How to Learn from Failure and Still Achieve Your Goals

You may often hear that you should learn from failure but ever wondered how? How do you overcome failure and still achieve your goals even when you feel defeated? Let’s dig into this.

Usually in the middle of the year you’re looking back on your New Year resolutions and any goals set to take stock. How are your goals coming along? If you have some that are still lagging, here’s how to learn from failure so far so that you can bounce back quickly and still achieve your goals before the year’s out.

Failed To Achieve Your Goals? Get Back Up And Learn From It

We tend to think of failure as something shameful and undesirable. Understandably, failing to achieve a goal often causes negative feelings, no matter how big or small the goal was.

The only way to overcome those feelings is by changing the way we understand failure – it is part of the process of success and leaves valuable lessons if we know how to learn from it.

Firstly, it will benefit you to look at your process. How were you attacking this goal? What was your plan of action for getting it completed or much further along than you are now?

Like I broke down previously, your goals must be SMART and you definitely want to be tracking your progress in a goal planner like this one.

Improving your goal-achieving process can help you to get back on track. But what about those goals that you’ve completely failed?

Redefine failure to learn from it effectively.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes – Learning from your mistakes is about more than just thinking about what went wrong. The first step towards using failure as a tool for success is to stop seeing mistakes as shameful.

Think about it – a failure is not just a natural part of embarking on a new project; it is also part of the human experience. As such, they should be accepted as a necessary step towards achieving your goals. As Michael Jordan famously said, “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.”

It may do some help to identify the source of your failure. Amy C. Edmondson classifies mistakes in three categories:

Preventable

These are the mistakes we often think of as bad. They result from a lack of focus or attention to the procedures needed to achieve the goal.

Complexity-related

These mistakes happen when the goal is the product of many factors – your own motivation, previous skills, your environment, your support network, and the resources you have to accomplish it. If any of these fail, you might be unable to achieve the goal.

Intelligent mistakes

Having the freedom to make mistakes increases creativity and work performance. Without unnecessary pressures to avoid mistakes and the shame that comes with them, employees contribute more frequently and are able to express more original ideas.

For example, many great inventions were discovered by accident – from Post-It notes to penicillin.

Whatever the source of the mistake, removing any negative feelings about it and re-framing it as a source of new knowledge is the first step towards learning from failure effectively. If your failure was preventable, perhaps begin to look at why you did not have the motivation to focus on this goal. Is it something that you truly desire?

If it were that something changed in your immediate environment that caused you to not be able to achieve the goal, how can you now work around this?

Failure creates polarity. When you fail at something, it helps you to define more clearly what you want and how you want to go about achieving it.

Learn to begin looking at failure as a valuable lesson to learn from and to use in succeeding.

But what’s next?

Learn from Failure – Rethink your approach to your goal

Now that you’re looking at the mistake without judgment, think of how you got into the situation.

Analyze your motivation levels, focus, and mindset. Did you feel less motivated to achieve your goal at some point? Did something else distract you from it?

If your dedication and focus decrease at any time, make note of it and try to find the cause. Identifying the internal and external causes that affected your resolve helps you prepare for them in the future. If you journal daily, which you should, read back your notes and identify any patterns or external influences that may have caused you to not achieve your goals.

Once you’ve identified any underlying issues that contributed to your failure, you may want to analyze it with a trusted third party. In some cases, discussing the failure with someone you trust can help you see the issues from a different perspective. Rely on your support network to pinpoint what went wrong and how you could prevent it.

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Plan ahead

Identifying what caused the mistake is not enough to prevent it in the future. You need to take steps to prevent that mistake from happening again.

If your goal was to write a novel in six months, you’ve probably identified a few reasons why you couldn’t achieve it – lack of time, insufficient planning, or lack of motivation. But what can you do to prevent those issues from getting in the way of your goal in the future? In our example, you could scale down the scope of the novel, spend more time planning the story, or set a specific time to write undisturbed.

Failure is not permanent. By accepting failure, analyzing its causes, and defining how you can eliminate those causes, you’re on your way to achieving your goals.

To really learn from failure, get into the habit of writing everything down and tracking your progress. Start with this simple free goal-setting worksheet. It will keep you accountable to yourself and help you to finish out the year strong.

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