“I just love failing,”said no one ever and if they did, they are an insane in the membrane. We do not like to fail, but failure is part of the dream chasing journey. If you are going to chase a dream you are going to fail. The key is not letting failure stop you so that you can overcome failure to reach your dreams. There have been times in my life that I have failed and quit and there have been times that I have pressed on and achieved what was in my heart. I’m sure the same thing can be said for you.
As I look back on my journey, I have discovered some differences in my bounce rate on failure. So how do you go from defeated to a hopeful dream chaser again? As Winston Churchill said, “Success is going from failure to failure without the losing your enthusiasm.”
These 4 things will help you overcome failure to achieve your dreams.
Autopsy a Failure
This can be hard to do, however, is critical to learning from failure. Failure is good IF we learn from the situation. Often times it’s our expectations that are off and we need to address that otherwise we will have the feeling of failure more than we are actually failing. In other instances there are key mistakes that we made. Sometimes to know if we made a mistake we need to get an outside perspective because it’s too personal. Look back and see what went right and what went wrong and how you can fix the problem in the future.
To Overcome Failure to Reach your Dream Know Your Identity
We can over identify with failure and it leads to discouragement and worse yet it can cause us to give up. You are a son or daughter of the King of the Universe. No matter if you succeed or fail at something your identity never changes. This is so important because when we over emphasize failure or success we close our eyes and our ears to things we need to hear or see. When we know that we are righteous men and women of God regardless of our production, we bounce back from failure much faster.
Do You Need to Change Your Path?
We need to ask ourselves if we are on the right path when we fail. Sometimes I have failed because I don’t have the talent or ability to do something. I don’t want to dedicate the time and energy to become better. Sometimes I don’t want it bad enough. Ask yourself if you would chase the dream regardless of “success.” If you would even if it didn’t work out wipe those tears and get back up! If you wouldn’t chase the dream wipe those tears and try to find a dream you would and try that.
To Overcome Failure to Reach your Dreams Take a Break or get Busy
Sometimes when you “fail” you just need to take a break. I took a hiatus away from writing a few months after releasing my book. You can get it here. The launch didn’t go as planned and I was tired. I needed to take a break from writing to find my voice again. On another occasion when an editor told me I didn’t have what it takes to write, I wrote ten posts in a few days and got featured in Entrepreneur Magazine. Sometimes you will need to break for a season and it’s okay. Other times you need to put the pedal to the metal and get busy. Take some time to look inward and then do what you feel called to do.
When you fail and you will remember that it’s not who you are. You can rise from the ashes and be different. Be kind to yourself in these moments. Take some time to encourage another dreamer because we all could use it. Dream big, fail small, and never lose that glimmer of dream chaser in your eye.
What causes you to overcome failure to reach your dreams?
I love your point about knowing your identity (child of God) makes it much easier to bounce back quickly from failure. Failure does not define whom we are.