How failure ISN'T failure

When most of us encounter hardship or some kind of failure such as not getting that promotion at work, not getting the grades we hoped for or falling short of a particular fitness goal, we are immediately gripped with negative emotions. This often results in us becoming obsessed, dwelling over this event which we first perceive to be a negative event in our life. And more often than not we drag out these feelings of negativity for days, weeks, months or in some extreme cases years. In the modern western world I believe this to be down to the huge negative social stigma we place on failure and the ever increasing pressure to succeed in life as the global population grows while the amount of stuff we have access to decreases forcing us to adopt an ever increasing competitive nature.

It is impossible for us to change the past but is we all have the power to change the way in which we view and feel about our past and life experiences.

Failure presents the greatest learning opportunities in life we will ever experience. For example during my time at college over the duration of the courses I was taking, every week we would all take a mock exam for each subject in order to identify where we were weak with that particular topic under exam conditions. This was to give us the opportunity to potentially screw up. Following each mock the next lesson would be based around working on the mistakes we had made rather than praising what we had got right and the more you'd screw up, the greater improvements you'd reap in the long term. The people who started the term with the crappiest mock results for the first few weeks were the ones with the very best grades at the end, simply because they had these opportunities to make mistakes. This principle can be applied to any part of life.
Individuals at the top of their game are often those who have FAILED the most in some form or another, simply because they use those experience to analyse what they did wrong, and what they can do better next time in order to optimise their chances of reaching their goal.

If you're thinking to yourself "But I don't want to make any mistakes at all in the first place!!", to do that you'd have to live a very sheltered and dull life. Where you are constantly gripped by the fear of failure which will mean the life you are living is not a live worth living all together, so get out there and fail at something. That said the fear of failure doesn't have to be a bad thing either, it can be harnessed to motivate you to work harder, but with any amount of hard work you will make some kind of mistake guaranteed down the line at some point, but don't be disheartened.

The take home message here is to embrace the failures and mistakes you make, as they are golden opportunities to find your weaknesses, once you've found them don't be afraid to record them, write that shit down so you don't stumble and fall over the same stone as you walk down the path of life.