When I took failure very personally, I was always – always - associating the failure with a bigger story about ourselves.
This is something I would always do. Then one day, a very close friend of mine asked me- how much of what you are thinking is fact and how much is story? When you feel very upset about a specific failure, ask yourself “Hmmm, what is the belief I have about this situation?” See if you can uncover the big, goose bumpy exaggerated story you are telling yourself about this particular failure. Try to separate the story from the facts.
Fact : I can speak , hear and understand 5 languages (Bengali , Oriya , Hind, English and Tamil)
Story : Most of my relatives , friends said : “Ohh God , you are a Bengali girl, how will communicate with a Tamil boy , are you going to use a google translator your whole life after marriage ?”
This is what I learnt is the best response to perceived failure : Ask yourself these three powerful questions:
1) What did I learn from this situation? I learnt a lot every time I failed, like I have created this diary of mine, where I have a plethora of words which the most deceiving people that I have met in my life frequently use. Now it is like a predictive algorithm where I can predict whether I should trust a person or not based on the words they frequently use( all by my old experience)
2) How can I grow as a person from this experience? Well, this is the most critical question, every time you fail, you grow provided you learn. If you sit and cry over your failure then you stay at that place. What I learnt was : Gift wrap your absence to people who don’t deserve your presence.
3) What are three positive things about this situation? You will always end you recollecting more than 3 positive things. And the funny part is , when people who are the troublemakers see you positive, they start losing their focus. Focus on yourself, take some time off, stay silent. As they say, confuse them with your silence and shock them with your actions.
Failure is a beautiful feeling because you have the capability of reaching your best when you take your failures as they deserve to be taken. Failures don’t deserve moaning , they deserve actions.
