What do we do when things don’t go our way?

It is not wise to think that things will always turn out exactly like we want them to. But it is our responsibility to choose how we respond to this. 

When something doesn’t go as planned, we experience feelings of frustration, sadness or even hate. What most people do is try to suppress that feeling and find ways to distract themselves with instant gratification like food or entertainment.  

Why it is important to process it in a healthy way?

It is so important to address failure and process it gloriously because it affects our mental health. That supressed feeling can burst open anytime as rage towards other people, all it would need is a small trigger like someone raising their voice.

We also don’t want to give the impression to the unconscious mind that it’s better not to keep trying because I will eventually get hurt. Many people have a fear of failure for this very reason. We do not want this belief to develop in our mind because it will eventually begin to affect our behavior in the future as well.

Four actions you can take today to move past failure today.

• The first thing we want to do with this is not fight with the emotion but feel it with awareness without being attached to the feeling.
• The second step is to look to learn from it. Ask yourself, “What can I learn from this?” “What could I do differently?” And write all the answers down in a stream of consciousness.
• The third thing you want to do is separate the behavior from yourself. We have this innate need to associate behavior with our identity so when we make mistakes, we feel like a bad person. But it’s important to understand that behaviors can always be improved with new learnings. 
• The fourth thing you want to do is look at some of your role models and how they view failure and how they moved past their own failures in life.
• For a basketball player, he could learn from MJ’s life that he was once cut off from his high school team or a writer can learn that J K Rowling was once depressed, lonely and wanting to take her own life.
• The best one for me personally is one of Vincent Van Gogh whose paintings now sell for $100 million dollars.
• The man literally sold only one painting in his entire life. But he kept doing what he loved and now many years after his death, we realise how valuable they are. 

You will love this

Please share with me how you deal with your own failures in life. Asyou loved reading this, here’s what you will love more.

I am doing an event this Saturday about how you can live life on your own terms, creating your own schedule and making time to do things you love while also making enough money to support yourself. You can easily register for the event in the link.