Hey, kiddo. What happened? Why are you crying?
Oh, you failed at something? Great! Sounds like you tried something new and pushed your own predetermined limits.
But failing still feels gross, doesn’t it? I get that.
If you’re caught up in your perceived lack of success, stumbling on your way to achieve something, disappointing people around you, or going through a slow learning process, it’s important not to beat yourself up about it!
Telling yourself you’re a failure, you’re worthless, you’ll never achieve what’s important to you, and all of those other negative thoughts that tend to rain down after missing the mark, won’t help. At all.
Getting caught in thought spirals and being overly self-critical actually puts you further away from achieving your goals. So let’s learn how to make a mistake, learn from it, and move forward with these specific and actionable strategies.
What if I don’t achieve my goal?
Not achieving a certain goal does NOT automatically equate to failure. Instead, try to think of it as an opportunity. That might sound like annoying advice, but bear with me for a second.
The key to conceptualizing unmet goals is to view them as feedback–not as a final verdict. These are opportunities to analyze, adapt, and move forward with more knowledge and intention.
Let’s get into specific strategies for addressing a missed goal.
What to do after failing.
So you just barked it up, possibly big time. After we don’t hit a goal, it can be hard to fight through those negative thoughts and feelings of failure. It’s normal to feel bad. Maybe your self-esteem takes a hit. Maybe you’re embarrassed.
That’s okay. First things, let yourself process the failure. In some cases, it might require a little bit of a mourning period. Let that happen. Then here’s how to bounce back.
1. Pause.
After a failure, take a pause. Stop beating yourself up–that’s most people’s natural reaction, but it won’t help. Accept your mistakes. Forgive yourself for them. Don’t put blame where it doesn’t belong. Let the anger pass.
Strategies for feeling better when you fail.
And you know I’ve got you with the specifics. Here’s how to move forward.
Accept it.
Speak to yourself in a positive, supportive tone. You’re on your team! We don’t beat up our teammates and expect to win. Realize that failure means you tried, and you can always try again–this time, with more knowledge and experience!
Acknowledge your other accomplishments.
Take a minute to think over your skills, achievements, strong relationships, great ideas. You might even write a list to shift your perspective.
Also keep in mind that setting and pursuing goals is success in itself. The fact that you intentionally push yourself to achieve greater things, put real thought into what you want your life to look like, and create plans to get yourself there means that you care. You’re driven, and you’re more mindful and organized than the majority of people. So pat yourself on the back for that.
Failing means you tried.
Seek outside support.
Reach out to trusted friends or colleagues for a pep talk. Sometimes an outside perspective is all we need to bounce back, and a little extra support never hurt anyone.
If you’re still in school, this person might be a guidance counselor or faculty advisor. It can be particularly helpful to reach out to those people if your mistake was school-related, as they can often suggest practical suggestions to better the situation.
Address the negative thoughts.
Realize that this failure doesn’t say anything about your worth or morality. Productivity is morally neutral. So is failure to meet productivity goals.
Negative thoughts will occur without us wanting them, but we don’t have to meditate on them. Keep reading to learn more about how to escape negative thought spirals.
2. Extract lessons.
Look over the mistakes you made. Where exactly did it go wrong? What happened to stop you from succeeding?
Figure out what produced this outcome. Are there points you can see led to the failure? If you can answer that question, you can figure out how to achieve the desired outcome next time.
Deal with the problems you can point at. Not all of them are tangible or necessarily understandable, but there are certainly issues you can avoid in the future with better planning, additional resources, more knowledge, or a little help from others.
Make a game plan for how you’ll avoid those hangups moving forward, then carry on.
3. Did you fail forever?
Sometimes the first fall or little bump in the road can make us feel like it’s over. We failed. There’s nothing more to do at this point.
Skip the existential spiral and self-esteem dunk. Instead, get practical. DID you fail forever? Can you try again? Can you get back on track?
If it’s trying to form a new habit, you have not failed. So often, people throw in the towel after one little hiccup. You skipped your workout routine for a day. You had a bad work session. You let your house get out of hand and now it’s a disaster.
That’s okay. Don’t let it ruin your life. When you skip your Tuesday workout, that doesn’t mean you skip all of them for the rest of the week and try again next Monday. It means you skipped Tuesday, and tomorrow is Wednesday, where you have full capability of changing that route. Not all is lost!
4. Assess and revise goal.
Sometimes failure can point to a flaw in the original plan. Did you focus on the wrong thing? Did a past mindset dictate a goal that’s no longer relevant for you? Were you just doing what you thought other people wanted you to do?
Often, if we struggle to find motivation to move toward our goals, the truth is that we aren’t trying to accomplish what we are meant to accomplish.
Don’t be afraid to question the original goal. It might need a full revision, or maybe just a couple tweaks, but leave space for the possibility that your original idea wasn’t quite right.
5. Try again.
The ability to acknowledge a shortcoming, determine where you went wrong, and try again will get you far. Practice those skills, and learn to get back up for another swing at it.
Tips for getting back up.
Here are some specific, actionable steps you can take to help get yourself back on track and avoid some failures in the future.
1. Think of the day in quarters.
This is my favorite tip–sometimes we fuck up our morning routine, or we get a rough start at work, and the whole day is ruined. We’ve programmed ourselves to “reset” only every day, so if you slip, you remain on your ass until tomorrow.
It doesn’t have to be like that.
Instead, you can think of your day in quarters: Morning, afternoon, evening, night.
If you mess up in one of them, start over in the next.
2. Chunk it into smaller bits.
Did you fail to hit your goals because the tasks were too big or complicated?
Moving forward, try to chop up those tasks even smaller. Achieving little wins can boost your confidence and keep up momentum.
For example, if you have a to-do list item like: Revamp socials for Customer A, that could mean nearly anything. It doesn’t help you stay on track, and you’ll be hammering at it forever before you see any “results”.
Whereas if we break that down into tasks, like:
- Instagram
- Evaluate Instagram account
- Optimize meta data
- Delete irrelevant/ugly posts
- Create new posts to fill first profile page with current aesthetic
Then we can check off those tasks as they happen, keeping us organized, motivated, and clear on what we are trying to achieve. Set yourself up for little wins.
3. Create a personal accountability system.
If the reason you failed is that you lack focus, discipline, or lost track of things, then you need a new system.
A personal accountability system can look like anything. It might be seeking positive influences in your social network, tracking progress daily, creating a detailed schedule to keep in a visible place, organizing weekly check-ins, etc.
4. Make it easy for yourself.
When you’re installing a new practice or habit into your schedule, there can be difficulty sticking with it consistently.
Don’t blame yourself here–new habits are hard to normalize, especially if there’s learning required.
So if you want to create a new system or routine, make it as easy and accessible for yourself as you can.
This can mean preparing the necessary resources to perform that task–make your language course homepage the first thing that opens in a new browser window, lay out your gym clothes the night before, meal prep for the week.
It can mean being sure you HAVE the time to do that thing–scheduling it, designating a time in your morning routine, choosing the particular day of the week.
Or maybe it’s something totally random. Say you struggle to wake up in the morning, but you want to try out something like the 5 am Club. Ask yourself what stops you from waking up early. Are you too tired? Is the room cold? Do you struggle to get up before the sun has risen? Or maybe you’re just going to bed at 1am?
Solutions can be creating a stronger nighttime routine to make sure you’re getting adequate rest, putting a space heater next to your bed that you can switch on ten minutes before getting up, or buying something like a sunrise alarm clock to wake yourself naturally and gradually.
5. Commit to 80%.
Sometimes we get so caught up in perfectionism and fear that we don’t even want to try to pursue our ambition.
But if we focus on potential failures, stress over little mistakes, or are scared to try if we know we won’t nail it, we’ll never take control of our lives or make progress.
So, commit to 80%. Consistency is more effective than perfection.
6. Redefine what it means to be a successful person.
Failure or success comes down to perspective. It’s important to challenge yourself to grow, improve, and find success in what matters to you, but YOU decide what matters to you.
Are your ambitions generated solely by external factors? Are you pursuing what you truly want in life, or what you THINK you should want?
Maybe you failed this time because you don’t have internal motivation, because you’re seeking things you don’t actually care about.
Going back to school, succeeding in business, building a family, making a ton of money, and building new habits are great goals, on paper. Unless you have no desire to do those things. Then they’re a waste of time.
Your measure of success might be something different, like spending more time with loved ones, creating a new relationship, building a life where you need less money, or setting aside time to pursue a creative art.
Get in touch with yourself and explore different possibilities to understand what it will mean to make YOU feel successful.
7. Cut back.
Do you have too many aspirations?
Are you trying to pursue higher learning, excel in your career, keep a nice house, curate a thriving social life, all while staying healthy and fit and getting enough sleep? And then you add MORE goals on top of all that?
It might be too much! Not everyone thrives–or wants to be–in a constant huge growth phase. If you don’t, that’s okay.
If you find yourself struggling to hit your own personal goals, you may need to simplify certain things in your life. That might mean pursuing only one goal (or one goal in each “category”) at a time, cutting back on your responsibilities, or just giving yourself some slack to be less than perfect.
Beyond freeing up some time and headspace to focus on what’s important to you, can you simplify the rest of your life?
If you aspire to keep a neat and tidy house, you might need to declutter the belongings you keep.
If you want to eat more nutritious foods, you might need to focus on a few successful meal types instead of trying it all.
Make things simple and easy when you can. Your life is complete and satisfying when you decide that it is.
How to avoid negative thoughts and improve self-esteem.
1. Think…less.
Try out this book, Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen. It might be a little far out there for people who aren’t familiar with this brand of ideation, but it’s a great resource for learning to remove yourself from existential spirals.
The key point Nguyen talked about in that book is: To think is to suffer.
Say you struggle with an anxiety disorder. You’re doing really well for a few weeks, then you get hit with a bad episode. Feeling anxious usually makes us feel anxious. We get anxiety about our anxiety. Why? Because we think ourselves into it!
Thoughts occur naturally, but thinking is an action. And we can choose not to participate in that action.
2. Feel more.
When you feel a negative emotion, just sit with it. Literally sit down, close your eyes, and feel where that emotion lives in your body. Tightness in your throat or chest? Maybe nausea? Feel those physical sensations until they pass, then move on with your day.
If you continue to struggle with negative thoughts, try writing them down somewhere. This can help you to “set aside” those things for now, with the promise that you can return to them later, if you need to. Sometimes we train ourselves that we HAVE to worry about things. We really don’t. You’re okay to let it go, and this exercise can help with that.
3. Be your own best friend.
If you have a sibling or bestie that you’re very close with, think of a time they’ve failed. Or a time they did something wrong. Maybe even a time they’ve hurt you specifically.
Did you forgive them? Probably.
Would you have forgiven a random person on the street, had they done the same thing to you? Probably not.
We forgive people we’re close to because those are OUR people. We’re pretty good at forgiving people when they’re our loved ones.
So why don’t you forgive yourself that easily?
You should love yourself because you are YOU. You’re your people. You’re the only one that will be with you forever. You live in your own head 24/7. Learn to love yourself unconditionally. Remember that you deserve your own care, regardless of if you’re failing or succeeding at the current moment.
So give yourself grace for mistakes, feel your feelings, try not to over-intellectualize your emotions, and be your own bestie.
Setting healthy and intentional goals.
Goals help guide our lives toward an intentional idea of what we think will make us feel happy and fulfilled. But setting goals can be tricky and confusing.
Try this guide to learn how to set a yearly theme that takes out the guesswork, micromanaging, and future-predicting that can occur in other goal strategies: Ditch Resolutions: Live Intentionally with a Yearly Theme
In fact, grab this free template for creating your own theme:
And if you have no idea WHAT goals you should even set, read this post all about how to brainstorm and refine your goals: Goal Ideas + How To Come Up With Goals
If you feel you need more serious guidance to process feelings of failure or low self-esteem, please don’t hesitate to reach out to a mental health professional.
