17 Practices That Will Help Improve Your Life After You Fail
Give yourself some time to take your mind off of your failure. Allow yourself to do nothing for an entire evening and cool down from whatever it is that’s causing you pain.
1. Give yourself some time to take your mind off of your failure. Allow yourself to do nothing for an entire evening and cool down from whatever it is that’s causing you pain.
2. When you feel like you’re ready to get back up, reflect on what happened without any biases. Be objective in thinking about what you did, what others did, and what the result was. This is supposed to be an analytical practice, not an emotional one.
3. Understand why you feel like the world’s crushing you down to rock bottom. Identify the emotions you’ve felt after the event occurred and accept the emotions for what they were. Don’t dwell too much on fueling past emotions because that will only make you stew in that failure longer than necessary.
4. Identify your reason for living, write it in bold letters and have it easily visible, so that you never lose sight of your ultimate purpose.
5. After you do so, write down a list of things you’d like to accomplish within the next six months. Pressure comes from expecting yourself to follow a certain route exactly as detailed in your five-year plan. It is also more sensible to figure out what you can realistically accomplish within six months and keep adding another six-month plan after that time period is over. You’ll actually achieve things much faster this way when you don’t get stressed over how far you have to go.
6. Write down a list of habits that are preventing you from attaining the lifestyle you want. Replace bad habits with healthy ones and commit to sticking to a few consistently. If you have too many things you’d like to stop doing, it’s counterproductive to force yourself to eliminate them all in a short period of time because that’ll only paralyze you with high expectations.
7. Give your life an organizational overhaul. Arrange your personal belongings in a way that makes everything important within reach, so that you don’t waste a second rummaging through clutter.
8. Consider making an inventory of everything you have and list where each item is located. This will save you a tremendous amount of time, and you’ll never have to remember where anything is again.
9. Identify what you’ve failed at. Be brutally honest with yourself and ask if this is what you’d like to try again. Ask yourself if this was imposed on you by others or if it is something you truly want without any regards to societal influences. Let go of the former and aim to have a better strategy for the latter.
10. In a notebook, pretend that you’re in a class and taking notes. What is failure trying to teach you about yourself in relation to your pursuits and mission in life? What can you do differently next time? What are the key concepts of failure that you didn’t understand before?
11. Write a letter to your failure, not one filled with angry rants, but one in which you’re making peace with it and thanking it for teaching you how to become more tenacious and reminding you that you have to consider all possible variables that prevent you from achieving what you want in order to deal with them.
12. Unfollow people who want to sell you something without providing genuine value, spam you with thoughtless and disrespectful comments, or make you feel like you’re inadequate. Clean up your social media feeds and consider whether or not it’s necessary to keep more than one social media account (don’t feel obliged to be on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram if you regularly use only one of them).
13. Take that much-needed period of rest that you haven’t allowed yourself to have.
14. Make an effort to brush up your resume once a week. It can also be helpful to take free online courses to improve your professional skills and have something more productive to do after work instead of online shopping, hanging out with people you don’t care about, scrolling on social media for hours, or binge-watching Netflix.
15. Identify common beliefs about success that are holding you back from focusing on what’s truly important and fulfilling to you. Be conscious about how you go about your day and make note of what triggers you to think that an erroneous and destructive belief about success is true.
16. Create a productivity system that feels effortless and allows no room for you to doubt yourself or worry about what could go wrong. This is more than a schedule or daily routine. Be creative with diagrams, charts, and the way you assign tasks for yourself based on your energy levels.
17. Remind yourself that failure is inevitable when you seek to do more than what you’re used to. Instead of berating yourself for not succeeding on your first try, accept that it will take more than a few attempts to achieve something that’s more than what the average person is capable of. Be glad that you’re closer to your goals than someone who has never tried and never wants to fail. And always take every opportunity to rise above your old self and embrace the valuable lessons you gain from the journey. 
