Facing Failure | How to Overcome your Guilt

I’m not blaming the world…I’m blaming myself.

Guilt is a terrible feeling and can be very difficult to overcome.

It can be especially hard if your failure has cost other people money. Your failure may be your fault, and it may not. Laying blame, whether it be to yourself or someone else, is of no use to you.

Other people may be blaming you for what happened. This in no way helps your situation.

My suggestion is if there are other people involved in the situation that are blaming you, do your best to cease all contact with them. Their anger and blame are of no use to you and will only hinder you from moving on. If contact must still be made with them, accept the offer of people close to you, or your professional team who have wanted to help, and see if they will deal with these people on your behalf.

It’s simply impossible to try accepting what mistakes you’ve made and move on with your life while there is someone constantly reminding you what happened and how angry they are because of it.

A saying that we’ve all heard thousands of times is:

‘It’s in the past, I can’t change it.’

As cliché as this may sound, this is very true to your situation and your process right now.

You’re actions are in the Past.

You made the choices and decisions that you thought were the best at the time.

Say this to yourself a few times…

You did what you thought was best with the tools, information and circumstances you had at the time. No amount of regret , self loathing, or berating yourself is going to change this. Blaming yourself and feeling the effects of crushing guilt will not change the past. It also will not fix any of the problems associated with the other people affected by your situation in the present.

What you choose to think and feel in the present moment, is the foundation of what you will think and feel in the future.

The first step to having a brighter, guilt-free future, is to forgive yourself for your past actions now, in the present.

A great way to help you to do this is to complete the following exercise.

Get a blank piece of paper and settle yourself somewhere you won’t be disturbed. Start writing down all the things you feel guilty about.

At first you may feel a little silly, but just keep writing…after all, you are the only person who is going to see this list.

Your list may be short, or you may need several pages, but don’t suppress anything.

Write it all down. Everything.

Don’t just limit it to your work life. If you have guilt regarding anything else, write it down.

Make sure you keep writing until you literally cannot think of another thing.

This may be an emotional experience for you. Sometimes, there are things within us that we felt guilty about that we didn’t even realise until it comes pouring out with ink to paper.

This is a good thing.

If you’ve written them all down, then that means that all your guilty feelings are out of your head.

When you’re done and can’t look at the list anymore, destroy it.

Burn it if you can. If that’s not possible, shred it. And if that’s not possible then tear it into as many tiny pieces as you can and flush it down the toilet.

This exercise should feel very liberating. You may feel lighter. You may feel drained and lethargic.

If you don’t feel anything, then I suggest doing the exercise again. It’s possible that you’ve still got some nasty guilt lurking in your head somewhere. You must get it ALL out!

‘Guilt is anger directed at ourselves’   Peter McWilliams

This exercise is a great way to help you move onto the road to recovery. Releasing all of your guilt will free your mind and allow you to look at your situation objectively, rather than having to re-live what happened with all the pain, regret and anger every time you think of what went wrong.

I’m by no means saying that this exercise will completely remove all of your pain and anger, but what it will do is make it easier to move on and to eventually forgive yourself.

You must learn to like yourself again.

As crazy as it may sound, as you are slowly releasing the guilt you’ve been feeling in regard to your situation and removing your self-blame, you will have to learn to forgive yourself and to allow yourself to live again.

You may have been depriving yourself of life’s small pleasures for months because you couldn’t afford it, or had to work, but you must now begin to allow yourself to be a human once more. Go window shopping, fishing, have a coffee, walk your dog, play with your kids at the park, anything that you once enjoyed but haven’t done in a long time because of your situation. When considering doing whatever it is that you want to do, immediately negative thoughts may be popping into your head.

‘I can’t do that because…’

‘…I’m being punished and shouldn’t do something nice like that for myself.’

‘…other people have lost money because of me…I shouldn’t get to have fun doing that.’

These nasty little thoughts are exactly the reason why you should go out and do something nice for yourself.

You have to live. You have to be yourself again.

If anything, with the last few months of turmoil, angst, worry and stress you have had to endure, are you not allowed some kind of pleasurable activity?

You must do something nice for yourself. You need to find yourself once more.

Even if it’s something as simple as sitting in your backyard in the sun sipping a glass of wine, or listening to your favourite music for an hour on your iPod, Do It.

If you hear yourself saying, ‘No, no I’ll wait until everything is settled, then do something’, then you’re allowing your guilt and self-blame to win, because what you’re really saying to yourself is,

‘I can’t do that because I failed and it’s all my fault and I don’t deserve it’.’

Do it now.

Learn to like yourself again.

While doing your enjoyable activity here are some positive affirmations for you to say to yourself, to keep those negative, self-blaming, guilty thoughts away.

‘I had the guts to try and I have the guts to move on’

‘I know I tried my very best and made the decisions that felt right at the time’

‘I will learn from this experience, grow and move on with my life’

Positive Outlook If anything you now know ‘what not to do’. We are all our own worst critic, however we must try in some way to learn from what has happened by looking at the situation objectively.

Every mistake is an opportunity to learn. Embracing this way of thinking may take some time but you must persist.

You must allow yourself to go through your process at your own pace. Some of the steps will be difficult, as well as all of the other details you may be dealing with if you are going through legal issues as well.

Learning what mistakes were made, what you could’ve done differently and moving on is what you need to do in order to be able to learn from your failure.

You could choose to believe that God, The Universe or the Powers that Be have specifically chosen you to fail at this venture, that you will never be successful or that they are punishing you for trying something that was doomed from the start.

That is Rubbish.

On the other side of the coin…

You could also choose to look at it from the point of view that you tried. You tried your best to make it work, you made mistakes, you may have failed, however what have you learned from it all?

I’d say that you know a damn lot more now than you knew when you first started, and how else would you have learned all those lessons unless you tried?

Remember, you have the choice of you how you feel. You can choose to let this failure knock you down & keep you down, or you can choose to learn from it, dust yourself off, get up & try again.

An important thing to keep in mind it this:

Successful people never give up.

Unsuccessful people fail once and then give up altogether.

Successful people acknowledge that they made mistakes, learn from them & try again with the advantage of their newfound knowledge behind them.

Unsuccessful people blame the economy, the sales figures, the competition, their staff, the suppliers, everyone else rather than looking within themselves to see what can be improved.

Hindsight has 20/20 Vision

‘I shouldn’t have done that….’

‘I wish I’d done this…’

Now that you know the outcome, it’s of course very easy to regret our past actions or inactions. Constantly bombarding your mind with, what if, if only, should’ve, could’ve is only punishing yourself in the present for your past actions. Going over and over these mistakes in your mind is only useful if you take control and LEARN from them.

Unfortunately you cannot change what has happened. The one thing you can change, however, is how you choose to react to your present circumstances.

Attempting to look at this situation with a positive outlook, you could say that now you’ve learned the biggest lesson of all.

Why did you fail?

Failure is pointless unless we learn from it, pick ourselves up and start again. It’s Hard. It’s Painful. It Hurts to look at ourselves under a microscope. It also HELPS.

Who ever said it would be easy?

A great exercise that I recommend is to sit down with a few sheets of paper and start making notes of the mistakes you made, leaving a gap beneath each one.

Write them all down. Every single one. This can also be a great exercise for letting go of any guilt you may have associated with these mistakes.

When you’ve completed your list, go back to the beginning & now fill in your gaps below the mistakes writing down what you’ve LEARNED from these mistakes.

What action would you have taken to ensure this wouldn’t happen again? What system would you change? How did could you have rectified that problem?

You can either choose to learn from your mistakes, or pretend they didn’t happen and blame everyone else around you. The choice is yours.

Remember, mistakes are an opportunity to learn.

How would you have ever learned to ride a bike unless you fell off it 20 times before? How would you ever know you were allergic to peanuts unless you made the mistake of eating one? All through our lives we are making mistakes, learning from them, changing our approach & trying again. We are all doing this because we are not perfect. However, we can use our mistakes & failures as tools to learn from & get us to where we want to go in life.

‘Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.’    Oscar Wilde

We can always do our best, try our hardest, learn & grow.

Take Care.