A friend posted this on LinkedIn and I thought it was great:
How do you learn from setbacks? How do we make facing setbacks less threatening to the ego? Research offers a few suggestions:
1️⃣ Observe other people’s failures
In their paper, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach propose removing the ego from failure as much as possible by looking at other people’s failures first, before you take on a task yourself.
2️⃣ Get some distance
If negative emotions are getting in the way of your understanding, they also suggest trying self-distancing techniques.
3️⃣ Share your own failure story
People tend to hide their own failures, out of a sense of shame, but there are ways to turn failure into success by transforming it into a story of growth.
4️⃣Recognize your successes
There are other ways to shore up your own ego. Studies consistently find that experts are better able to tolerate failure in their fields, in part because they have a past history of accomplishment and future predicated on commitment.
5️⃣ Feel the disappointment
If all else fails, try just feeling sad over your mistakes and defeats. There is a great deal of research suggesting that sadness evolved as a response to failure and loss, and that it exists in order to encourage us to reflect on our experiences.
6️⃣ Focus on the long-term goal
Often, we need to ask ourselves: Will my failures lead to rewards down the line?
7️⃣ Practice mindfulness
There is yet another reason failure often contains superior information: failure violates expectations,” Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach write. Because people almost never intend to fail, failure can be surprising, which has the happy effect of waking up our brains—and a brain that is awake learns more than a brain that’s sleepwalking. When you feel surprised by failure, take that as a signal to be mindful and to sit with it rather than ignoring it.
8️⃣Reflect on the lessons you learned
Because failure requires more interpretation and thinking than success if we’re to learn from it
9️⃣Do less
Increasing our capacity to learn by engaging in fewer tasks that present opportunities for failure
🔟 Practice self-compassion
Many people believe that they should be hard on themselves in the wake of failure; after all, how else would you grow?