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4 Lessons for Reframing Failure to Bring On Success
You might be surprised to hear the best thing you can do about failure is to embrace it. If your presentation bombed or you didn’t get that promotion, or your big sale fell through, or you flunked that exam, embracing your failure is probably the last thing you want to do.
But take it from experts, the key to success is learning to reframe failure. Consider these four lessons.

Failure is an opportunity to learn
You cannot learn without making mistakes. No one learns a new skill right off the bat. It just doesn’t happen. Remember when you learned to ride a bicycle? You had to fall off a certain number of times before you got your balance and learned how the whole thing worked. Then one day you just got it.
So many skills and accomplishments are like that. That’s how science works. You have an idea and test it, experiment, it doesn’t work, you try another way. No scientist expects to get it right the first time.

Failure builds resilience
If you persist in the face of failure you are much more likely to succeed. It took Sir Edmund Hillary three attempts before he reached the top of Mt Everest. He had to find the routes that didn’t work before he could finally succeed.
Successful people are not crushed or paralyzed by failure. They see mistakes as clues, what not to do on the way to reach their goal. Most of the time failure is not a moral issue, so don’t take it personally. Reframe mistakes and view them as important information.

Failure takes you closer to success.
Once you reframe failure as data, you can see that even if you make a mistake or a misstep, you are still moving forward. Failure is only a disaster if it makes you give up. Often a failure ends up being a blip on the way to success, and that’s all. Try to take the long view. With hindsight, chances are no one will remember today’s flop.

Failure can make you a better person
Regardless of the size of your failure, whether you bombed the interview or went bankrupt, people will remember the way you behaved in response to failure. If you pick yourself up, recalibrate, behave graciously and keep going, your failure is likely to end up winning you friends and allies.
Embracing and learning from failure and acknowledging your imperfection can make you a more empathic person, a better team player, and a better boss.

– Scott Blessing

4 Ways to Rebuild Confidence After a Big Setback
It can and does happen to anyone. One minute you’re flying, everything’s going well, and you feel great! Then something happens. A setback. A rejection. A failure. How do you pick yourself up and put your confidence back together after something goes badly wrong?
Here are some things you can do to rebuild your self-worth and get that spring back in your step.

Acceptance
Accept that things sometimes happen. A health scare, a bad investment, a big sale that falls through, a relationship breakdown. Whatever your setback, you can be sure that other people have been there before you. And it’s not likely to be the end of the world. There will be other promotions, other opportunities, just not this one. Detach and let this one go.
It’s also true that if you haven’t failed, you haven’t tried. See this setback as a step toward achieving your goal, even if it’s an unintended step!

Analysis
Take the time to write down what has happened. Not only will it help you process the emotions around failure, but you will also likely gain some valuable insight into what happened. You won’t feel so helpless, and you can start to take steps to recover.
Ask for feedback or advice from someone you trust. You might feel vulnerable right now but getting someone else’s perspective will help you work out what to do next.

Be kind to yourself
An important step in moving on from a setback is the ability to forgive yourself.
Don’t take the setback personally. Hopefully, you have been embezzling company funds or doing something criminal. So, stop beating yourself up and take responsibility for what’s your stuff, and let the other things go.
If it’s a health setback, make sure you get what you need – whether it’s time off, a different diet or a change in lifestyle.

Reframe
You can take the sting out of your experience by reframing it. Staying in a negative frame of mind is easy. But to move on and build resilience you need to reaffirm that you will succeed. Put this setback into the bigger context of your past successes and failures. Chances are there is something to learn from this experience that you can use to take you closer to achieving your goal.
Remember it took Edison 1000 failures before he invented the light bulb that eventually worked. He reframed those ‘failures’ as inventing 1000 ways that the light bulb wouldn’t work. He saw failure as a vital part of the invention.
Edison knew that everyone makes mistakes and that the only real failure is not to learn from them.

– Scott Blessing

You might think that having negative people around you would be demotivating. And it’s true that having a positive support network around you will help you succeed. But you can bet your life that there will be naysayers casting doubt on your dreams, so why not take that energy and turn it around? Find out how to use those doom and gloom merchants to spur you on to greater success.

Use them as inspiration
Proving the doubters wrong can be a powerful motivation to get off the sofa and into action. There’s nothing like an “I’ll show them” attitude to energize you and make you focus on your goal. You might even make a bet with one of your doubters that you will achieve your goal, whether it’s starting your own business, losing twenty pounds or making the gym a regular habit.

Blind them with science
Having a skeptical audience can inspire you to new heights of planning and strategizing. Building a solid business strategy of data, evidence, and analysis will not only stand your project in good stead, but it might even convince some of your skeptics to invest in your idea! And if you can win them over, you’ll have a new network of allies.

Take them seriously
Don’t just brush off your doubters. It can be helpful to have a good, objective look at their reservations and see if there is something you may not have considered. Use their doubts to improve your strategies, especially if they have experience in the area you plan to tackle.
Set your ego aside for a moment, and think about your critics’ motivations and experience. Not all negative feedback is sour grapes. There’s likely to be at least a nugget of truth in there. Could you glean useful intelligence and use it to ensure your success?

Cut them loose
Once you’ve considered your naysayers’ motivations and credibility, you can then take action to weed out the people whose doubts will undermine you. An overweight friend who says you’ll never lose that weight will drag you down and convince you it’s all too hard. And on the other hand, if your HR manager is telling you that you’re underqualified for the job you want, maybe you should listen.
Evaluate which of your naysayers might be useful, assess what the credible ones have to say, and cut loose the ones who will get in the way of achieving your goal.
You are in charge of this project. It’s your dream. Use the energy of your naysayers positively and shoot for your goals!

– Scott Blessing

Six Ways to Keep Adversity from Keeping You Down
Sometimes life seems to go downhill fast. Whether you’re naturally an optimist or a pessimist, your world can change for the worse in ways you can’t ignore. You may lose your job, lose your friend or family, have a health scare, be bullied or disliked, or the goal you’re aiming for may disappear before you can reach it. Or there may simply never be enough money to keep you and your family safe and happy.
Adversity can drain your will. That makes it harder and harder to change what you can change, accept what you can’t change, and to know the difference between the two.
Here are six ways to take control and fight back against adversity so you can get your life back on track.

Acknowledge the adversity
When things are going badly, you might want to lie down and give up or bury your head in the sand. But the first step in fighting back is to acknowledge what’s happened. The longer it takes to face the facts, the lower your energy will be. Set out what the issue is, and it may not seem so insoluble after all.

Don’t catastrophize, don’t panic
Even if something’s going badly wrong for you now, it won’t always be that way. “We’ll look back on this and laugh” is a true statement. Keep calm, be practical, and you’ll get through it.

See the opportunity
Sometimes adversity is an opportunity to let go of things or people who are no longer serving you. If you lose your job, move on and focus on the next one. A health scare may be an opportunity to retune to a healthier lifestyle. If you really can’t get what you want, change what you’re looking for and make it your new goal.

Right now, life may be bad, but you’re good
Don’t let today’s adversity define you! It’s true that bad things happen to good people. Remember how good you are, and how much you have to give. You are not defined by today’s bad luck or by other people. You can get through what’s happening and make your future life great!

Decide what to do, and get going
When you can see your situation, make a plan to put it right. Focus on the good that will come, not the bad that’s happening now. Break the plan down into actions and get started – and don’t stop until completed!

Turn to your support team
Accept that you can’t deal with adversity alone. Chances are many people want to help and support you at this time. Don’t feel too ashamed to ask for help. Accept their support, draw on their strength, and know that you will be able to pay it forward.

– Scott Blessing

How to Plan Differently to Improve Your Chances of Success

You might think that having a plan is enough to guarantee success. After all, you’ve set your goal, some milestones, you’re committed. Surely that’s enough. Well, no, in reality having a plan by itself is not enough. Think back over all those New Year’s resolutions you’ve made. How many did you see through to success? Have you ever been on a diet? Or decided to get fit and start running, or join a gym?
Robbie Burns knew what he was talking about when he wrote ‘the best-laid plans of mice and men, often go astray.’ That poem is about a mother mouse having her supposedly safe cozy nest destroyed by a plow. An unforeseen circumstance. To a mouse, an act of God. And that’s often where our plans go astray.
You may have worked out how to brainstorm, mind map, to build a beautiful strategy but just making a plan is not enough. There are three things you can do differently to increase your chances of success.

Allow For Uncertainty
You can’t possibly know what’s going to happen next month or even next week. Things happen that are out of your control. Stock markets plunge, heatwaves or blizzards happen, suppliers go out of business, health scares happen.
You have to build in flexibility to your plan so that you can roll with the punches. Learn to get more comfortable with uncertainty and be able to react accordingly.

Know Your Weaknesses
Studies have shown that people tend to be overconfident in their abilities and capacity to deliver. Be honest and look back at your past performance. What are your weaknesses? No one is good at everything. So, whether it logistics, research, public speaking or sales, be aware of your strengths and weaknesses and how they are likely to impact on your chances of success. Once you know where you need support or extra skills, you can plug that gap and minimize the chances of failure.

Do Some Doomsday Planning
Another element that people tend to neglect when planning is being able to imagine the worst-case scenario. Visualizing failure doesn’t mean that’s where you want to head, but it allows you to plan for things going wrong and predict how you might react and prepare.
Say you’re planning a big event, a launch. You’re dependent on a whole lot of external variables to come together for success. So, prepare for one or all of them not working. From unseasonable weather to your main speaker pulling out, to the catering not arriving on time. What would you do in each case? If you have a contingency plan, you may not be able to failure-proof your event, but little will catch you off-guard either.
By planning things differently, it may allow you to be more flexible and realistic in dealing with the unexpected. Building uncertainty into your plan makes it more likely that you’ll succeed.

– Scott Blessing

You know those days when it seems like everything that can go wrong does go wrong. You sleep through your alarm, don’t have time for breakfast, miss your bus, get to work late, and things go downhill from there.
Or it’s more than a bad day. You’ve had bad news, the bills are coming in, and you don’t know what’s coming next. It’s easy to stay motivated and energized when things are going well, but what about when times are tough? How do you keep going when things are looking grim? These are the times when you have a clear choice about how to react. You can bury your head in the sand and hope that it will all go away, or you can choose to take control and find a way out.
Here are three practical ways you can keep your motivation high and paddle out of adversity.

Get Clear On What’s Happening
Adversity can seem confusing and overwhelming. Part of the fear and paralysis comes from not knowing what to do. It can help if you take the time to sit back and work out just what is going on. Once you have the facts in front of you, you can assess how big the problem is and how much is under your control. You’ll know what you need to do and you can start to plan.

Write It Down
Writing things down on paper not only gets the worries out of your head but often it shrinks those problems down from overwhelming and insoluble to clear-cut and not so scary after all. Sometimes the very act of writing helps you formulate solutions. And it gives you something concrete that you can talk through with family, friends or colleagues.

Share Your Worries
Lying awake at 4 am is not going to solve any of your problems. In fact, issues seem to get bigger as the night goes on. Chances are whatever problems are happening to you they are not unique. Everyone goes through tough times whether it’s related to finances, health, employment or relationships. The adage ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’ is deeply rooted in truth. The act of sharing your worries helps enormously. Sometimes just sharing your troubles makes you feel better, and often asking for help or support can lead you to a solution.
You don’t have to stay stuck in helplessness when things are tough. You can take control of your life by being clear about the problem and taking steps to find the right solution.

– Scott Blessing

No one likes to fail. It feels bad. You might feel like giving up or blaming someone else or beating yourself up. But you might be surprised to hear that many successful people are not just grateful for their past failures, but they ascribe their present success to having tried and failed in the past.
Here are six reasons to embrace your failures.

Failures Are Opportunities
To see failure as an opportunity is not putting a Pollyanna spin on reality. It’s accepting that everyone fails, and you can choose to learn from your mistakes, or you can stay stuck in them.
Successful people see mistakes as an opportunity to learn and change course. For example, say you want to lose twenty pounds. To know that you’ll fall off the wagon if you see a chocolate jam donut is some useful information. You can take steps to avoid the things that tempt you most and make it more likely that you’ll stick to your diet.

Failures Show Up Your Weaknesses.
Whether it’s not being able to resist a cigarette if you’re in a social situation, or finding you need more accountancy skills than you thought you did. If you can detach from the emotions of failure you can soon see where the leaks in your boat are and take steps to mend them.

Failure Will Make You Resilient
One big lesson from trying and failing is finding out you can get right back up again and keep going. You can admit that you tried and failed and use what you learned to build a better strategy to get to your goal. And that’s a huge life lesson.

Failure Will Make You Innovate
Failure can make you more inclined to try different strategies, to see risk in a different light. If you’re not afraid to fail, you’re more likely to try bold strategies and might just hit on something big!

Failure Reminds You That You’re Not Alone.
Believe it or not, failure can make you a better person. Accepting failure as part of life will make you more empathic and less judgmental of others. You’ll be more likely to help other people you see trying to make it, and in return, you will be more open to asking for and receiving help when you need it.

Failure Will Make You Kinder To Yourself.
Seeing failure in its proper light will make you more forgiving of your flaws. You’ll be less of a perfectionist and be less prone to self-doubt. And that, in turn, will build your self-confidence and make you more likely to succeed!
So, embrace failure, learn from it and use it as a stepping stone to success.

– Scott Blessing

You might be surprised to hear that failure is an important ingredient of success. It sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Who wants to put in all those hours of effort, all that investment and energy and enthusiasm, and then fail to fail? Surely success is the name of the game?
But stop and think about it just for a minute. Sure, everyone wants to succeed, everyone wants to achieve the goals they set for themselves. After all, that’s the whole point! But if you look back over your success and failures, how often did you make a mistake? How many times did it take before you mastered a new skill? Guaranteed there will be few occasions where you got it right off the bat. But the key thing here is that you didn’t give up.
Here are three ways that failure can fuel future success.

Failure Encourages Innovation
Thomas Edison famously had more than a thousand failures before he invented the light bulb that worked. But he didn’t see those thousand attempts as failures. He saw them as useful discoveries. He knew a thousand ways to make a light bulb that didn’t work.
Alexander Fleming ‘invented’ penicillin by making a mistake. He forgot to follow his laboratory procedure and left Petri dishes unattended for two weeks, allowing fungi to colonize them. We’ve all forgotten things in the fridge. But on this occasion, that mistake and failure led to one of the most revolutionary contributions to modern medicine!

Failure Encourages Learning And Experimenting
Both Edison and Fleming learned from their mistakes. They weren’t paralyzed or crushed by what looked like a failure, and they didn’t fear failure. They were curious and investigated further and experimented to see what would happen. And by doing that they changed the world.
If you take the personal element out of failure, the moral self-punishment, you can reframe mistakes, errors, or failure as information to use in trying again and again. Mistakes allow you to recalibrate, adjust your strategy, to work out what’s preventing you from moving forward.

Failure Builds Resilience
Have you watched a small child learning to walk? Over and over again the baby will fall over. At the beginning they make no progress at all, they crumple up. But little by little first one step then two, the baby learns to balance, to shift its weight from one side to the other, to master the skill of walking. Edison did the same on his quest to invent the light bulb. Every failure was a stepping stone to success. Every mistake or misstep gives you a clue as to how to reach your goal.
No one likes to fail, but the difference between staying defeated and becoming a success is not to see failure as an end in itself. Mistakes, ideas that didn’t work and flops are all evidence and teachings to help you build a sure foundation for success in the future.

– Scott Blessing