My life, My experiences, self development and personal growth

I have been using this site quite extensively to improve my own performance and that of my team and colleagues from different teams. On this site, I will share some of my personal experiences along with those of my colleagues in addition to some very good articles from the Mindtools website.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

How do you recover your motivation after a failure?

There is no such thing as failure
I like this quote by Anthony Robbins a lot. In full, it goes like this:"There is no such thing as failure. There are only results."
Even more so with personal development: you can't, and you won't fail, if you have the right attitude.
It’s really amazing to understand how even the thought of failure at even the simplest tasks can prevent most of the populace from even attempting those tasks. In the grander scheme of things, the fear of failure is a big hurdle for most people to overcome. No one can avoid the truth of the failure. The history has witnessed that all those who have attempted to flee from it, their entire lives almost certainly have missed great opportunities and even greater rewards.
Bouncing back quickly from the failure will decide how far you will go and how successful you are in your life and/or profession. The individual’s ability to recover quickly from the failure almost always differentiates those who recover and manage and those who recover and succeed. The pain and disappointment of coming up short may send you into an emotional whirlpool filled with questions, doubts, and promises to yourself to never try again, but those normal reactions to failure usually subside. And when they do, your reaction to that failure will determine if you succeed.
There are 2 major ways in which things may fail.
One is by way of making a mistake and taking a wrong decision. This is predominant in Sports. The coach or the captain of a team takes a wrong decision and that costs the team that game. This is also seen in the day-to-day businesses wherein the CEO of a company decides to introduce a new product in the market based on the belief that the product will bring in dramatic growth to the company but instead the product may not generate the anticipated growth to the company and the company has to cut losses. This type of failure revolves around what went wrong. It may be hard for some people to accept but for the others take the responsibility so that they can improve for the next time.
The second type of failure is when you have done everything RIGHT from your side, put in all the best efforts and energies into the pursuit of being successful and even have considered the things that may go wrong and have back-up plans in place, but in the end, you fail. These kinds of failures are difficult to handle due to the feelings of helplessness assosciated with them. However, some persons take this as a hint that they were very close to being successful and view this as a matter of time rather than matter of their ability to accomplish the said task. Although these letdowns are difficult to handle, everyone faces these one or the other time in their lives and everyone handles these situations differently.
What's the way out or how do you bounce back:
There are a couple of things to be considered here.
One of them is to change the failure to a setback. This mainly requires you to change your perception of the failure. First off, you need to change the word "failure" to "setback". You also need to look at your shortcomings objectively and look at the ways to overcome those. Just the change of perception from "an event knocking you down" to "a setback that knowked you back" would definitely help you recover and you will be able to acknowledge that there would be bumps along the road and they are very much manageable.
The other one is to avoid generalizing the situations when we get frustrated. Saying "Why me...", "this always happens..." or "I never..." are very difficult to the recovery process, because what you are really doing is setting yourself up for another loss. Understanding that the setback was a one-off event would help in faster recovery.
Next step would be to assess the damage caused by the setback. You would have to look at what is the degree of setback and what you've lost in the process. The best approach is to look at what has been lost and what is remaining. This is important because due to generalization of the situation, the actual damage could be lesser than it really is.
The next step is to start picking up from where you've got a setback. Collecting yourself can prove difficult if you've not really set yourself up for moving forward. The resetting does not necessarily mean taking a step back but it could be a mere re-adjusting yourself, so that you are in a better position to succeed.

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