The new girl

[enterflora]

My name's fran. I'm not much used to this whole blogging thing, but I hope to learn a lot from it and meet people outside of where I live.

Im in the UK, trying to get through my final days of school. Ive been hitting a lot of brick walls with how best to deal with failure. I guess I have quite high standards for myself, and take failure very personally. For example I just got rejected from two universities which was a bit of a blow but I'm not sure how to channel my frustration productively rather than moping about. It would be lovely if you could give some advice on hope to cope when things don't go may way.

[Thomas]

One very basic thing is to see failure as learning experience. That is, failure is not only necessary but actually nothing negative; in a sense it's asking What can I do better next time? as soon as possible after finding out about a failure or mistake.

Another important thing is to actually acknowledge (accept) that failure or mistakes are going to happen, regardless of how high you set your standards, how much you try to win, suceed or be perfect.

Also having high standards as you mentioned you should be careful about being pedantic or perfectionist. A good way to help prevent being caught in perfectionism is to decide in advance how much is good enough. If you like setting high standards you can look at the average results others have and raise the bar. But set yourself up for a challenge, rather than a preprogrammed failure; as much as failure is something to learn from (to _want_ to learn from, rather than only to _have_ to learn from), it's not better than success (so if being grateful for failure is hard to swallow, try 'embracing failure' instead).