I read a book for a bit and pet my cat.
You rarely succeed without failure.
Failure is a chance to learn. Why did you fail? How could you improve? How could you fix the problem even after failing? How could you ensure you don’t fail again?
These are all things you typically can’t learn until you fail and have to answer these questions.
I fail at things everyday. But because I’ve failed so many times with so many things I know how to fix things or how to set myself up so failure isn’t possible.
You don’t. Distracting yourself from the emotional experience is how you develop supressed emotions that will keep cropping up for years to come. Instead of trying to distract yourself from these emotions, when they crop up, just take a moment to notice how it feels, and accept it. First be courageous to feel your difficult emotions, then be willing to feel them completely. As you sit with your feelings, they will tend to dissipate over the course of a few seconds or minutes. Then later, the feeling will come back, and you may again feel an aversion to feeling it. And then, again, you can sit with it. Note that there is no pressure to “do it right” any time you feel these emotions since, after all, the emotions will just keep coming back until you have fully processed them.
You note in another comment that you don’t know how to embrace something that hurts you. But it isn’t complicated. Pain and discomfort are just feelings, and we can accept them with equanimity. It just takes practice.
I failed college at 22-ish. At fist I denounced all academics and got my trucking license. I got married and had two kids, but the academic failure kept on itching me. Tried to go back to school for years, but it was difficult financially and time management wise. Eventually got my Bachelor at 35 and am now working as a junior swe.
Failure is just part of the game my friend. Like all experiences it shapes who we are as a person. I’d even argue we are shaped more by our failures than our successes. Focus on recovering from the failure. Decide if you want to try again with a different approach or if you should just stop. Knowing when to quit is a skill most folks underestimate. Sometimes things are just not meant to be and knowing when to quit keeps you from wasting your time trying again and again.
If you’re not failing, you’re never learning. If you succeeded at everything in life, why would you need to learn anything? Learning things is what makes us human. And thumbs.
to a typical person failure is the best teacher. it shows you what you did wrong and you figure out why it didn’t work.
there’s a quote supposedly by Thomas Edison that’s fitting for your question.
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. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.
point is, you never truly fail as long as you learned something.
however, people with high anxiety may not feel the same way because they’re too focused on results over experience. to them my best advice is this; get medicated. I say this as a medicated anxious person. if that’s not possible for you, learning from your failures will take more effort.
it helped me to write my failures out, one sheet of paper only. discuss the points with myself as if I was talking to a person on the sheet of paper. discuss what I did wrong and next steps to resolve the problem. once I was done, I burned the paper. While burning it I envisioned all the failure burning with it along with all the stress and anxiety. this gave me control over the failure and the outcome of the failure and allowed me to take the next steps to resolve it as I had discussed on the paper.
The only time you truly fail is when you give up prematurely.
Every Chess Grandmaster has lost more games than the average person has played.
When you never succeed you don’t know the difference.
Failure is self defined. To me failure is too final a term. If I tried something and it doesn’t work that was just an unsuccessful attempt or a flawed plan. I can always try again or rethink my plan.
To better answer your question, I try to figure out what went wrong and plan my next step if it’s something important. If it’s not too important I do something else for a bit.
Well thanks for the reminder
Learn and move on
