Failure can be a major impediment to a successful career. The hurt from it can last a lifetime. The fear of it can stifle your ambition and diminish your potential. So, you might ask, what’s the point of learning about a subject that’s known to cause such grief and suffering? 

The answer is that by digging deeper into the cause of the failure you’ll discover a whole new perspective on how to respond when things don’t go your way. In addition to finding the underlying reason, you’ll also learn how to turn your pain into gain.

Failure is temporary; it only has lasting impact if you let it. Until you know the reason behind it, you’re speculating at your own risk. You may give up on a relationship or a job too soon and be dead wrong. Rather than treating failure as a hapless predicament, instead, explore the source to find out what you can learn from it.

Failure and the learning that comes with it can be put to good use once you understand and accept that it’s not about you. To avoid being overwhelmed by failure when it occurs use the following principles to guide and sustain you:

• Think of failure as a means of measuring the importance of your involvement. You risk being rejected whenever you act on your own beliefs.

• Look on failure as part of the learning process. You will be rejected many times in your career. Examine the cause and avoid similar missteps in the future.

• Adopt a no big deal philosophy. When one thing doesn’t work the way you expected, don’t give up—try something else.

• Have a strong belief in your personal worth and professional value. You have much to contribute that has not yet been tried or tested.

• Do what you believe in, and others will believe in you. Trust and support others and they will trust and support you.

• Don’t compromise yourself and your values. Hold yourself up and treat yourself well. You’ve earned it and you deserve it!

Your personal worth is derived from who you are, not from what you do, nor from how others feel about what you didn’t do. Self-esteem is enhanced proportionally to the difficulty of the task. The tougher it is to do, the better you’re going to feel about yourself when you get it done.

You do things for a reason, sometimes unconsciously. Your behavior has an ego-payoff. Understand what it is, and improvement becomes easier. Feeling bad about the past is futile. Concentrate on those things you can redo or revise. Spend less time thinking about situations you cannot change.

Be conscious of when you are letting other people determine your behavior especially when it goes against what you believe. Enjoy what’s here right now because today is the only certainty you have and the only time you’re in control of what happens next.