Achieving your goals is often simply a matter of surviving setbacks and dealing with failure. Take the movie Pursuit of Happyness, for instance. Chris Gardner faced seemingly endless obstacles, and yet he achieved his goals despite the disappointments and setbacks.
Chris Gardner kept bouncing back, which is the only way to achieve your goals.
Dealing with failure: if you achieve your goals, you'll live longer!
Actors and actresses who win Academy Awards live an average of four years longer than those who haven’t won, claims Donald Redelmeier, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto. Winning the Oscar represents peer approval at its pinnacle, and helps the performer view everyday difficulties as less stressful. Winning helps people deal with failure. Achieving goals may also encourage winners to take better care of their health by exercising regularly and eating more carefully. Plus the sense of accomplishment, says Redelmeier, "changes the immune system, hormones, blood lipids, and buffers you against work stress."
Winning an Academy Award represents the ultimate in dealing with failure, surviving setbacks and achieving goals.
Dealing with failure: using failure effectively to achieve your goals
Maybe you’re not up for an Oscar this year, but you have goals and dreams – and you’ve no doubt failed along the way. It's par for the course. Achieving your goals may involve winning a promotion or losing twenty pounds; no matter what it is, failure, setbacks, and plateaus are inevitable.
You can give up, or you can deal with failure to strengthen your resolve and achieve your goals.
Dealing with failure: achieve your goals in steps
“Successful dieters meet their goals by learning from past failures,” maintains the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR). Losing weight and keeping it off involves trying new diets and fitness regimes – and not giving up if a plan doesn’t work. Successful weight loss involves dealing with failure: signing up for a Pilates/cardio combo at the gym when Weight Watchers doesn’t work, or trying portion control and eating every three hours when Spinning classes prove too difficult for the body or schedule.
Dealing with failure this way is effective in most aspects of life and achieving goals, not just weight loss.
Dealing with failure: specific examples of achieving your goals
Your big promotion and raise went to Jane, not you? To deal with failure and achieve your goals, talk to your boss, find out why you were passed over, and use the boss’s comments and suggestions to improve your game. Try different strategies to improve your job performance and marketability – take on different tasks, read books, network with people in different organizations. Dealing with failure requires bouncing back and surviving setbacks.
Your relationship is limping along, or perhaps you’ve just experienced the fifth worst blind date in a row? Take a look at what you’re doing and how you’re communicating – it’s not wrong, it’s just not working – and find ways to improve. When you're dealing with failure, ask your partner or friends for feedback, or see a counselor if necessary. Going outside your comfort zone is mandatory when you're achieving your goals.
Those Academy Award winners performed in several different movies, and in television commercials and on stages, before they won. They “failed” dozens of times before they succeeded, and they weren’t always confident of their performances. Dealing with failure simply means trying again and again when you're achieving your goals.
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