Feelings of failure can make you feel down, defeated, and depressed. And if you go to a negative extreme, and start thinking “I’m a failure” or “My life is a failure”, this is a sure-fire recipe for depression.
Think about it: if you regularly feel bad about a perceived lack of success or lack of achievement in you’re life, it’s very predictable that you’ll have lower self esteem and self confidence, and you’ll naturally feel low and depressed.
For this reason, in order to get rid of depression of for good faster and easier, it’s very important that you learn how to stop dealing with feelings of failure that suck the life out of you, kill your spirit, and make you feel perpetually bad about yourself and your situation.
Right now, you’re going to learn how to get over failure step by step, so that you know how to bounce back from failure and feel more successful. The overall result is that you’ll quickly and easily increase your self esteem, have more self confidence, feel better and happier, and therefore naturally find it easier to become and remain depression-free.
Why do I feel like a failure in life?
The most important thing for you to understand about feelings of failure is that they are completely created in your mind via negative perceptions and thoughts that work against you.
Specifically, if you are struggling with a sense of failure, your mind currently works something like this:
- You see a lack of achievement in your life. (If you focused on positive things you’d achieved, and appreciated these achievements, you’d naturally feel more successful, instead.)
- Whatever you’ve achieved is not good enough for you to be pleased and satisfied with it. (If you chose to accept things you’d already achieved as already good enough for you to be pleased and satisfied with them, you’d naturally feel happier and more successful.)
- You don’t see anything that you learned, gained, or benefited from in your life, especially if you consider instances where you didn’t achieve what you set out to achieve. (If you saw things that you’d learned, gained, and benefited from in your life, including instances where you didn’t achieve what you set out to achieve, you’d naturally feel happier and more successful.)
The overall lesson, here, is that the difference between feelings of failure, which make you want to hang your head down and curl up in a ball, and feelings of success, which make you feel happier and help you hold your head up high, is completely determined by how you think about things.
This is very important for you to understand, because this means that learning how to recover from failure is entirely a matter of learning how to improve your thinking.
Indeed, you can replace feelings of failure with feelings of success very quickly and easily, just by thinking about things differently, in a completely valid, acceptable, more constructive way.
What to do when you feel like a failure
The story goes that it took thousands of attempts before Thomas Edison got his first lightbulb to work.
Although there are variations on what he said about this, he said something like: ‘I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work.’
Some people consider this an example of how to learn from failure, but you can see here that Edison didn’t see failure at all. Instead, he only saw a form of success that most other people didn’t see.
The big lesson here is a that a sense of failure or success is completely determined by how you choose to think about things. So if you’re interested in how to get rid of feelings of failure, here is a crystal clear example of how to do that.
If you think about it, it’s common and normal for people to see a lack of achievement and failure in all of Thomas Edison’s initial attempts to light a light bulb, and to see him as being unsuccessful before he got that first lightbulb lit.
In contrast, it’s extraordinary to be like Edison and to see achievement and success in all of his initial attempts to light a light bulb, and to feel successful well before he ever got that first lightbulb lit, long before anyone else on the planet ‘deemed him’ successful.
Indeed, in Edison’s mind, he’d learned and gained something of positive value with each attempt to get a lightbulb to work, so he never struggled with feelings of failure at all!
This is huge. It means he never struggled with feeling down and depressed about any failure or lack of achievement, but rather, he felt good, encouraged, and motivated by all his perceived success, even if no one else saw the gains that he did.
How to not feel like a failure at life by changing your thinking
It’s completely valid to have a glass-half-empty view of your achievements in life, and to regularly see a lack of achievement, which naturally makes you experience feelings of failure, and makes you think thoughts like “I feel like such a failure in life”.
It’s also completely valid to have a glass-half-full view of your achievements in life, and to focus on all the things you’ve achieved, which naturally makes you feel successful, and makes you think thoughts like “I feel successful and proud of what I’ve achieved in life”.
To appreciate this, consider how it’s perfectly valid to see a lack of achievement and failure in Edison’s thousands of attempts to get a lightbulb to work, just as it’s perfectly valid to see something he learned, gained, and achieved with each and every one of those attempts.
In other words, it’s neither right nor wrong to see failure or success. They’re both valid views.
But here’s the difference: feeling successful feels good, and it’s energizing and motivating, and so it helps you hold your head up and move on to achieve other great things in your life. And this means it’s smarter and better to see gains and achievement rather than failure.
So Edison wasn’t “right” to see success in each of his attempts to light a lightbulb. Instead, he was smart and improving his life by doing so.
Similarly, you’re not “right” to see success and focus on everything you’ve learned, gained, and achieved in your life. Instead, you’re very smart and improving your life by doing so.
How to get over feelings of failure fast
Ultimately, it boils down to this: you have a choice in how you think about things, so that you either struggle with feelings of failure, and the lack of confidence and lower self esteem that accompanies it, or so that you feel more successful, and enjoy the greater self-confidence and higher self esteem that accompanies it.
Now think about it: if you want to achieve more things in life and be more successful, which way of feeling is more useful to you?
Well, of course, feeling more successful, and having higher self esteem, and higher self confidence will help you achieve more and more with your life. In other words, this way of feeling is very useful and valuable to you, while feelings of failure are of little or no value to you, and can even work against you.
It’s important to appreciate this, because once you see tremendous value in feelings of success, and little or no value in feelings of failure, it becomes very easy to change your thinking, and let go of negative, destructive ways of thinking that make you feel like a failure.
After all, since it’s just as easy to think in valid, acceptable, positive ways that make you feel more successful, it becomes a simple, easy, no-brainer to do it moving forward.
So this is how to overcome feelings of failure quickly, as well as how to stop feeling like a failure simply by seeing no value in feeling that way.
How to not be a failure & feel more successful: 4 steps
It’s already empowering in and of itself to know that you can feel better and more successful just by changing your thinking. Indeed, regardless of how anyone else views you, your life, or your achievements, you have the power to be like Thomas Edison and to think in constructive ways that benefit you.
So to do this, and to eliminate feelings of failure and feel more successful, regardless of how anyone else might feel about you or your accomplishments, complete these 4 simple steps:
- See little or no value in feelings of failure, and see lots of value in feelings of success and accomplishment.
- By extension, see little or value in ways of thinking that make you experience feelings of failure, and instead see lots of value in valid, positive ways of thinking that make you feel happier and more successful with everything you’ve achieved, even if no else yet recognizes what you’ve achieved. (Remember, this was the position Edison was in.)
- Focus on positive things you’ve achieved, instead of any lack of achievement.
- Focus on things you’ve learned, gained, achieved, and benefited from in your life, including instances where you didn’t achieve what you set out to achieve. (Just like Edison learned and gained something from every one of his attempts to light a lightbulb.)
By following these 4 easy steps, you can quickly and easily eliminate feelings of failure right now, and instead feel much more successful. This will make you feel better about yourself, and also quickly increase your self esteem and self confidence.
Along these lines, never again think a thought like “I am a failure”. Instead, always know without a doubt that you are a success, and how much success you see, feel, and experience, is completely up to you.
The combined impact of all this is that you will find it easier to become and remain depression-free. So for your own good, make these beneficial changes in your thinking right now, and never struggle with feelings of failure again.
Next: How To Overcome Lack Of Self Confidence Fast →
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Section 9 Lessons:
- How to let go of regret & be thankful
- How to deal with failure & feel more successful
- How to overcome lack of self confidence fast
- How to overcome low self esteem and depression
- How to have high self esteem fast
- How to stop hating yourself