First of all, you will fail. You will fall down flat on your face at some point. Something you strived towards will be snatched from you and goals will be shattered. Dreams you have will evaporate and there will be a point in your life where you stand with the wind knocked out of you. If you haven’t had this experience yet, I can guarantee you this– you will.
Now, after that cheery introduction I’m going to tell you how failure is actually a good thing. 
Failure sometimes doesn’t seem very scary. “Oh FAIL,” we laugh as we look at our Pinterest-creation that flopped and then tag it humorously as #nailedit on all our social media channels. So often when we fail we feel that tiny prick we might breathe in sharply from pain but we quickly recover- we square our sholders and lift our chin- we won’t do THAT again and we learn from our mistakes. That’s just life. Simple little failures that we learn from and move on from quickly, thats how we grow and learn. If you didn’t fall, you’d never learn to run.
But what about the bigger things? Marriages, jobs, kids… as you get older the failures are more soul piercing. You begin to stumble, blind sided sometimes by life. There is a screeching halt and a paralyzation that happens. Failures and grief are soul mates, entwined. Certain Psalms seem to be written by your heart and God can either feel very distant or very real, sometimes changing day to day.
Being someone who has failed (a lot) I decided to make a list of helpful ways that have worked for me to get back living well. I hope this is helpful for other failure-overcomers. Know that you can stand up again!
- Embrace the pain of the failure. Don’t try to keep avoiding it. We all have coping mechanisms and they serve their purposes for their times, but eventually the time is up and life needs to happen again. Give in to the grief and pray out your fury, brokenness and humiliation. Don’t hold back on God, be honest.
- Acknowledge verbally to yourself what happened or talk to a very trusted friend or therapist/counselor. Be able to share what you did wrong in an honest, assessing manner. It’s super hard at first, especially, if you are like me, you are a first child and try to explain what you did to justify it even though it really doesn’t matter (I usually remain stuck here for awhile). OR, (and I’ve done this too) you try to justify the terrible actions of others because reality doesn’t feel like a friend, and you see how stupid you were to stay in a situation the turned into a failure. Ultimately, being able to discuss what happened, with decreasingly less emotion, is a healthy place to be able to arrive to. This may take a few days or up to a year, so sorry if you were wanting a quick fix!
- Create a truth statement about the situation. That sounds weird but when you feel the failure wound opening back up it’s good to have a plan. What did you learn from this? What could you have done better? What is the truth about this and how did you learn from it? How did it actually help you? How are you a better person because of this failure? Can you identify a root cause that seems to be the root of a lot of these failures? (For me, overcoming people pleasing is a constant battle- a lot of my emotion regarding failures is people pleasing subconsciously and when I realize that I have the epiphany that I really don’t want live for the praise or validation of others.)
- When you feel the almost literal squeezing of your chest in remembering a failure, stop yourself. Breathe deep to give your brain oxygen. Remind yourself of the truth statement regarding the situation. Out loud if you can without looking too crazy. This won’t always work but eventually it gets easier to stop the fear or frustration spiral and to regain the lost ground quickly.
Failure is a good thing. Without it we couldn’t improve, learn and grow. It inspires creativity, new thought processes and peace. Often we develop depth where we had been shallow before and can grow radically spiritually. We learn from our mistakes and hopefully how stop making them. We become more empathetic and loving towards others and it grows our capacity for life and future failures. Failures are how we learn. It’s how we learn about ourselves. We learn boundaries and how to be healthy emotionally, physically and spiritually. You can learn how to interact with others better. The more you fail the more you will progress and have success if you choose it…
So, embrace your failure. Your dealing with it well can be the key to happiness. Part 2 will deal a little more in depth some specific failures that are hard to overcome as well as talk about the “lifestyle failure” trap.
So I leave you with this-
- Have you ever failed? If so, how did you “get over” it?
- What other advice do you have in addition to what I have said?
- What is your favorite failure and the good that came from it?