3 tips for overcoming setbacks

Dernière mise à jour de l'article le 23 January 2025

« Forget the consequences of failure: failure is a transitional stage that prepares you for your next success ».

Denis Waitley

Failure is seen as a prerequisite for success.

However, we don’t like failure, or even run away from it.

When we have the impression that we are failing, we feel rather negative and our self-confidence is affected.

If you open a personal development book, you’ll probably read that failure allows you to move forward, to gather feedback so that you can do better next time.

And yet we don’t like chess.

Honestly.

Who wants to feel that bad impression, that feeling of failure, of not being up to scratch, of having made a mistake?

That’s right. That’s how we’ve learned to feel when we fail.

A negative feeling.

And yet it is thanks to these failures that many discoveries have been made.

I’m thinking in particular of the famous Thomas Edison and his electric light bulbs.

He had to go over it more than 2,000 times before he found and succeeded in building these bulbs (fortunately for us, he didn’t give up…).

And did you know that when a reporter asked him the question « How did it feel to have failed more than 2,000 times before succeeding in inventing the light bulb? »

Thomas Edison replied « No, I haven’t failed, I’ve simply discovered 2,000 methods that don’t work! ».

So. Maybe it’s time to change our perception of chess, don’t you think?

But what exactly is a failure?

A failure is the result of an action that did not achieve what we wanted in relation to the criteria we had defined.

And so we consider that we have failed when we have not achieved all the success criteria that we defined beforehand.

In reality, it’s not failure as such that we fear, but rather the fear of failing.

When we face failure, it has an impact on our self-confidence and self-image.

We become more and more anxious and afraid of doing it again. And so we don’t dare try again, because we don’t want to experience those feelings again.

And the vicious circle begins. And starting a new action with a feeling of anxiety, telling yourself that you’re not going to succeed, that you’re going to fail before you even begin, doesn’t really put all the chances on your side.

And if, by some fluke, we do succeed, we tend to trivialise it and attribute it to luck rather than our abilities.

And if we fail, well, that was more or less what we expected, so it feeds our belief in failure and our self-confidence and there … a new limiting belief is born from these experiences.

Where does this fear of failure come from?

I came across this quote that got me thinking about how we perceive our failures.

After all, everyone makes mistakes in their lives.

However, we always have that bad feeling when we fail.

Where does this come from?

Perhaps a fear of being judged?

Fear that our skills will be called into question?

Fear of social rejection?

Fear of missing out on life?

But where does this fear come from?

The feeling of fear comes from the perception of immediate danger. At such times, we tend to adopt flight or inaction behaviour and have a need for protection.

We see failure as a danger.

I don’t think it’s possible to remove fear from the register of emotions. It’s an emotion like any other that lets us know how we feel about a given situation. On the other hand, I think it is possible to move forward and act despite this fear, once we understand the hidden message and can identify what we need to move forward and overcome this fear.

Now let’s move on to the promise of this article.

3 tips for overcoming setbacks

(1) Accept failure.

Yes, it’s simple to understand, but it’s not obvious. We all know that failures are, in a way, stages to go through when trying out new things. Albert Einstein said as much:

When we start something new or innovative, we don’t yet have all the information we need to adjust and improve our idea or our actions. It’s only through feedback, trials and tests that we can then adapt our actions.

When you take a step back, you understand this and it’s easy to integrate. But when that phase of failure arrives, our feelings tend to get the better of us.

And now for my second piece of advice.