You know that there are times that Life really just comes along and it not just a failure, it’s not even a slight catastrophe. It is when life has come to be and plowed your rear end over then backed up and parked on top of you for a while just for good measure. Sometimes we goof up and other times we flat out fail. Perhaps we let out guard down and wham! Life comes along and whacks us upside the head. It lays your cleanout. What do you do? How do you recover? The answer to this is not as hard as you would think.
Like all the other times we fail having a complete decimation of our plans it can be cleaned up and our plans reset and we can get going again. It can be horrible when in the throes of a disaster, yet you can overcome it. You may love everything including your house and you have to sleep on your cousin’s couch while you get your feet back under you. It can always get worse. Your life or plans fallen apart can be anxiety and fear-ridden, yet it isn’t the end of the line. You can and will bounce back if you have the right mindset.
Why you are able to bounce back
Even though it looks like your world is over and you will be the laughing stock of your town. How can I possibly say that you will be alright and you will bounce back? Because when it gets messy and everything is turning upside down you ignore all the important parts of the disaster and focus on the stuff that doesn’t matter. WE look at the opinions of our lives at that moment. Say you just lost $500,000 in a stock market investment. You would feel like your life is over. You would think that you will never be able to poke your head into the local country club ever again. You are sure that everybody knows you are darn near destitute because of this horrible event.
Now first off, losing $500,000 is bad. I can’t even imagine losing that much money. Yet if you look at the facts you lost Half A million dollars that is all. That is only a fact there are other facts but we put too much emphasis on everything else. That other stuff is just an opinion made about you by you. Your life is ruined is an opinion. Saying that people are going to think you are laughing stock is only an opinion.
The reason you can bounce back is that we only focus on the unimportant stuff that others might think. The truth is you still have your house. You are still married. If you focus on the acts and see that that blow was hard but nowhere as devastating as you want to believe you can focus on the good parts of your life.
Defeats are temporary
It may be painful but it won’t last forever. The main aspect of any upset or defeat is that what you feel are the emotions made by your thoughts. The emotions are just vibrations felt throughout your body. They don’t last but for a short time. If you focus on the facts of the matter and can keep the opinions to a minimum. You will see that the mess that lays before you is a lot easier to pick up. But we as humans often allow our emotions to be entangled into the mess and it can, in turn, make the mess look a lot bigger because the emotions are nothing more than fluff.
You can also see that your setback is nothing more than a hiccup in your plan. As mentioned before we all fail. Sometimes they are bigger blunders than others but they don’t keep you from your goal if you are willing to stop and access the situation and then make a decision. There are a lot of key points that making a bounce back from failure can show you.
What does bouncing back show?
So what does being able to bounce back show you?
Reliant
Huge point is that you have a good level of resilience more specific you have to have self-reliance. We often don’t think we are reliant or we are flat out fragile. This isn’t true we are tougher and can bounce back from many different upsets. So don’t be afraid and think that your disaster is that earth-shattering because you can take far more than you believe. Being self-reliant provides an immense amount of self-pride. Yet you have to be able to believe in yourself to be able to dig your way out of the hole you found yourself in.
To be self-reliant requires you to trust that you will push through. If you just make pie crust promises all the time your inner-self won’t believe what you have to say when the tires hit the road. So you need to do the hard thing and know that you will do it.
Resourceful
When you have been knocked down, there are times that you will not always be able to right away figure out how you got into that predicament. Therefore you will have to use what is at hand and search for different resources you never thought were available to you before. You may find out that your Uncle had a business that failed many years ago and he has lots of insight on what to expect from bankruptcy. Then again you may find out that the local church you attend has a group that helps people who are struggling with your very problem.
There are often resources that are available to you that you would have never even thought of. This equates to you getting creative due to a major failure. Much like the affirmation of…
I always have plenty of money for everything I truly want
You find the resources you need when you want them. Often it is viewed as a gift from heaven and possibly could be.
You are willing to step outside your comfort zone
If you find yourself in a tight spot. You always have to get out of your comfort zone to recover. If you have ever gotten stuck in a mud hole you know very well that it is not just going to be muddy, it’s also going to be about 34 degrees and raining with a possible 30 mile an hour breeze blowing up the back of your shirt. So if you want to stand back up then be sure you are about to do some unpleasant steps. It could be admitting that you are wrong and that you failed a customer at a critical time. You may have violated a trust with your wife.
Either way, you know you are going to have to eat a lot of crow, and start from the ground floor and rebuild that trust. You have to be ready for that repair to take time and lots of effort on your part. However, it turns out you will have some unpleasant parts of recovery from failing. Be ok with that. It means you are growing as a person.
That you own your dirt
This is one of the hardest and most needed parts of getting back up after being knocked down. You have to take full responsibility for your part of the mess up. It could be you only or you and a group of other people, whatever the cause you have to own up to your fault. You don’t need to throw your partners if any under the bus, but you have to fess up to your shortcomings.
So many people what to point the finger to other people which is both a cowardly action but doesn’t build trust that you learned anything from the failure. When you own up to your faults you are showing people that you are a person of integrity. You are a leader and the backbone. You should be ready to accept any ramifications that come from the mistake. You might be homeless by the end of it but if you take responsibility for your actions you will be better prepared to climb out of that hole. If you don’t accept responsibility you will more often than not sit in your mess and stew. You will not progress any further till you accept that you should have done this or that differently.
Belief in yourself
Along with being self-reliant you also have to believe in your abilities. Even if you slide more as you try to climb out of the pit you made you can rely on the internal strength of yourself if you believe you are up for the task.
You can laugh at yourself
Nothing helps you get out of a bad spot than a bit of humor. You have to be able to laugh at yourself sometime. Now it may not be at the very moment of your world falling apart, yet as you have heard before you will be able to look back on that bad time and laugh at the whole situation. You will see that you grew in some amazing way, some are pretty funny.
How to get back up
Now as we know you will get knocked down and maybe even get the wind knocked out of you. So How do you get back up?
Take responsibility
As before you have to accept that you got yourself into the mess you are in. It can be hard and a bit humiliating but it is good for you and those who are around you to see that you are taking full responsibility for your actions
Take control of the situations
If you are going to get out of the hole you have to grab ahold of the wheel and drive that beast. You cant rely on others to dig you out. They may help but there is no guarantee that they can do much. So you have to take control of the situation and direct your progress yourself.
Look towards your Friends and Role models
You have friends and role models who can help you navigate where you went wrong. So access them when you can. They often have some mindset tricks that will help you easily leap over the problem you are having.
Reinforce yourself with your goals
Remember your goals. They are there to help direct you when you go off course. So keep your goals in mind because even though you have gone off the proverbial rails you are not lost if you have your goals laid out. Look at them often and you will find that that major disaster wasn’t as bad as you originally thought.
Ask yourself these questions
Asking yourself questions is a powerful way to find out what you know and you allow your mind to explore the situation and to come up with ideas and means of getting out of the predicament you are in.
- What difficulties have you previously overcome?
- How did you overcome those difficulties?
- What did you do specifically?
- What were you thinking at the time?
- Did you ask yourself any specific questions?
- What lessons did you learn from these experiences?
- How can you use these lessons and apply them to your current predicament?
These questions help you set your mindset. Asking what it was that you overcame before and How did I overcome that difficulty, helps give you a frame of mind and helps alleviate the common sense of hopelessness that we feel when we are wallowing in your own self-pity.
Finding out what you specifically did before can often provide some extra resources you may have forgotten about and can come into play again.
What mindset was you in at the time you were getting out of your last problem? It is a great example of you taking action on getting out of the hole.
Then there are the questions that provide healthy and beneficial after-action reviews. You find out what you learned before, and again this can help you now. Then the last question helps you get the ball rolling. So you can get out of this woeful place and get rolling on your goals and life’s ambitions.
So, Yeah having your world fall apart is horrible. You are the hardest on yourself for falling into this particular pitfall, but if you admit that you were the one driving and you didn’t head the warning that the bridge was out. You could have taken the scenic route. But you didn’t and that is OK because you are learning more about what you are capable of doing and you are finding out that you are stronger and better than you could think.
