The Psychology of Failure

By: S. Pradono Suryodiningrat

Failure is always be part of our lives. There are no humans in this world that have never fail, in fact, most successful people, they fail countless times before they become successful. And we are going to learn how did they face failure and transform it into their biggest strength.

Most people will celebrate success and hide their failures as hard as they can, so other people won’t know about the failure part. This happen because most of us think that success and failure as a chronic state. But it is actually depending on how we are defined things. We have to start to view that a failure is one part of a learning process that increases the chance of future success. We have to stop and change our mental state that are too over-focus on one failure incident. We have to remember that any given failure is only one frame in a very long piece of film. Failure is real and it can be painful, but it does not define you. Don’t let failure define you!

We should not give a failure too much weight, and let it define us like a label instead of letting it ignite learning. If we let that happen, than we will start a predictable failure cycle, which are: (1) We will avoid failure, (2) we will avoid dealing with it when it does happen, (3) the failures pile up mentally causing a huge cognitive burden, and finally, you will have a (4) Break down and question your worth.

The transformation of how you view failure begins right now! You only have to remember one basic piece of logic; Failure is Normal and Necessary. We must try to accept and embed that logic into your daily thinking routine. If you successful accepting it then the negative idea of failure begins to fade while positive idea about learning and improving become your focus.