7 Steps For Moving Through Failure (Even If It's Messy)

Dwelling on the negative can create a self-fulfilling prophecy of despair and defeat. You're already beaten before you start if all you can think about is a negative outcome. While it's important to think about as many things as you can that could go wrong, the reason for thinking about them in the first place is to find creative ways to prevent them.

When you focus on the negatives, your thinking renounces the possibility of a positive outcome. You lose the power of positivity. Positivity isn't ignoring or failing to consider the negative. Rather, it's a mindset that is oriented toward making things happen for you, not to you.

Often we look in the past and think about those failures that we've already endured. We've endured them, but we haven't learned from them. And we're condemned to repeat them if we don't extract and apply the lessons from the experience. How many people have failed to try because they're stuck in a "failure loop," replaying past events that now appear to be real? If you don't dispatch the past for what it is, a place to learn and grow from, you're going to be stuck in the memories that keep you confined in its prison of self-constructed misery.

Getting out of a failure loop is emotional. When you're upset, you're at the very bottom of your brain. Emotion is clouding your ability to think rationally. Time to hit the reset button.