If you’re wondering how to not feel like a failure, the most important action you need to take starts with your psychology. Without the right mindset and the right frame of mind, you can’t dig yourself out of a hole. The first step starts with healing your thoughts.
I’ve been there before. There were days when I just wanted to crawl inside a rock, cry, and never think about anything again. I lost five figures in a single day from my portfolio before. There were also days when I got rejected by 3 companies in a single day for a job.
The important thing to do is to never hold your emotions in. The first step in how to not feel like a failure is to let it all out. I snuggled up in bed at night, turned the lights off, and just cried. It was liberating. That gave me the validation that I truly hit rock bottom. Once you hit rock bottom is when you realize there’s nowhere to go but up.
However, if you are in denial that you are at a low point in your life, then you can’t get out of that low point. You will feel that everything is fine when everything isn’t. Then you start to make decisions as if everything was fine. How you should act when you are confident should be different from when you are feeling down.
All the steps below on not feeling like a failure is useless if you don’t admit that the situation is bad. The first step to bettering your life starts with you. No one else is going to make your life better for you, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Below are what I do when I feel down.
How to Not Feel like a Failure
The first step in how to not feel like a failure is to SMASH that social share button and post to your favorite social media! Your friends may be feeling the blues without you realizing and this article could help them snap out of it onto greener pastures.
It’s not something people like to talk about. People don’t like talking about their failures but rather their successes. You never know who you can help with this article.
So with that said, let’s go into the tangible steps that you can take to not feel like a failure.
1) Accept that You Truly are Not Alone in Failing
This isn’t one of those feel good sayings. This is one of those factually correct sayings. You can’t not feel like a failure without realizing that you are not alone in failing. It’s mathematically and literally impossible for you to be the only one who failed at your efforts.
There are 8 billion people on Earth. What are the chances that you are the only one who failed? One in eight billion. Otherwise known as statistically impossible. You are not alone. You have no idea how many times I failed and how many times I will fail in the future. More times than I would like.
Therefore, truly and genuinely accept and recognize that you are not the only one. What happened doesn’t matter. What matters is what will happen in the future. The measure of a person isn’t by how much they got knocked down. The measure of a person is how many times they got back up afterwards.
2) Detach Yourself From Your Work for a While
How to not feel like a failure? Let time pass. Time heals all wounds is not just a saying. Ok, maybe it won’t heal ALL wounds but it will heal 99% of wounds. When you feel like a failure, you have to focus on yourself and nobody else. Your work is not more important than you. You are more important.
It’s a good business decision to detach yourself from your work. By trying to force work, you end up producing mediocre effort and results. What’s better is to take a step back and physically and mentally step away from it. People perform better when there are breaks in between.
We are not programmed to be “on” 24 by 7 by 365. There’s a reason why we need sleep in between days to recharge and get back to it. We are not machines where all we need is electricity to recharge. We actually need time as well. You need to stabilize your emotional and mental health.
Volatility is the enemy.
3) Spend Time Alone or With Loved Ones
This one completely depends on who you are as a person. You have to know who you are. Whether you are an extrovert or an introvert doesn’t matter. There are extroverts who like to be alone from time to time. There are introverts who like to be surrounded by people from time to time.
What matters is which one do you prefer when you are feeling down? Do you just want to be alone or do you want to be surrounded by people? Personally, I prefer being alone. If I’m surrounded by people, it feels like I’m burdening others with my problems. I don’t like doing that.
I love crying in private. There’s no need to think about what others are thinking or feeling about it. Most of my friends would be sympathetic but even then, their feelings would still be in my thoughts. I want to completely and utterly focus on what I’m thinking and feeling.
However, this advice is completely dependent on who you are. You have to know yourself to know how to not feel like a failure.
4) You May Just be Feeling Like a Failure
It may just be your irrational feelings that are making you feel like a failure. More than likely, you’re not. There are people who hit more lows than you and came out ahead by the end. Take for example, Chris Sacca. By the time he graduated law school, he was in the hole. By how much? Four million dollars.
He negotiated the debt down to $2.125 million and eventually repaid it all back. He became a billionaire by the end. My guess is that you are not in the hole by $2.125 million. There’s always a way to get back on top. Failure is just a state of mind, not a factually correct statement.
Wherever you are in life, there’s someone who did worse than you. And still came out ahead.
Therefore, consider whether you are just feeling like a failure. There’s a very good chance that you are just feeling like one. Once you let time pass, sleep well, eat well, and take care of your health, you can feel like a million bucks again. It may seem impossible, but with time and effort, it is more than possible.
5) Take Care of Your Health, Especially Sleep
Your health is more important than you realize in figuring out how to not feel like a failure. One day, I was feeling particularly down. The good part was that I took paid time off from my job and I was free to do whatever I wanted. The bad part was work stress seeped into my mind even when I took PTO.
It felt so bad that my body wasn’t moving the way that I wanted it to. By 10:00pm, I started crying lying down on my bed. I cried for about 30 minutes. It was particularly liberating to let my emotions out. However, once I had a good night’s sleep, everything felt better. The great part was that I didn’t overeat that day and ate healthy food.
The next day, my feelings bounced back to new all time highs. I actually quite literally felt like I was on top of the world. However, I would have never gotten to that place if my physiological needs weren’t met. That’s the most basic need you need to take care of to function properly throughout the day.
Take care of your health during these times. It’s the most critical time when you need to tend to it and take care of it. You will be surprised how much health affects your mood. When I overeat and eat unhealthy foods, I get bitter and angry. You don’t want to do that.
6) Practice Self Acceptance
You need to accept who you are as a person if you want to know how to not feel like a failure. You don’t have to be this angel who rescues kittens every day to feel love for yourself. Look at yourself in the mirror every day and think how great you are as a person. When I look myself in the mirror after a shower, I talk about how I love who I am.
You are who you are. There’s no need to change who you are unless you want to. Accept yourself and love yourself. It’s hard to convince others to love you if you don’t love yourself. It doesn’t matter that you failed, it already happened. That’s already in the past. No one cares about your failures but you.
You have no idea what kind of cringeworthy failures happened in my life. The thoughts creep up just when I’m about to go to sleep at 11:00pm at night. It makes me cringe and re-think my actions and decisions. Do you want to know who’s the only one who thinks about those things? It’s me.
When I brought up the subject with others, they didn’t even remember that happened. I am quite literally the only person in the world who thought those thoughts. Once you recognize that whatever you failed in, remember that you are the only one in the world who cares about it.
7) Don’t Feel Like a Failure by Avoiding Comparing Yourself to Others
On how to not feel like a failure, you need to avoid comparing yourself to others at all costs. At. All. Costs. When you failed miserably, that’s when people’s successes magically pop up in your newsfeed. Your friend just bought a house or they just got engaged to a wonderful girl or guy. I had those moments many times.
That’s not good. Others are just on a different life path than you. Whenever I get jealous of other people’s successes, I think about another successful person. Then I think about how that other successful person doesn’t have the successes of the first person I compared myself to. Even so, they’re doing really well for themselves.
It makes me feel like I’m really the only one in the world who cares that the first person became successful. I shouldn’t care. I should be happy for them. A house is not on my list of my goals in the near future. I don’t want to buy a house to live in at the moment. The exception is if it’s an investment property.
Therefore, by caring about other people’s successes, it magically ruins my own goals and successes. That’s how it can be for you once you compare yourself to others. Don’t focus on what others are doing. Pay attention to what you are doing. You’ll care about that the most once you are older and reflecting back on your life.
Let Time Pass and Not Feel Like a Failure
Tough times don’t last. Tough people do. It doesn’t take much to be tough. All you have to do is let time pass so that you can feel a balance in your life. I used to think that you need to do something in order to be tough. Nope. Tough is just about feeling stable in your life. There’s nothing else you need to do.
Therefore, if you’re wondering how to not feel like a failure, all you have to do is just let time pass. Take care of your health and sleep well. Your body naturally and biologically wants to get to a state of neutrality. Don’t do any more work to get better. Your body biologically takes care of itself.
Doesn’t that sound like great news to you? You don’t need to put in more actual effort on your part. Every time that I failed, it made me feel so low. Lower than the lowest low that I felt before. After a year, I can’t even remember that feeling. I don’t even remember what I was so bummed out about.
Things that seemed so important is no longer important. How many times did your emotions make you do or feel something? How many times did you recover after a year? If I had to guess, I would say one hundred percent of times. That’s your body healing and recovering itself for you.
Whatever feeling you are feeling now, you will not be feeling the same in a year or two. You will do new things and experience new adventures. Trust that things will turn out the way that it’s supposed to. You already made it this far, do you really think this is the farthest you’ll get to? I think not.
