How to Fail Grace-fully While Daring Greatly

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Jill Poulton, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

Failure is far more common than success. Talk to anyone who has achieved any significant accomplishment, and you will find a series of examples where they tried and failed. Failure is part of the process to achieving success because it’s about making progress. Using each failure as a means of improving is one of the keys to failing gracefully while daring greatly. (Remember the story of Thomas Edison and the light-bulb?)

To dare greatly means embracing the risk of failure. And failure can be a tough pill to swallow because of the feelings often associated with it, and the potential consequences. Being emotionally attached to an outcome can cloud our judgement and create more mental mess than necessary. To make peace with failure requires us to recognize what is within our control. The only things we can control are ourselves – how we approach, process, and respond to failure.

Here are six strategies for failing with grace:

Don’t take it personally – Keeping a healthy perspective of yourself is important to overcoming adversity and mistakes. Tell yourself, “I’m not a failure. I failed at doing something.” There’s a big difference.

Retreat, reflect, evaluate – Turn the experience into wisdom. Take a step back, give yourself the space to digest the experience. This is about gleaning the lessons learned so you can move forward better equipped and with greater insights.

Stop making agreement with failure – Change your thoughts. If you continue to dwell or beat yourself up over the mis-takes made, you turn the failure into defeat.

Release the need for approval from others – You cannot control what others say or think of you, and frankly it’s not your business. The problem with the need for approval is that until you believe in yourself, it will never matter what someone else says because the most important person doesn’t believe it, You.

Perspective – Focus on the victories, look at the positives versus dwelling on the negatives. What did you gain as a result of the experience?

Focus on the goal behind the goal – Many paths will get you there, you just happened to find one that didn’t. Tap into the reasons you tried to begin with. Were your motives in alignment with who you are what your vision is. Use this opportunity to recalibrate, and prepare to keep moving forward.

As the wise Zig Ziglar once said, “Make failure your teacher, not your undertaker.”