What to Do When You Feel Like a Failure
If you believe in yourself, the setbacks would be less important.
The end result is still the same: if you fall short of your target, you revert to self-criticism. Then it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to let go of all the negative energy, which saps your inspiration. As I said in my previous article, Do you want to improve yourself? Start Here. Getting to know yourself better will help you not only figure out what you need to improve, but it can also help you view yourself in a more constructive light. However, there are moments that people need to do something to help raise their spirits. They must cultivate self-acceptance in a direct manner.
When people have a poor self-perception, it’s not shocking that they feel defeated easily when confronted with obstacles. Any stumbling block, blunder, or setback may appear to confirm what they already suspect – that they won’t excel and that they aren’t okay. If this fits you, it’s critical that you make learning to respect yourself a top priority.
Concentrate on valuing who you are rather than what you do. When people look at their successes to prove that they are deserving, their sense of self-worth is based on those achievements.
As a result, if you do well, you will be pleased with yourself. You would feel less capable if you do badly. However, you are greater than your achievements. You are deserving simply for being you, just like any child is brought into this universe as a worthy human being.
This sense of self-acceptance can be attained by looking both at yourself and at your relationships:
You have the strength inside yourself. People gain a better sense of well-being and see more value throughout their lives as they focus on their “inner selves” (including characteristics they think they have even though they don’t reveal them), according to research.
You will put this to the test by setting aside some uninterrupted time to reflect on your beliefs and the characteristics that you believe define “the real you.” They will feel “right” when you imagine expressing them. Since you’ve given it some thought, consider how you feel about yourself. (You may want to stop right now to do this.) You’ll also notice that you’re pleased with yourself. This is the emotion you want to cultivate.
Make it a normal habit to do this exercise in a benign and optimistic setting, rather than in the midst of an internal crisis. And when life isn’t going well, you’ll find that you feel better for yourself (that you have greater self-acceptance) over time.
Relationships have tremendous influence.
We are social beings, and relationships provide us with both physical and emotional support. Others of stable marriages usually see you differently, particularly though they disagree with you or are angry with you in particular circumstances. You will foster a stronger sense of self-acceptance by being receptive to their constructive ways of perceiving you and their positive emotions towards you.
It could be beneficial for you to recognise true loving and caring friends – those who show interest in you. Choose one person and see what they appear to value in you. If you’re unsure, you may want to ask the person directly. Enable yourself to just soak in the good messages when you consider this. If you find yourself dismissing the note, keep in mind that they do see you in these respects. Then practice encouraging yourself to soak in constructive reinforcement once more. Repeat the process for and friend until you’ve had a chance to think about it.
This exercise can prove to be a challenge for you. Keep with it, however. Do it on a daily basis until you feel more at ease being viewed in a positive light…until you can even see yourself in a positive light.
When your sense of self-acceptance increases, you’ll be more likely to see failures as temporary issues rather than evidence of your inadequacy. This will assist you in getting back up and trying again. Whatever your aspirations are, you would have a better chance of reaching them if you are persistent.
NOTE: This post has gotten a lot of responses from people who are in a lot of pain. They also mentioned that this article would not apply to them because they are so engrossed in their suffering or distressing condition. If this response resonates with you, bear in mind that the aim of this post is to highlight one path to dealing with life’s challenges and feelings of loss. If it doesn’t work and the suffering is unbearable, you should get immediate help. If therapy hasn’t worked for you, you may want to try it again with a different doctor. I hope you find the best therapist for you – one with whom you communicate and who can collaborate well for you.
I’ve been getting updates about this note in the comments section, as well as privately, since I first left it (especially more positive ones). If you feel like this article isn’t comprehensive enough or you’d like to hear all about the challenges that can contribute to feelings of inadequacy, you may find another article I recently published, Withstanding the Pain of Feeling Inadequate, useful. You may also find the linked short film, Learning the Truth: You Are Worthy, beneficial.
When you feel like you've failed, there are few important lessons to learn.
They write poems, novels, inspiring quotations, and movies about it, but they still speak of failure in the past tense, as if it’s alright to talk about until we’ve transcended, found purpose, and are back on our feet. Failure is a pain in the neck. It can be difficult to find the romantic, poetic, or positive lessons we are meant to learn when we feel like we have lost in life, often because we are too angry or broken-hearted to search for them.
It takes a lot of energy to feel like a loser in life, and it comes in many ways. The only thing we can count on in life is that we will lose. We’ll do it again and again, and as mistakes pile up, it may sound like the world is collapsing under our feet.
Here are few examples of how failure can appear and feel.
Failure can take the form of:
Losing the job
Going bankrupt or having financial difficulties
Being passed over for a promotion
Being dumped
Being off a diet
Divorce is something that many people go through, and certain people go through it more than once.
When you had to get dressed, there was someone waiting for you.
Not completing a big objective or even a regular to-do list
And when you do something well, you somehow appear to lose when it matters.
Anything you spent a lot of time on going horribly wrong (anyone remember the IKEA disaster?)
You’re in your twenties (sort of—just kidding)
Failure can take the form of:
Bewilderment
Disappointment
Deflation (I know, a lot of “d” words)
A feeling of emptiness
Failure, on the other hand, may sound like:
expansion
alteration
forward motion
So, what are the lessons that occur in the interim that help us move from desperation to wisdom? They are, in fact, there if we are able to see them.
When you feel like you’ve failed in life, here are ten important lessons to remember.
Attempting is commendable.
If you’ve lost, the fact is that you must have worked hard to get to this point. Because of their fear of failing, many people chose not to try in order to escape the risk of failing.
Fear of failure plagued 31% of 1,083 adult respondents in a Linkagoal poll, a higher proportion than those who feared spiders (30%), being alone at home (9%), or even the paranormal (9%). (15 percent ).
If you’ve ever felt like a loser, it’s because you summoned the confidence to do something difficult. Remember that your courage hasn’t vanished only because things didn’t go as planned. Remember that this is the product of your determination to try.
If we don’t give failure so much power, it humbles us.
We memorialize our mistakes as predictors of potential imminent failures if we give them too much credit. It’s as if failure at anything in life means you’ll never be able to excel at it again. We catastrophize our defeat, exaggerate the scale, and transform a single event into a self-fulfilling prophecy that we will have to repeat.
We don’t have to, however. When we accept our loss for what it is—nothing more, nothing less—it humbles us. We take it in, call what happened, describe how it affected us, and leave it at that. We regard it as information and recognize that it has no bearing on whether we can succeed or fail in our endeavors.
The “What if” Mental Gymnastics is Pointless— Make Most of Your Time.
What has been finished, has been done. Nobody benefits from reliving our failure moments. “Would’ves,” “should’ves,” and “should’ves” race through our heads while we remember all of the many directions things could have gone better if only. But the fact is that the time we waste in this loop of unnecessary replay might be best spent working to fully own the pieces of the loss that we have power over.
This is our opportunity to invest time in meditation and to be completely truthful in identifying the main causes. When loss hurts so bad, all of us look for ways to get ourselves off the hook. We search for external sources to accuse or confuse the memory with explanations rather than confess to the thing we should have modified.
Although we may not be able to control any mistake, there are many areas where we can be held accountable, learn from, and improve in the future. It’s preferable if you “concentrate entirely on certain things that are beyond your grasp.” Feeling in charge is a powerful solution to feelings of helplessness and defeat, motivating you to try again, reducing the risk of failing, and increasing your chances of success.”
Accountability is not something that can be shared.
We don’t want to be blamed, so martyrdom isn’t our target. Accountability, on the other hand, is critical. We want to take full responsibility for the errors we discover by self-reflection and show complete honesty in conversations with those who were harmed by our mistakes.
While responsibility should be divided and the other person can have a role to play, we can take this time to state our effect regardless of our intentions in order to make sense of our mistakes. And if no one else is involved, the goal is to eradicate excuses, name what happened, and state what will happen next.
For example, if you feel like you struggled in life when you were passed over for a promotion in your profession, you should reflect on why there is some responsibility for the moments you could have been more intentional in your job and set a goal on how you can strive on next quarter and make a point to self-advocate more socially.
When, on the other hand, the mistake is a break-up, and self-reflection reveals ways you should have become more communicative or honest during the relationship, you could make a point of admitting it to the involved party and stating that this is something you want to improve on before starting your next relationship.
The Elimination Process Is Used.
Consider the last time you took an exam with a multiple choice question. You had to use logic to narrow down the options to the most possible options, and in the absence of certainty, you had to make an informed guess.
We are constantly presented with similar chances, and we can see failure as a means of getting closer to the “correct response.” Many of the ways things shouldn’t go get us closer to seeing how it should. In this way, failure in life is beneficial to us. We get closer to the results we want to find when we can process our mistakes productively, derive the insights they offer, and continue with intuition.
Failure teaches you what you’re made of, so it’s not for the faint of heart.
It hurts a lot when you fail in life, and I mean really fail. Overcoming the difficulties that come with major life failure is no simple task. And then, as we want to go back out there and try again, we are proving something to ourselves.
The metaphorical action we take to “get back on the horse” shows to us that we are more resilient than we thought. Trusting after getting your heart broken, applying for a promotion after being passed over before, asking the next person out on a date after being ghosted—the metaphorical step we take to “get back on the horse” proves to us that we are more resilient than we realized. We’ve tried before and failed, now we’ll try and fail again.
We learn to rebound as we learn to bounce back.
“Experiencing discomfort is unpleasant, but the trust and sense of relief—what we refer to as ‘excitation transfer’—are extremely strong. That feeling of superiority, of “Wow, look what I just did,” is a learning opportunity. The terror is unpleasant in and of itself, but no one remembers it. The good high is what they remember.”
We will learn the art of failing forward as we push beyond disappointment in the path of trying again.
Little children who are learning to walk may fall to the ground hundreds of times, but they do not decide to crawl for the rest of their lives. They continue to pose. We will treat life more lightheartedly and fight back on all of the derogatory self-talk we learn as we mature if we tap into the same childlike ease of loss. “If I fail, people will criticize me,” says the author. “If I try to fail in front of others, I will lose their respect.” What does it matter? Life is difficult.
It’s all about how you frame it.
You must determine how you can learn about and discuss your mistakes in the future. What you want to mention reveals a lot of how you felt about the loss. You prolong life’s biggest challenges if you focus on and chat about all of the frustrating residuals of the loss.
“Fear leads to rage, anger leads to hatred, and hate leads to suffering,” Yoda said. When you talk of literacy, you are perpetuating the growth that the rest of the planet longs to see.
It Is Caring To Share
Repurpose the knowledge and spare someone else the hassle. I’ve always doubted the adage that any generation must learn for themselves that the iron is hot—I think that’s nonsense! Any people may pay attention to the message.
Granted, loss happens to all, and we all have things to remember, but it never hurts to tell the experience. Or the way you share your ideas with the world, be free, honest, and brave. Never underestimate the effect you would bring from voicing the “aha!” moments that came from your mistakes, whether it’s in the form of a mentorship partnership, openly sharing on your blog, or snippets you post as you sit on a panel one day.
It’s All Right to Let It Go (You Know, As Elsa Said?)
If you’re a famously hard on yourself, you might feel tempted to hang on to disappointment, but after the contemplation, responsibility, and learning have taken place, the failure would have served its function. Allow it to go to make room for your next move. Besides, you still have a lot of mistakes in you!
Last Thoughts
Life is essentially one huge opportunity to be really good at failing. When you feel like you’ve struggled in life, there are a lot of ways to screw things up, but there are far more than 10 major lessons to remember.
Consider each day a fresh opportunity to exercise courage—a new opportunity to learn from your experiences and adapt what you’ve learned to the next major danger. It’s fine to lose in life and it doesn’t mean you’re doomed for the rest of your life. Nobody has ever achieved success without first struggling.
If you’ve been going for broke or being cautious to stop making mistakes, let today be the first of several days where you fail with complete conviction that everything you do has a reason.
What to Do When You Feel Like a Failure
How to Stop Feeling Like a Failure: Confessions of a Former Loser
I get emails on a regular basis from people who believe they are complete losers, but I know they aren’t.
There is such a thing as a true loser, believe it or not. However, this is not the case for the majority of citizens. Nonetheless, all of us share this sentiment.
Recently, I’ve found a change in culture. People feel powerless, insignificant, and ineffective.
What caused this to happen?
We live in prosperous times, but people are so engrossed in negativity that they are oblivious to it. They’re under too much strain to “be everybody” that if their lives aren’t flawless, they sound like failures.
I believe that a healthy degree of disappointment will serve as inspiration, but feeling like a loser is not the same as merely trying and failing.
If something, it is my responsibility to inform you of this matter.
You aren’t a loser. You aren’t a loser in any way. That isn’t something I’m doing to appease you. I’m serious. You can feel confused, but you will get back on track.
Take it from someone who knows what they’re talking about:
I dropped out of school with three credits remaining in order to do an internship. I never returned to finish my degree.
In education, I had a 0.0 GPA. I didn’t even have the foresight to drop out at the time. I simply did not show up for the classes that I had paid for.
I’ve been detained. For five years, I was on felony probation. I’ve spent some nights in prison.
I had a period in my life where I didn’t leave the house because I needed drugs or tried to get hammered.
People now look up to me, which is strange to me because I know the loser version of myself. If only they were conscious.
You can improve if I can, so how do you do it?
Why Do You Feel Failed?
When you’re in your twenties, you can’t lose. You certainly can, but it’s very difficult to completely ruin your life at such a young age.
Despite this, I receive a large number of messages from young people who feel like losers in such a brief amount of time. What is the reasoning behind this?
We’ve always been taught to compare ourselves to other people.
Grades are nothing more than an abstract criterion to which you may compare yourself to your fellow cult members.
When children’s brains aren’t yet fully grown, they are put under pressure to get it all together.
You’ve probably heard about Lori Loughlin, who is facing decades in prison for bribing universities to admit her kid. It’s all for the sake of “status.” It’s just a load of nonsense when it comes to street cred.
Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Why are we so concerned for our futures?
We live in a time when status, contrast, signalling, curating, and filtering are all essential. You must attend the best colleges, achieve the highest honors, travel to the best destinations, take the best photographs, and enjoy the best life possible. Otherwise, you’ll be a nobody.
At times, writers like me contribute to the muck. There’s a lot of conversation these days about discovering your meaning and passion. You’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself to figure out what you want to do with your life. Now is the time. Otherwise.
This is a cultural problem.
However, the only way to be the best self is to ignore the society and simply…be yourself.
Here’s a list of all you’re good at.
Let me begin with this quote: “We are swift to forget that simply being alive is an exceptional bit of good luck, a distant thing, a monstrous chance occurrence.” Nassim Taleb,
When I read it, it still brings me down to earth.
Allow yourself to unwind. Take a deep breath. You’re fortunate to be here at all.
You and I are both too able to forget that.
How much of life are we missing out on? There’s so much pressure to excel, to keep up with the Joneses, to get the best-curated feeds. For what purpose? In the grand scheme of things, we’re all fortunate little atoms. On the radar are blips. Soon after, he died. Under that situation, how do you possibly consider yourself a failure?
You can’t do that. When you take life so seriously and forget that you’re a cosmic miracle, you can only see yourself as a loser. You have a one-in-a-billion chance of being born into a species with a one-in-a-billion chance of surviving on a planet with a one-in-a-billion chance of supporting life.
Don’t you think you’ve already won?
Okay, that’s fine. So that brings you back to earth for a moment. That isn’t enough, though. I understand.
The inner critic returns from the depths of your subconscious to remind you of your inadequacy. There is no way to solve the mystery by pondering the world. So, what’s next?
What would you do to avoid feeling like a loser in a true, tangible way?
Mentality of a Marathon
I recall it as if it were yesterday. It’s pouring outside.
To drop off the nightly deposit at the bank, I had to walk a mile from the video store where I worked. I didn’t have access to a vehicle. I was 25 years old, a time when not having a car made you a loser.
“It doesn’t matter,” I reasoned. I’d taken the job as a boss at a video shop, paying $10 per hour, as a way to stop being a loser.
At any moment, the cosmos will catch up with me.
I’m on my feet. Plug on your headphones. I’m listening to the late Nipsey Hussle, my favourite artist. I was listening to a song called 7 Days a Week on repeat. “Seize the moment, believe, and take care of it,” one lyric stands out. Then get started on your marathon and keep going until it’s over.”
I recall how unconcerned I was about the storm, despite the fact that my clothes and shoes were completely saturated. I planned on walking there, returning to my home, waking up, and getting back to work the next day. I was in the middle of my marathon. I’d be a star one day.
I set aside $100 a month in order to purchase a $2,500 car at an auction (a car I still drive by the way). I drove out of town in that car, to a new career and a new life.
I didn’t feel like a loser anymore. So, what made the transition easier for me?
A few basic points:
You must seek out the purest, purest, purest mode of irritability. Let it sting. “I’m not going to fucking live like this anymore!” I cried.
Around the same time, you must avoid falling into the pit of self-flagellation. You set a standard for yourself and feel like a star as a result. My goal was to do well at my $10-an-hour job and publish articles afterward. All I wanted to feel worthy was that.
After you’ve found a way to make yourself more responsible,
Self-Improvement: The Nuts and Bolts
The most common and mundane self-improvement suggestions are actually the most effective.
For example,
Sleeping for eight hours
3 days a week physical activity
30 minutes a day of reading
These practices aid in the outside-in approach to working. It’s harder to feel like a loser when you’re working to improve your mind and body’s consistency.
I recall reading about 50 books in one year. I was already broke, so I didn’t feel like a loser because I spent all of my time studying. The exact opposite is true. I was en route to somewhere. I had no idea what I was doing, so I was doing something.
That’s just what you’re looking for. Momentum. Motion. There is no self-help medication that can pull you from your sofa and transport you to the gym or open the pages of a book for you.
Between my words and your actions, there will be a chasm that you must bridge. No one will help you break the nut.
On the other hand, independence, sanity, and pleasure can be found on the other side of inertia and momentum.
You aren’t a loser. You are a living thing. As a result, you’re more adaptable, imaginative, and flexible. As a species, we’ve never lost. We’re still standing. This means you’re made up of the DNA of people who discovered a way to keep society progressing.