You’ve had an out-of-body experience for the last two months. Your mind is lost in thought of the impending future, and how you’ll make it through. You watch as someone who looks like you walk through familiar rooms and pull back the blankets of a familiar bed. In a more rational sense, you’ve been glossing through your teenage years without any idea of who or what you are. Blame it on seasonal depression (even if summer just ended) or your horrible luck, but it’s clear that you’ve been left in the dust of this fast-moving world.

The idea of failure is horrible. Not getting what you want, not reaching your goals, and not becoming who you want to be, whoever that is. Waiting for the perfect day, hour or minute, but it never comes. And since no day has been perfect, you watch the seconds pass on the clock, trying to find yourself on the day you’ll fix your life.

Obviously, there is no such day as that. But there is such a time as now, where you are able to change yourself, one step at a time.

Reflection

After a major failure, the best action to do is wallow in your tears. There is no way to step back to success if you do not identify why you failed in the first place. Was it a selfish choice? A bad day? Or just a one-off thing? Identifying what went wrong will help you make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Writing down specifically what happened can bring down the feeling of doom and help you in succeeding for the future.

Goals

The goals that we set are crucial for our future selves to actually go through with them. Specificity is the only way to actually achieve your goals. Writing down specific steps to achieve that goal is a good step to success after failure. First, identify what you want. Is it a better grade in the class? Is it better relationships? Better health?

Once you identify the overarching goal, brainstorm into what you can do to actually make that happen, before finally, breaking it down into the smallest steps you can think of. Doing this helps make the goal of maxxing that class or becoming healthier seem more achievable. You wouldn’t know where to start if you only knew you wanted an 100 on the next math test. But writing down exactly how you can get there, you would.

Action

Reflecting and writing down goals is nothing if you do not put it into action.

As simple as it may seem, it’s a lot harder than it sounds. Locking in and putting in the work is where a lot of people don’t get to. They reflect, write down their goals, and do everything else right but ultimately fail because they never put it into action.

Using rules like:

• If it takes less than five minutes, then do it now.
• Just take the first step, and show up, even if you don’t go through with the action. Just sitting at your desk or putting on your gym clothes can start the momentum of actually doing the action.
• Finding the right environment without distractions
  • leaving your phone in another room
  • blocking distracting websites
  • going to places specifically made for the action you want to do

As said best by Albert Einstein, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Conclusion…

Obviously, the advice given is not something revolutionary, but it really is the simplest actions that can help get you back on track. No one wants to live their lives with everyday bleeding into the next, on autopilot, and the only way to change that is through changing. There is no one-step way to get back after failure, because you just need to do it.