When You Keep Failing: How to Recover and Boost your Confidence

Introduction

We all face multiple failures in life. The road to success is paved with failures and a person learns the best lessons of his/her life from failures only.
One can choose to react in one of the following two ways:
(1) Keep feeling sorry and stuck there only. This leads to a loss of self-confidence.
(2) Learn from your failure and use it to avoid further mistakes and achieve your goals.
Highly successful people have the right mindset, that is, they have a growth-oriented mentality that makes them move forward towards success even after huge failures.
People who achieve great things in life perceive and respond to failure differently:
• They Accept the fact that failure is inevitable,
• They take problems as challenges to be solved (not avoided), and
• They actively identify their mistakes and learn lessons from their failures.

You can regain your confidence after a failure, by cultivating the right mindset by the following simple steps

1. Reaffirm Yourself: Most successful people are well aware of the fact that failure happens to even the best of us. If someone hasn’t failed at anything before, it means he/she has never tried anything. Just because you failed at one or two things, doesn’t mean that you are a total failure. Successful people visualize their dreams and goals and reaffirm that they are credible. They assert positive things like “I can” by which they influence their subconscious mind, transform their behavior, and reshape their attitude towards situations.
2. Take a break: Take some time out to de-stress after going through major setbacks. This will give you a reprieve from the failure. It will soothe your ego, stirs your creativity, and helps you get a sense of things that truly matters in life. Surround yourself with positive and supportive people. Make time for simple pleasures like reading, nature walk or simply just hang out with your family.
3. Find Out and Recognise your Mistakes: Focus on what can be learned from mistakes and failures. By reflecting on these failures, you become aware of your strengths and weaknesses. You will thus, become conscious of where you lack, your blind spots, and your best course of action for going forward.
4. Forgive yourself and Let Go: Many successful people practice self-compassion. They do not overthink and hurt themselves too much after making a mistake. Being too harsh on yourself does nothing but kills your self-confidence further and make it much harder for you to bounce back to winning ways. The moment you learn to forgive yourself is the moment you permit yourself, to rise again and make things happen.

5. Focus on lessons that can be learned from those mistakes: The Self-confidence of a person takes a hit when he/she lacks the necessary skills. The best way to fix this is to acquire your knowledge and/or skills. Focus on the things you are weak at rather than those you are good at. Ask yourself questions like, why you failed, what you can do differently, and how can you incorporate your learnings into future actions.
6. Reflect on your past successes and failures (that led to success): Constantly remind yourself about your past failures and that, you have thrived thereafter. Regularly reflect on your past failures and identify the learnings that eventually led to your success. This will help you to rebuild your self-confidence, strengthen your resilience and enable you to take risks in the future that are necessary to achieve long-term success.
7. Manage your self-doubt: Whenever you make a mistake, analyze your feelings and frame strong arguments to answer negative self-talk and doubt. You can write down your fears and concerns clearly and challenge them rationally. It’s fine if your doubts dissolve by doing this, but if the worries are based on real risks, set additional measures to manage them properly. This will boost your confidence. As you think, so shall you become.
8. Restrict Negative Self-Talk: We all have an inner critic. It generally points out negative things about us and shows up often after a setback or failure. But your inner critic isn’t WHO you are. Think of your inner critic as a person who warns you. By this, you’ll listen to it objectively, stop it from being repetitive, and move forward.
9. Recreate your approach: Trying the same things again and again but expecting different results is insanity. One must constantly recreate his/her approach and find new ways of doing things based on learnings of the past. Create the best and clear and rational plan or solution which will then boost your confidence and help you move towards success.
10. Get back up on their feet and commit themselves to success: Dust yourself, get back up on your feet, and continue with your journey. Don’t stay down. Start and make small, steady steps forward that are armed with lessons learned from past failures. This will rebuild and rejuvenate your self-belief. Every victory is a reward for your commitment.

Summary

We, human beings, are all very sensitive souls. No matter the amount of success we have achieved or how talented we are, any kind of unexpected setback can directly break our self-confidence. Amidst normal circumstances, when things are going well, if suddenly something wrong happens, it might take us some time and some amount of concerted effort.
Most of the successful people understand this and they take impressive steps and measures to bounce back even after huge setbacks and with the help of these steps, they recover and rebuild their self-confidence.