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Resilience
How to Deal With Failure
Failure is inevitable. How you respond is what counts.
Posted August 3, 2023 Reviewed by Ray Parker
Key points
- There are three main ways to deal with failure: acceptance, positive reframing, and humor.
- It's important to remember that failure is a normal part of life and that it doesn't mean you're a failure.
- It's key to allow yourself to feel your emotions; don't try to bottle up your disappointment or anger.
Anyone who speaks, either professionally or for one’s job, experiences a failure of attempted communication at least occasionally. The audience isn’t right for the speaker, the topic isn’t right for the audience, the audience was having a bad day, the speaker was having a bad day, and Mercury was in retrograde.
There are an endless set of possible reasons why things can go less than perfectly. The 80/20 rule surely applies—whether it’s 80 percent of the audience or 80 percent of the talk, or 80 percent of something else—speaking, like any other human endeavor, doesn’t always reach 100 percent.
Failure is a Part of Life
The relevant question, for speakers and for all of us, is how do you deal with failure when it occurs? As a recovering perfectionist, I have a number of options. I can stress out and ruminate endlessly on what went wrong.
I can beat myself up for my part in the debacle. I can try to pretend that nothing happened. I’ve tried each of these over the years, and a few more besides, and I can tell you that they don’t work—of course, they don’t. And yet, many of us respond in these ways over and over again, trapped by our perfectionism.
How to Deal With Failure
What you need to do instead is to understand what went wrong, as dispassionately as possible, decide what to do differently the next time, and move on. If apologies are in order, make them heartfelt and timely.
The key here is that part about moving on. If you don’t process the failures cleanly, you’ll find yourself like a ship with its hull covered in barnacles, moving slower and slower, unable to navigate gracefully through the waters ahead.
Worse, the next time you're in a similar situation, and the moment looks weirdly like the failure moment to your unconscious mind—which never forgets, especially pain—you will find yourself suddenly distracted at the very least by your brain saying, “Oh-oh. Things are about to go horribly wrong.” That will compound the agony, and matters will quickly get worse.
Three Ways to Deal With Failure
There are better ways. A study from a decade ago that I recently ran across finds that acceptance and self-compassion, positive reframing, and humor are the three most effective ways to deal with failure. These are techniques I can get behind, even though I’m not great at them.
1. Acceptance and self-compassion are the basics of moving on from failure. You will know best how to talk to yourself, but some form of acceptance and forgiveness of yourself as a unique, valuable, fabulous human being is what’s needed. There are many books, online courses, and psychologists out there ready to help. Do the work; it’s important. As the self-help cliché has it, the airplane safety talk is right: Put on your own oxygen mask first.
2. Positive reframing can help make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The idea here is to find something, anything, that did go well or can be spun into a positive. Don’t fool yourself, but don’t overdo the doom and gloom in the first flush of failure, either. As a wise person (maybe on Facebook) shared with me once: It’s the broken places where the light comes in.
3. Humor is a great gift if you can summon it. Laughing at yourself is a great gift; lightness allows you to rise above the slough of despondency and sail on serenely. Laughing at others’ pratfalls is something I leave to your discretion. The point is that once you can laugh at failure it is no longer terminal. You are ready to move on.
Failure is not fun, but if you can progress forward using one of these techniques you are much better placed to survive it, learn from it, and evolve into the being of light you are destined to become.
