Failure can be hard to handle. A big swing and a miss — whether it’s in your personal or professional life — can distort your vision of yourself, torpedoing confidence and convincing you that you’re less valuable as a person.
Fortunately, it is possible to shift from feelings of overwhelming disappointment to those of empowerment with a little emotional regulation on your part. Here are 10 practical, psychologist-recommended tips to help navigate the fallout of failure and move toward your mindset toward your next success.
1. Acknowledge Your Feelings
For handling intense emotions of disappointment, Kalokerinos’s first suggestion is a deceptively simple strategy: acceptance. Go ahead and tell yourself it’s okay to feel bad in the beginning when something doesn’t work out the way you wanted it to. A little bit of wallowing is okay.
“It actually does make you feel better,” Kalokerinos says.
2. Be Kind to Yourself
If you’re struggling to find ways to show yourself some love, try taking a half-hour break to recharge, maybe by taking a nap or connecting with a friend.
3. Use Distraction to Reset
Distraction, on the other hand, is about temporarily focusing on positive feelings, so when you return to the feeling of failure, it may be less intense and easier to process it.
To cope with failure, Kalokerinos suggests something enjoyable that pulls your attention away from negativity and rumination, like taking a walk, a nice meal, running, listening to a podcast, or even spending an afternoon watching a show you enjoy on a streaming channel. Skip unhealthy distractions, like drinking alcohol, which won’t help your cause in the long run.
4. Get Punny
“People often focus on wanting to feel less bad. But actually, sometimes it’s easier to leave the bad aside and to try and feel happy instead,” says Kalokerinos.
5. Tweak How You Talk to Yourself
When things aren’t going your way, it’s easy to get sucked into your own thoughts, says Jason Moser, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist, professor, and associate dean of research in the department of psychology at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Dr. Moser says a simple internal language shift can help: Talk to yourself as if you were someone else, using “you” or your name. Called distanced self-talk, this dialogue strategy creates helpful emotional distance from a difficult situation.
6. Connect to Your Values
Moser says even when things don’t work out the way you’d hoped, you should still stay true to your personal values about growth, exploring new opportunities, and challenging yourself. By connecting with your core values, you may find help accepting failure, he adds.
7. Treat Failures as Feedback
The most resilient among us may have learned to bounce back from setbacks by learning from their failures instead of feeling shame over them. Errors and setbacks don’t define who you are; they’re information that helps you improve over time.
“Mistakes are a fundamental aspect of learning. Period,” says Moser.
8. Make an Action Plan for Next Time
Once you’ve started to absorb the loss and learned a little from your mistakes, consider creating an action plan to help you resolve future failures, since there will almost certainly be more of them down the road. Moser recommends taking time to think through how you might approach a similar disappointment in the future.
“You want to pull in information about how that mistake occurred, how you can do something differently the next time, and what will produce a match between what you intended to do and what actually happened,” he says.
By doing so, you may find you contributed to the situation in some ways — it does take two to tango, after all — while other factors may have been beyond your control.
9. Search for Unexpected Positives
Remember that old saying about turning lemons into lemonade? In the face of a sour situation, ask yourself this: What meaningful thing happened as a result of this failure? What do I now have that I wouldn’t have had otherwise? Maybe by not landing that dream job, for example, you’ll have an opportunity to spend more time with family, suggests Kalokerinos.
10. Reach Out for Help and Support
If you’ve given these tips a try and still not getting past your feelings of failure, Kalokerinos recommends asking friends, family, or a mentor for assistance in reframing the event. However, just any old sounding board won’t do.
“The difficulty with using other people is that you need to turn to other people who are empathetic and compassionate and good at these kinds of things,” Kalokerinos says. Seeking support from someone who tends to invalidate you can do more harm than good.
Can’t think of the right person to lean on? Try a therapist. “They’ve been trained in how to support you through your emotions,” she says.
The Takeaway
- Because failure can impact emotions and self-worth, emotional regulation can help people shift from overwhelm to empowerment. Start with strategies that ease intense emotions, like acceptance, self-compassion, distraction, humor, and distanced self-talk.
- Once your feelings are more manageable, try thinking about the failure differently by connecting with your core values, treating it as a learning opportunity, making action plans, or searching for unexpected positives.
- If you’re struggling to cope on your own, reach out to empathetic friends, family, or a therapist who can help you work through your emotions.
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