Three powerful steps in personal development for leaders

You must have heard the words that a person learns more from failing than through success.

Nevertheless, when the rug is pulled out underneath your feet and you stand there sweating, heart racing, in that moment, those words will not have much meaning. Yes, the title of this article could have been “How to deal with failure”, but really, these are growth opportunities.

All too often, people try to compare themselves to the Trumps, Kochs and Zuckerbergs of the world. People focus on their successes and are sometimes not aware of all the failures that happened in the lives of their role models.

But, oddly enough, these successful people who we look up to, are the ones who have failed the most. However, what made them successful, is dealing with what has happened and finding ways to move on.

So, what we should grasp are strategies to overcome our failures and then to use them to our benefit. As such, here are three steps to move through a failure and turn it around to lead us to success.

Be irrational in that moment

When you are faced with a setback, such as where you have failed at something, you might feel extremely negative, and no matter how many people tell you to stay positive, none of that advice will work. Now, before you are paralyzed by your experience, you need to handle failure with a rational mindset and not react to failure irrationally. That might not be easy as we go through a process of second-guessing ourselves, as well as questioning our abilities.

In fact, you want to treat failure as a stepping-stone on your path to success. And just remember that innovation and action are the two elements for success, but to block yourself off due to the fear that you will fail or that once you have failed you will never get it right, are irrational. Failure is when innovation and action take place, and we all will face different problems in your lives, but we also need to move forward.

Go take a walk, just clear your head, but also understand why this happened to you. Then start to accept what has happened, but you need to start to think rationally again.
Accept, own and learn

You should understand that you are not alone; all of us will have disappointment in our lives. What, however, differs are how people handle that failure. Many have the problem with accepting failure. They would rather ignore it, but in reality, you can’t. If you do, you would have learned nothing and will just keep on making the same mistakes repeatedly. Rather take ownership of your failure. Here again, if we take ownership of our mistakes, then we can also take ownership of the benefits that come with failure, that of innovation, and the action that was taken.

Once you have accepted and taken ownership, then you should also apply the principle of failing forward, by learning from your failure. To do that, you can take some self-reflection time, speak to other members of the team or even use data. By self-reflecting, you need to have a clear head, and this might be difficult.

Therefore, to get a better perspective it might be useful to have a chat with other members of the team. Not only can they help to place some of what has happened to you in perspective, they can also share how they tackled their own failures with a similar situation.

Still, you can also use data, and this will show the chain of events clearer and you can gauge where things went wrong. So, to conclude on this, all the information and ideas from others, we should gather as it can help us to learn from our own mistakes and then we can create a better outcome the next time.

Move on but prepared for battle

It can be extremely discouraging when you fail, all you own demons preying on you and your fears and weaknesses. But you need to keep on moving forward and keep on trying.
Now, it might be a bit too romantic stating that you should just keep on trying, learning from your failures and in the end, you will find success. In reality, however, it can be a cutthroat business.

As part of experiential learning, we need to state clearly what went wrong. But if you are passionate and driven, and apply those qualities to your work you can demonstrate to superiors that even though you had a failure in the project, you have also found ways to improve.

Ghostwriter for article. Published in thesouthafrican.com. [Text altered].