Managing Success and Failure – Basics

You can use ‘reflection’ or ‘careful thinking process’ to identify your fears and desires. These fears and desires are the things that are most crucial to you and you value in your life. These fears and desires are also the ones that most affect the way you deal with and feel about your success and failures. When you learn to identify your fears and desires, you will be able to identify your strong reactions that are based on these fears and desires. Hence, if you learn to control your fears and desires, you will in turn ultimately learn to control your strong reactions to situations that arouse feelings of fear or desire in you. So, in turn you will learn to deal with and manage your successes and failures.

There are some people who fear success as much as they fear failure. Such people are under constant stress of both reaching their goals and achieving them or in fear of losing the success they have already achieved.  Negative emotions are a major cause of people to fail and put off tasks. Negative emotions should be conquered to overcome failures. Yet, in the right context, these feelings are completely natural. Dealing with negative emotions inappropriately can also be harmful – for example, expressing frustration of failure through violence.

It is important that in order to manage your success and failures, you should understand yourself better. In order to understand yourself and to increase your self-awareness, you should learn to identify the root cause of all your emotions. So, whether you are happy, sad, distressed, anxious, elated etc., you should always know where these emotions are related to your success or failures are stemming from.

When you understand the root cause of your emotions, you will know what makes you happy, sad, angry, depressed etc. when you are faced with success or failure. By becoming more self-aware, you will then be able to control these emotions by keeping a check on the triggers that cause these emotions. You should learn to identify each specific type of emotion that you feel. To begin this, you can keep a fixed schedule where you take time out from your busy day and try to identify the various emotions that you felt through the day.