Yes, you read that correctly – and even more so, learn to love your failures.

In our culture, one of the biggest hurdles to success is overcoming failure in order to get there. The fear of failure can stop a person from pursuing dreams, and lead to regrets later. One of my favorite quotes is, “You always regret more the things you didn’t do.”

Success means different things to different people, but achieving something means not only getting the thing you want, it means your self-confidence will get a boost as well. If we’re too afraid to even try, or we take a few steps forward to get started and then never really follow through – we conversely don’t get the thing we wanted and we lose self-esteem any way.

Failures Can Help Us Develop Confidence

It seems counterintuitive to say that a failure, loss or rejection would make us feel more confident, but the reason they really do isn’t because failure feels good – it’s because experience makes us more confident. Think about an athlete’s first Varsity game where they’re a starter, and a young hopeful. They may or may not play their best game the first few times, and the team as a whole may have won or lost, but the confidence eventually develops after the player has more games under their belt. The athlete inevitably experiences both wins and losses throughout their career.

When we take actions to create a path that leads us to a goal we want to achieve, be it losing weight or starting a business, we need to have a plan that we follow. Once we start down our path, we have to stay on course and if we do stumble, fall, or take a few steps backward, we have to get up and keep going. If we hit a wall or a roadblock we must reassess and change something to overcome the obstacle, or maybe we rest a bit while meditating on it. If we give up, we don’t get the goal and we don’t get experience to grow from. At that point, we’re not interested in growing, we’re interested in the easy path or nothing at all.

When the athlete wants to score big points to help their team win, they don’t quit the team and the sport if they’ve had a few bad games. Again, it’s the experience through time that helps us grow and gain confidence in our abilities. It’s often times that a bad loss can inspire a competitive person to practice more, focus more, become better so they’re coming into the next game with confidence and momentum. Failures can actually inspire us to try even harder.

How to Stay Motivated After Failures

None of us are bullet proof and sometimes failures are proverbial emotional bullets that seem to cause wounds that need attention and healing. This is especially true when it comes to failed relationships. Even when our goals are on things like career settings or educational goals or house projects – there are relationships that go along with everything we do in life. We need clients, service people, teachers, coworkers and often emotional support from friends and/or family. There are many relationships involved with any success or failure.

Disappointments in self or in others usually follows a failed attempt. Something as simply as being turned down after you worked up the nerve to ask someone out on a date leads to a feeling of disappointment. Getting turned down for a job after an interview can be deflating. Most start up businesses fail in the first year. There will always be disappointments throughout life, knowing this and accepting this can help us avoid feeling like a victim of bad luck. Knowing that it’s not normal to win every game, succeed every time, and never make a mistake or experience rejection. If we understand that so many who have had success have also had failures and losses, it keeps us realistic.

What would our world be like if every time a person failed they just gave up trying? It’s easy to be hard on ourselves, but to stay motivated so that we can keep moving forward to reach goals or to live in a way where we can enjoy a balance of life’s ups and downs, without becoming an emotional roller coaster but rather living from a strong center no matter what we’re going through, is key. In order to maintain a rational outlook, a strong will to learn and make progress, and the motivation to keep going – we must be willing to spend our time wisely, change when we need to, and surround ourselves by healthy influences.

One key to staying motivated is not to repeat the same mistakes. When we hit the roadblock we have to be willing to try something a little different. We must remind ourselves that we don’t need to be perfect. We can visualize the impact of reaching our goal instead of the process by which we get there. We should be flexible in case our process must change in order to reach our goal. We should understand it takes time to get where we are going, and sometimes it takes longer than we want it to. We should be open to acknowledging when something isn’t working and be willing to adjust and change without criticizing self and/or others.

Another key to staying motivated is to cultivate gratitude for self and others and be respectful to self and others. We lose motivation when we become depressed, and when things aren’t working out as planned we can feel frustrated, lose hope and get down on ourselves and others. Suddenly the world around us seems unhelpful and we feel alone. It’s easy to get stuck there. If we hit a low point the best thing we can do is start to list the things we are grateful for, acknowledge the times when we’ve had good luck, and to recognize and be grateful for those who really have helped. Doing something kind for someone else, like dropping a card and a note in the mail for someone with a kind word, can make us feel so much better. Being grateful for others and helpful to others can give us a new jolt of positive energy to help us feel hopeful and keep us moving forward.

The Company You Keep Will Make or Break You

The most important thing is to be around people who are healthy and genuinely good for you. This is one of the main reasons I suggest loving your own failures. When relationships fail, there’s a good reason to move on. Some endings are the most fabulous thing that has ever happened to us even if we’re sad, mad, or hurt and need to heal. The real love is found in the healing and it’s the love for self that must be uncovered and honored. When we are in relationship to someone or something that is out of alignment with our core self and our path to personal progress becomes blocked, we need to move on in a different direction. We can actually feel good about it.

Sometimes when we’re making a change or needing one, we tend to cling to the familiar. Yet, we’re trying for change, so the familiar is not where we are going to find success. If we’re dealing with trying to stay motivated after a failure or a setback, we have to look at where we are going and how it is different from where we are at now. We must learn about what is not working. We have to acknowledge our lifestyle and surroundings, and this is where it can get tricky.

Maybe we’ve tended to gravitate toward people and places that don’t fit our new vision. Even if both are healthy, like transitioning from weightlifting and body building to martial arts. It’s not wrong to spend time lifting weights in the gym, but to excel at martial arts takes time, patience, and being around the culture. The dojo is so much different from the gym. To succeed in martial arts, you will do better by living it and being it.

This doesn’t mean we can’t be friends with our gym buddies, or our high school buddies, or our friends from our old job, and at the same time it may mean we are spending more time with people who foster our new goals. When we start to step out and form new relationships, new habits and change our perspective and possibly our lifestyle, we should expect that some relationships may change or even end. This is why drinking buddies don’t stick around long after you’ve sobered up and started going to the dojo three times a week. We don’t have to see it as a negative when we realign and we shift who we’re around.

Remember that failed relationships are sometimes the best failures we can have. There are some relationships that don’t serve us well and can suck our time, energy and money away. In some cases we can wither with the wrong surroundings. If what you’re around doesn’t nurture you, you can experience a failure to thrive with your own personal growth and with whatever success looks and feels like to you. Each relationship we have helps us grow, some are life long, some are very temporary. Even the “bad” relationships are great teachers. A bad relationship that failed is actually a success that has us going in a better direction.

Learn From the Past but Don’t Look Back

If you’ve ever failed at a startup, you know that it’s tempting to keep thinking about the failure, replaying decisions and regrets. When you move on to the next project you tell yourself you’ll do things differently, but what if you still don’t have the right formula?

There may be many tries, and years may pass before any given idea formulates all the way into a successful endeavor that sustains for the long term. Sustaining is the hardest part, and surpassing it easily only happens after a lot of failed tries. By the time you hit the big win, you’re hitting your stride and actually breaking records. We don’t hit a stride if we’re always looking over our shoulder and fearing that something will go wrong like it “always” does. Once we step away from the failures and move on, we will eventually come into alignment if we keep trying.

So no matter how many diets you have tried that didn’t work, you keep trying and you’ll hit a magic formula. It may need adjusted from time to time, but returning to past eating habits is not an option, you will gain the weight back and the high cholesterol will return, as well as your risk for diabetes. If we sustain, looking forward, and not using the past as an excuse or as proof to ourselves that we can’t do it, when we keep being consistent about eating healthy, we will see results, we will hit a stride and it’ll then be easier than it’s ever been.

No matter what, if we always look forward to the next thing from the moment we’re in, we have a better chance of making progress. If we try to look back while running forward, we’re going to trip.

The Only Real Failure is Selfishness

Most failures are partial successes that end before we’re ready. A failed marriage likely had many points where happiness and fun were mixed with challenges. Some failed businesses have certain measures of success until they can’t sustain. A failed test had some successful answers while most were wrong. No matter who wins the Super Bowl, one team fails to win, but there are so many successes to getting there and so many during the game for both teams. The only failure would be to not try at all, to refuse to take the test or play the game.

When we refuse to try, we do this because we don’t feel like it, we don’t feel good enough or ready enough or we fear failure or rejection. After all, we’re talking about trying for something we want to accomplish. Personal growth, progress, experience and success are inspiring to others, and if no one tried, nothing would make progress. Societies would not build and make progress and thrive. It’s a form of selfishness when a person hides their talents from the world and sets the example of underachiever for others to witness. In this way, laziness and victimhood become normalized.

When a person can’t admit their mistakes, they can’t learn from them. One of the biggest failures stemming from lack of humility, is the inability to be held accountable, to hold oneself accountable and to admit and apologize for mistakes. This form of narcissism has been normalized to some extent in American culture, so some people who function out of this realm of selfishness have succeeded in front of our eyes in terms of monetary wealth. Because of this, we often confuse being rich with being successful. Again, if you’re trying to succeed at losing weight, being rich has nothing to do with it. But if you can’t admit to yourself and others that you eat and drink way too much, you’re not going to be successful at losing weight – and everyone else can see it, plus your denial.

The only real failures are in the failure to try, in giving up, and in blaming others when we don’t get what we want in life. To try and fail is to succeed at trying and getting started. To get up and try again after falling is to succeed at discipline and perseverance. To be grateful for our talents, gifts and loved ones even after rejection or loss is to succeed at developing wisdom and setting a good example for others. Failing is a part of attaining experience, wisdom, and finally, success.