At some point in their lives, everyone has gone or will go through losing a job, a business failure or some other kind of failure. We see it every day, and we see how a few get over it quickly, as if nothing had happened, while others fall apart. People in the second group sometimes imagine such a dire scenario that it rarely comes true; in other words, what they imagined would happen is worse than what actually ends up happening.
And then, of course, there are those who stay face down in the mud and can’t get out. The only difference between them is how they manage their own emotions. You’re allowed to feel fear, anger, sadness, guilt, shame or rage for a while. What you’re not allowed to do is hold on for too long to emotions like these that don’t help you. If anything, they limit you, putting you in a dark place, darker than it really is.
And this can also happen with a divorce, or when you go bust because of a business partner or because you managed your own money badly.
(See: 4 things I learned from being broke)
It doesn’t matter why it happens, because there is only one direction we should focus our mind on: moving forward.
Failing at something doesn’t make you a failure. Plenty of highly successful business people failed at something in their day and refused to take on the identity of a failure. But careful: I’m not one of those who sell the romance of failure, because to me there’s nothing romantic about it. In fact, it sucks. But once it happens, you have to come to terms with it like anything else that happens in life.
See also: The 3 goals you should have in life, and there are no others
In the end, it all comes down to controlling our emotions. It is often said that we are our thoughts, and the way a person thinks says a lot about how far they will go. Controlling your emotions is a habit. We’re not going to say it’s easy, but as with any habit, practice helps.
“Success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics.” – Tony Robbins
Change the story you tell yourself.
It doesn’t matter what the real story is, because we can give it a new meaning. It’s like the boy who was given a pile of manure for Christmas and, instead of getting upset, shouted for joy and ran all over the house excitedly looking for the pony. He had literally been given a load of crap, and he could have chosen any of several meanings for it, but he preferred to choose his own: if there was horse manure, the horse must be somewhere nearby.
In the boy’s case he wasn’t going to find any horse, however excited he was about it. But in life, when you’re handed crap, forget about it, because there must be a horse (or lots of horses) nearby.
Is being fired the end of your life? When you’re 20 or 25, you don’t usually go under, because you know you’re young. Even so, I’ve seen young people crushed as if the world had fallen on top of them. Still, at 25 a dismissal or a failure shouldn’t normally knock us down.
But we hear stories about how hard it is to find work when you’re laid off at 40, 45 or 50, and as a rule the problem isn’t age but the loss of confidence we’ve suffered over the years. There are 50-year-olds who feel old, while others feel more full of life than they did at 35. Once again, it’s the meaning you choose to give your situation.
Is it going to be harder for a 50-year-old to find a new job than for a 35-year-old? Of course it is. But what is really hard is for that 35-year-old to have gathered the knowledge, wisdom and experience of the 50-year-old. And in this new era we live in, if you want to use your experience to do something, you don’t have to ask permission. Just do it.
As in the story Tony Robbins told in Awaken the Giant Within (published in Spanish as Controle su destino), two women reach the age of 70. One decides to sit out her old age, believing her life is coming to an end, while the other chooses to believe that life has given her a second chance, and goes on to set a world mountaineering record by becoming the oldest woman to climb Mount Fuji.
Clearly they are both the same age, but they don’t have the same emotional control when it comes to facing their situation.
Ultimately, we can see failure as the end or as the beginning. And this isn’t cheap motivational philosophy. A person is often reborn after being fired, because, as I always say: “Today there are great products and great companies because at some point someone was fired from a company.“
Some people feel more vulnerable and weaker simply because they have failed. Often it’s quite the opposite: you can be even more “dangerous” and effective, because you know you can fail and keep going. Others still don’t know whether they could, because they haven’t failed yet, in many cases because they haven’t tried to do very much either.
See also: How to recover after a business fails
Featured image: Alpsdake, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
