Feeling Like a Failure?
Sanil Pillai
Bridging Human Potential and AI Innovation | Coaching for the Future of Work
Stretch your hand out completely and hold a glass of water. If you hold the glass in your hands for 30 seconds, your hand will not pain. Now, hold it for a minute. Your hand will pain a bit. You’ll notice the discomfort. Now, try holding it for five minutes. You’ll experience enough pain that you will not be able to ignore it. When you keep thinking about your failures, that is exactly what you’re doing. You’re carrying the stress of what people have told you for too long. Long enough that it is causing you noticeable pain.
Now, what does that mean? It suggests that you don’t spend any more time on it. You have to just focus on the next thing to do - failure or not. How do you do that? Here are some simple but practical techniques:
- Reframe the situation. Rather than calling yourself a failure or not being good enough, change your language. Tell yourself that the attempt you made at something did not work out. No big deal! If you just google for the number of things that have not worked out for people, you’ll find that you’re not alone. Everyone has things in their life that did not work out. Things that did not go your way can co-exist with things that did go your way.
- Make a plan. You need to create a goal that you are going to work towards. This is absolutely essential! The plan needs to be very objective, short-term and something that you truly want to achieve. It will not help if your plan consists of a lot of wish-lists that you never really intend to get to.
- Make weekly action items that you need to work towards this plan. Weekly actions are more important than daily ones. Weekly actions will give you the flexibility to ride over unplanned events that will crop up from time to time.
- Execute relentlessly. This is the time to roll up your sleeves and get into action. There is no space for worries or emotions to kick in. They can wait. This is your ammunition against your thoughts of failure. Execute, execute and execute.
- Celebrate the small wins. Consistent small wins build momentum to push you forward towards the next one. Along the way, you will enjoy some big wins too. The small wins will try to occupy the limited bandwidth in your memory and it’ll start pushing out your negative thoughts.
- Lastly, DO NOT compare your life with anybody else’s. No one's life is better or worse. They’re just different!
You’ll now find that your mind is spent productively on actions rather than what happened in the past. The future is built on actions so go act now. Thoughts of failure can wait and you may never realize when they melted away!
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