Four Unique Strategies for Getting Rid of Failure

Note: This article is by Marc Chernoff, who shares 4 unique strategies for overcoming failure.

That's what I feel when I fail, as failure makes me want to sit and cry, and I feel lost, lonely, and want to give up. I want to sleep, but these thoughts follow me even to my bed. Failure is very painful.

People think I never fail because I write and know many things about success, happiness, and conscious life, but I'm a human being, and what people think is not true. I fail at things more than you might imagine and much more than I would like to admit. I fail at one point or another at everything just like you, and I feel just as annoying as everyone else.

I feel frustrated and guilty, I try to avoid thinking about it and prefer to hide it, but deep down, I know that these negative reactions are not helpful. So, I admit what happened, learn a lesson or two from my failed experiments, and then go back and try again. The last part is the most important part, and that is trying again:

• Sometimes, I fail to eat healthy meals, but I try again.
• I fail to stick to my exercise schedule, but I make up for it by going to the gym and working out more vigorously.
• I fail to love myself sometimes, but I don't give up on myself either and try again.
• I fail to be a great father sometimes, especially when I get distracted at work, but I keep trying and oftentimes, putting a smile back on my children's faces.
• I even failed to write the article you are reading now, and I made an initial attempt and deleted it because it wasn't good, but I started again and finished it.

I often succeed in achieving my goal when I try again and again. One of the most important things that you should learn from this article is that trying again is always worth it, and once you understand this simple principle, you can apply these four unique strategies to give yourself another chance by giving up your failures and learning from them.

Four Unique Strategies for Avoiding Failure

1. Monitor your thoughts and emotions

We need to monitor our thoughts without overthinking them, instead of trying to change them every moment through gratitude or forgiveness, as you are the one who shapes your feelings. So, when negative thoughts appear based on past experiences or future fears, you must realize that they are thoughts that your mind deals with. Therefore, stop, be present, pay close attention, and think about these thoughts and emotions consciously, as if you were a spectator looking at your thoughts.

Separate yourself from your thoughts, and with time, your negative feelings and emotions will lessen, real awareness, love, and acceptance will grow, and you will begin to realize that your mind is just a tool and that you are the one who controls it and not the other way around, by not judging your thoughts, or blaming yourself or anyone else. Only by observing them, a great transformation will happen within you.

Your sense of self-worth will grow. It's not like you'll never fail or get upset or that you'll never feel anxious, but knowing that your thoughts and emotions are just fleeting and independent of you will help relieve your stress and increase your positive presence, allowing you to learn and start over.

2. Monitor and correct your negative thinking

You subconsciously match past experiences with the present. When an experience has emotional significance, it is classified in your mind as significant. When the emotional experience is tragic, it triggers feelings of fear in your mind, which orders your mind to remain alert to any future circumstances that remind you of that tragic experience.

It does this to protect you from future harm, then your mind tries to match the new experiences with the old experience. However,  this can lead to the formation of false feelings that leads to loss depending on how emotionally attached you are to the original experience. This is true, especially regarding personal failure, mistakes, and misjudgments.

For example:

• Your relationship has collapsed, so you now think all your future relationships will fall apart too.
• You have obtained a low score in an exam in secondary school, so you are now doubting your ability to take any form of written examination.
• You did not get along with your old boss, so now you have a problem respecting a new manager.

This false association process occurs when you respond in a negative, emotional way to a particular past experience, and it all happens subconsciously. You know that all relationships are completely different, but you respond emotionally as if they were identical. If you feel helpless because you can't get over a past failed experience, then your mind relates to them as if they were still happening right now, which means that it incorrectly associates the two experiences with the present.

Here's a two-step solution that might help:

• Ask yourself: “What failed past experience and associated feelings do my current feelings remind me of?” Dig deep and be true to yourself.
• After identifying the origin of your current feelings, list all the things in which your current circumstances differ from those of the past, that is, the original failed experiment. This should include the places, people, and details that caused the pain and discomfort. Review the differences over and over again until you fully understand them. This can help you recognize and remember that circumstances have indeed changed.

3. Regularly review your progress and determine where you are

Although you intellectually know that you are stronger than you were in the past, your subconscious mind often forgets that your abilities have grown.

Here's a quick metaphor: Zookeepers usually attach a thin metal chain to the leg of a large elephant, then tie the other end to a small wooden stake buried in the ground. An elephant, which is 10 feet (3 meters) long and weighs 10,000 pounds (4.5 tons), can easily snap the chain, chop the wooden stake, and escape to freedom with the least effort possible, but it doesn't because it never tried.

The strongest land animal in the world, which can uproot a tree as easily as it can break a toothpick, is kept subdued by a small wooden stake and a flimsy chain. This is because when it was young, its trainers used exactly the same methods to raise it. A thin chain was tied around its leg, and the other end was tied to a wooden stake in the ground.

At that time, the chain and stake were strong enough to restrain the little elephant when it tried to get rid of it. So, when the metal chain was pulling it back, the elephant was pulling hard, but the chain did not budge, and the little elephant soon realized that trying to escape was not possible.

So, it stopped trying, and now that it's grown up, it sees the chain and the stake and remembers what it learned when it was young, which is that it's impossible to escape from the chain and the stake. This is no longer true, as the elephant that weighed 100 kg is now an elephant weighing 5000 kg.

If we think about it, we are all like elephants, as we all have great strength within us. Also, we have our limitations, namely the self-beliefs that hold us back, such as a childhood experience, an early failure, or something we were told as children. So, we need to learn from the past, but we must be willing to update what we've learned based on how our circumstances change.

Here are two things to keep in mind:

• If you suspect that you are living your life through beliefs from the past, remind yourself of what is different now regarding your circumstances and your capabilities. What has changed inside you? What do you know now that you didn't know then?
• Examine what you learned from past failures and hardships that can actually help you now. Instead of regretting the past, ask specifically how it helped you grow. Did your past teach you to be assertive, self-reliant, perceptive, strong, compassionate, etc.? Focus on what you have gained rather than what you have lost from negative past experiences.

4. Learn to see beauty in uncertainty

Nothing can be predicted, and nothing is certain in this world, which is the truth. You have to understand that we are not special, as sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Life is always balanced, so don't expect to get everything you want, don't expect recognition for every effort you make, don't expect your genius to be instantly recognized, or for everyone you meet to understand your love.

There are things you don't want to happen, but you have to accept them, things you don't want to know, but you have to learn from them, people and circumstances you can't live without, but you have to let go.

Some things come into your life just to make you stronger, so you can move on without them. Some people call these experiences failures, but they are positive lessons. As you live and experience things, you must realize what belongs in your life and what does not belong, what works and what does not, and then let things go when you know you must, not because of pride, inability, or arrogance, but because not everything is supposed to fit into your life.

So, forget the past, purify your soul, get rid of painful memories, and stop being who you were before to become who you are today. It's time to let go of what happened yesterday and unleash the current potential of your life.

In conclusion

I hope you have found value in the above four strategies I have shared them because they have helped hundreds of our clients over the past decade. I am as far from perfect as you are. We all share the commonalities of failing and rising to the best. We share the ability to start over, and that's what we must do together.