Embrace failure as a stepping stone

Good morning everyone,

I hope you’re keeping well 🙂

Failure is a word that we all hear from time to time in our lives, however, does that mean that it has to be a bad thing? Let’s take a look at how we can reframe our approach to failure and the lessons it can teach us in today’s blog.

Hello and Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!

Failure isn’t the end; it’s a curve on the pathway to success. This is a statement I learnt on a business course from a man called Alan Donegan back in 2019, and it’s really stuck with me over these last five years.

I’ve failed more than I can count, whether it was not doing as well as I hoped in college, messing up in a job interview, saying the wrong thing to a friend or something different entirely. While some people would see that as a ‘bad thing’, I see it as what has helped shape me into who I am today.

Here are a few ways how you can use failure to your advantage:

🔍 Analyse What Went Wrong – Take a thorough look at what happened and how it led to its result. Understanding the root cause is the first step to improvement

📚 Find the Lesson – Every failure comes with a lesson. Use these to refine your approach to perform more effectively next time

🤝 Seek Feedback – Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback from colleagues or managers. An outside perspective can help identify things that you may have missed at first

💪 Stay Resilient – Facing setbacks is entirely normal; it’s all a part of the learning journey. Don’t let them prevent you from reaching your full potential

Don’t view failure as a bad thing or something to be ashamed of. To occasionally fail is to be human, it can be your best teacher if you are willing to acknowledge and learn from your mistakes. Putting your hand up and owning your mistakes can appear to be one of the toughest things to do, but it’ll pay off massively as you move forward in life.

I find the conversations around how people define failure, success and other aspects of their lives to be fascinating. It’s something I have delved into quite a bit on the page over the years, and I am definitely interested in venturing back into in the near future- how I’ll do that, I’m not 100% sure as of yet.

If you would like to find out more about some of my views on this topic, be sure to check out my “What Do We Mean By Success?” series, they were such a lot of fun to write!

That’s all for today’s blog, what do you think? How do you define failure? What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from a ‘failure’ so far in your life? Would you like to see more blogs like this going forward?

Be sure to let me know your thoughts and answers to the above questions 🙂

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a lovely day!