Resilience After Failure: How to bounce back after you fail to hit a goal
“Refuse to be stuck in your failures.” - Jill Birth
Failing to achieve a goal can be disheartening and leave us questioning our abilities - and even our self worth. We find ourselves at a crossroads, wondering whether to give up or try again. But what if I told you that failure is not the end of the road, just a stepping stone to your greatness? I’m sharing all about how to have resilience after failure to hit a goal. You’ll learn the three key concepts and the powerful exercise that helped me push past 23 failed attempts at losing weight, until the successful 24th attempt where I lost half my body weight.
Self-reflection
Before moving forward, it's crucial to look back and engage in some deep self-reflection. While we don’t want to dwell on the past, self-awareness is the key to understanding the underlying causes of your setbacks. Dive into your past, examine your experiences, relationships, and choices that influenced your recent failure. By doing so, you gain invaluable insights into the origins of your struggles and gain more clarity on how to move forward. Embrace this introspection as a powerful tool for personal growth and transformation.
I won’t beat around the bush, this step isn’t always easy. It requires an honest conversation with yourself that can be uncomfortable, but don’t skip past it.
Embracing Failure as Part of the Process
Failure should never be viewed as a dead-end but rather as an opportunity to learn and grow. Each unsuccessful attempt adds a new layer to your resilience and character. When I was on my weight loss journey, I had 24 starts, 23 fails, and 23 decisions to try again. I know that I’m not alone, and you aren’t, either.
Embracing failure with an open mind allows you to extract valuable lessons from the experience. These lessons become building blocks for your future successes. By recognizing failure as a necessary part of the process, you liberate yourself from the fear of trying again and give yourself the freedom to evolve.
Recommit to Your Desire to Win
Ask yourself why you set the goal in the first place. Reconnect with the passion that ignited your journey. Reconnecting to your why is one of the most powerful ways to reconnect to that desire to win. Anchor in to how you will feel and how your life will be different when you achieve the goal.
That desire to win will carry you through failures, defeats, setbacks, personal struggles and losses, lack of support from those around you, and even the voices in your head and taunt you with the fact that you have not yet won the battle. When you never give up on your desire to win, your success becomes inevitable – only a matter of time!
Write Your Burn Letter
A burn letter is a story you’ll write and read to a tree or someone you trust, the Lord, and yourself. It can be a letter, a list, or a journal chronicling your thoughts – the things that frustrate you about this failure, what you think caused it, anything that comes to mind or anything that you’re feeling about it.
To get yourself started on this very important letter, find a quiet place and time to answer the questions I’ve listed below. Then add whatever you like as you write the letter. I want you to prayerfully consider what events, words, opinions, etc. have filled your life’s backpack with stones that you have continued to carry, refused to let go of, and that have ultimately weighed you down for years. Write them all down. Don’t worry about grammar or chronology. Just use the questions below to prompt your memories. Go at your own pace. Answer a few of them a day if you like, until you feel like you’ve told your story and put it all out there in black and white. Prayerfully address each question. Leave no stone unturned.
A few questions to get you thinking:
What are your best personality traits?
What are your worst personality traits?
Who has betrayed you in life and how?
Who have you always been able to trust and why?
If you’re married or living with a significant other, describe that relationship.
How has it been a positive force in your life?
What did you do well in pursuit of this goal?
What did you miss the mark on in pursuit of this goal?
What could I have done differently?
Did the problem reveal some lack of skill on my part?
How could you learn or improve those skills?
How did I stand in my own way of success?
For more questions (specifically tailored to individuals trying to lose weight and get healthy), download a free copy of my book Finding the Voice Inside You.
Now comes the most important part. After you’ve finished writing your letter, read your letter to yourself. Read your letter aloud to someone you love and trust, or to an object, and then read it to God. Then, burn it! Leave it in your past, and move on toward your inevitable success!
Other Helpful Resources
If you enjoyed these tips, this is just a fraction of what I cover in my book Finding the Voice Inside You. Download a free digital copy here for more.
In case this is the first time we’re connecting, I’m Jill, an entrepreneur, speaker, author, and leader inspiring other women to live out their God given purpose by helping them overcome physical, mental, and financial hardships. If you liked this blog post and want more where that came from, here are a few ways we can work together:
Improve your health and lose weight with Zallevo products, the purely sourced supplements that helped me finally experience my own health transformation.
Pursue a work from home income opportunity surrounded by other servant leaders. I’ll coach you on how to grow a wildly successful 1099 business sharing health & wellness products that actually work.
Learn how to overcome food addiction, improve your health, energy, and confidence, and master your mindset through one of my self paced courses.
