How Can You Turn Failures into Opportunities

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

When you hear the word failure, what comes to mind? Embarrassment, defeat, disappointment? Most likely whatever comes to mind will have some type of negative tone to it. This mindset is what keeps many of us from going after our dreams because it leads to thoughts of worst-case scenarios. If you are anything like me, these thoughts center around outcomes that lead to having no money left or looking crazy.

What if we challenge ourselves to change our mindset concerning failure? Instead of looking at failure as defeat, we focus on the opportunities it can bring. Remember the saying, “whatever you feed grows”? So, feeding our mindset that failure leads to opportunities will help us to focus more on finding them instead of dwelling so much on what we think we’ve lost. Let’s explore some ways failures can turn into opportunities.

Thinking about some of my past failures, I’m reminded of how brokenhearted some left me feeling. In some cases, I was trying to be brave and step outside of my comfort zone to do something new or different, and in other cases, I truly put my all into going after what I wanted. Despite my efforts or good intentions, things didn’t work out the way I had hoped. This led to me having thoughts about never trying new things again and shutting down the idea of leaving my comfort zone. It took some time, but I came to understand how some of my failures were the result of me trying to do everything on my own and some led to me feeling like I was on my own. However, experiencing these failures allowed me the opportunity to receive help and support from God and those around me to keep moving forward. Can you think about a failure you’ve experienced that left you feeling brokenhearted, and how special it was to have those who were there to help you through it?

Failures can also lead to opportunities for learning lessons. Think about when we were in school and failed a test or a class. It led to learning better study habits or at least some tricks to help pass. Often, experiencing failure leads to abandoning some dreams because we think it's not meant to be for us. This is not always the case. When we try something new or go after goals, we won’t always get it right the first time. This allows us to learn what does or doesn’t work. We can apply this information so we know what to continue doing and what needs to be changed. Failures can also teach us things about ourselves like how strong and resilient we are. Think about a time you failed at something and initially couldn’t imagine how you would get past it. Look at you now! You may not be exactly where you want to be, but you now know that you have the strength and resilience to work on moving forward. Experiencing failures also gives us a chance to learn about our likes and dislikes. Take a failed relationship for example. Although things may not have worked out, it gave you an opportunity to learn what you would like to have with your next partner and pay attention to red flags on who isn’t right for you. Life is full of lessons and blessings. Often, the lessons are learned when things do go as planned.

One last example of how to turn failures into opportunities is by using them to regroup or redirect efforts. Sometimes, we can get complacent when things continuously go as we plan. Becoming complacent can keep us from growing. When failure throws a monkey wrench in our plans, it allows us a chance to regroup and examine how we can do some things better or start back doing things that we know work. There will also be times when we may be going about things in the wrong way. The failure could be a means of protection to help redirect our efforts so we don’t waste resources. As we work toward believing dreams to reality, there will be some failures. But as Lisa Nichols says, let’s fail forward.

These are just a few ways of how we can turn failures into opportunities. I’d love to hear about some ways you’ve turned failures into opportunities in the below comment section. Remember, the main keys to making this happen is by having a mindset to focus on the opportunities and believing that even failures will work toward our good. We will not allow the fear of failure to stop us from going after our dreams!