Are you worried about failure? Read this then
Are there people out there who don’t worry about failure? Yes, in a sense. There are people who view failure in a completely different way and instead of worrying about it, they embrace it. I know that sounds crazy, but with the right mindset and ways of being, you can view failure as something to embrace too. The following life hacks will help you to stop worrying about failure and start seeing it as something valuable and even needed in your life.
1. Pretend This Is Heaven
Kamal Ravikant, a best-selling author, gave a speech on loving yourself. During it, he talks about a friend of his that died for 7 minutes after a heart attack at the age of 24. She said that after that happened to her, anything she wanted in life came to her. When he asked her why she thought she was attracting things so easily, she said that she started to wonder if this was heaven, because nobody can prove that she really didn’t die for good from her heart attack. And if this is heaven, she said, they I can have, do, or be anything I want.
Imagine having that kind of mentality. Would you worry about failure? No, because you know that eventually you can have, be, or do anything you want. Moreover, if you believe this is heaven, then failure must be a part of being in heaven, right? It must be necessary in heaven, for some reason, so why not just embrace it at as a part of your journey to get whatever you want?
In short, pretend this is heaven where nothing is happening TO you, it’s happening FOR you. Everything that happens is happening to set you up with what you want because it’s heaven – a place where you can get anything you want. And let this belief carry through all areas of your life – your health, love life, and career. If you do, then you will take failure in any area of your life as a part of the process of getting what you want – and it won’t seem like a bad thing that you need to worry about.
2. See Failure As A Confidence Building Tool
Mom with her 6 years old daughter walking along city street and eating ice cream in front of the outdoor cafe. Good relations of parent and child. Happy moments together.
Do you want to be more confident in all areas of your life? You can be confident without failure, but you can’t gain the level of confidence that allows you to face life’s ups and downs head on and move through them easily.
For example, you may start a business and have instant success. Of course, you will feel confident during this time. You will feel like you know what you are doing and that you are capable of success, and that confidence will help you move forward. But, when something goes wrong, your confidence will be tested. You may start to doubt your ability to run a business, and that doubt will affect how you interact with your business and how successful your business is. But, if you experience ten big failures in business where you lose or nearly lose everything, and then you build a successful business back up, you will gain a superman-like confidence in your ability to come back from obstacles and still be successful.
So success is a tool to build confidence, but failure is the best confidence building tool. It allows you to see how strong you are, how capable you are, and how you can take whatever life throws at you and bounce back no matter what.
3. Turn Your Failures Into Projects
This is something I learned from Vishen Lakhiani in his popular course, Becoming Limitless. When he first talked about this idea, he was excited, which got me excited, and I hope it excites you too.
There are two ways to grow in life, satori and kensho. Satori is sudden enlightenment. Kensho is an experience that causes enlightenment. Satori moments don’t happen very often. You may experience a satori moment when you are training with an enlightening being or when your meditation goes completely right. But, kensho moments happen all the time. In fact, they happen on a day to day basis.
For instance, if someone breaks up with you and breaks your heart (what most people consider a failure), you can let it get you down or you can decide that you are going to work on the areas that you were lacking in the relationship. If you work on the areas that you were lacking, you become more confident and stronger. You grow as a person. That’s why kensho moments like a breakup are so important. They help propel you into a better, stronger, and more confident person.
If you can view all failures as kensho moments, then you will see failure in a whole new light. You will see it as a chance to have an awakening. You will see it as a chance to do something amazing in your life. And if you can’t see it as that yet, then start to develop the mantra that you will turn failures into projects. Doing that will help you see it in that way.
Develop the belief that every time you experience a failure, you will develop a project from it that helps you elevate into someone stronger, better, more informed, more aware, or whatever else you want to be.
For example, if you are dating and looking for love, see future failures in love as a chance to become a more attractive person to the perfect person. Every time you fail in love, pick an area that went wrong and then create a project to elevate yourself into someone that your perfect partner would want to be with. For instance, if you didn’t have enough trust, create a plan to become more trustworthy or trusting and then work on that plan.
You will find that you will grow and celebrate your failure because it helped you grow. And you will start to wonder what future failures are going to help you do.
4. Become a Master At Forgiveness
One of the best ways to stop worrying about failure is to master the art of forgiveness. When you are able to forgive yourself and others, you are able to let go of the past and move forward. When you are NOT able to forgive, you stay stuck in your past failures and accomplish nothing but self-abuse in that state as you beat yourself up over what you did wrong. In that mindset, failure really does suck!
The quicker you are at forgiving, the quicker you are at moving forward from failure. And, as you become better at forgiving, you will become better at realizing that failure won’t hold you back because you will forgive it and move on to something better. Failure won’t be as scary to you anymore because it’s not something that will linger in your life.
This may not make a ton of sense right now, especially if you have a hard time forgiving, but I want you to really try to include this life hack into your process to stop worrying about failure because it will help.
Start small. Imagine something small that you haven’t forgiven. It could be an experience, a person, or even yourself. For instance, maybe someone cut you off in traffic and you are still mad about it and can’t forgive them.
Next, see yourself face to face with them in an environment of your choosing and briefly tell them why you are mad at them. For instance, see you and them talking on the side of the road after you pulled over.
After about 30 seconds to a minute of venting, stop. You don’t want to get stuck in that negative mind-state, you just want to tell them what you are upset about.
5. Characteristics Of Champions
Now, let them tell you why they did what they did. This is an important step because it allows you to step into their shoes and see alternatives to the situation that you may not be able to see when you are focused on what they did to you. For instance, they may tell you that their mother is dying and they were just trying to get home and weren’t thinking clearly. Or, they may have just found out that they have a terminal disease and they were having a hard time concentrating on the road.
It doesn’t have to be something big. Maybe they just are not happy in life and don’t know how their miserable actions affect other people. Whether it’s big or small, you will notice that you will start to let go of the focus on what they did to YOU and start to see things from another perspective where forgiveness becomes easier.
Lastly, tell them that you forgive them and try to feel forgiveness in your heart. You may realize that they are not worth your anger or your time. You may realize that they have no impact on your life and never will again, so there is no reason to hold onto the anger. You may realize that they really didn’t mean to hurt you after all. All these realizations will help you feel the forgiveness, and that will help you move on.
The more you practice forgiveness, the better you will become at it. Forgiveness after failure may require you to forgive yourself, another person who affects your ability to succeed, or an unforeseen circumstance that causes you to fail. But, no matter what it is, you can forgive it. And, you will start to see that failures don’t have a very big impact on your life, so there’s no need to worry about them.
6. Practice Being Present And Grateful
Look around you right now. Is there something to be grateful for? Probably. If you are reading this on your computer or phone, then you can be grateful for your computer or phone that allows you to read this. You can also be grateful for the store that sold it, the people that made it, the people that invented it, and the investor’s parents. To be honest, that’s just a small portion of what to be thankful for when it comes to your devices.
Why be present and grateful? There are many positive benefits of those two things, but for the sake of this article, let’s just say that it helps you to stop worrying about failure.
Worrying comes from living in the future. It comes from pretending like you know what’s going to happen and pretending that the worst case scenario is probably what will be the result.
The more skilled you become at living in the moment and focusing on things to be grateful for (which kind of go hand in hand by the way), the more skilled you will become at living life without worrying about failure so much.
You will do stuff because it feels right or good. And while failure or success may come out of it, you will be more involved with the process of it than the outcome of it.
7. Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone
Your mind likes familiar situations. It doesn’t like to be pushed. And, when you are doing something or thinking about doing something that is going to push it, your mind starts to get worried. But, you can lessen the worry that you feel by exposing it to uncomfortable situations more often.
The more you push yourself and experience both failure and success, the less you will worry about what is going to happen knowing that whatever happens, you will be fine. Moreover, the more you push yourself, the more you see that you don’t have control over what will happen. Sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t.
And you will start to understand that worrying can increase the chances that things will not work out. It can keep you from staying open to essential tools, people, or situations that can help you have success. And, it can keep you from taking necessary action.
It will become painfully clear that when you are filling up your time with worry, you are taking away time from action and growth.
8. Think Differently About The Past
A lot of times we can’t stop worrying about failure because we know that we have failed in similar situations from the past. For instance, we may worry about doing poorly in a job interview because we failed miserably at our last ten interviews.
Hopefully, you will incorporate the above 6 techniques to stop worrying about failure because they will help you feel differently about yourself and see the potential of the future differently. But, I want to give you one last thing to think about.
Why are you relating to what will happen in the future with what has happened in the past? Yes, without change history can repeat itself, but if you have an awareness that change is good, and you are working on your personal growth, then you don’t have to worry about history repeating itself too many times. It will only happen as often as you need it to for your growth.
Unless you don’t want to change and never do anything to grow as a person (which isn’t you if you are still reading this article), then your future isn’t going to mirror your past. So, realize that there is always a possibility of things working out differently and don’t worry about future events being guaranteed failures based on past experiences.
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