Failure makes you Competent and Competence gives you Confidence

Failure is the underbelly of success. Failure tells you what not to do next time. It provides you with valuable insights and feedback on your past actions. It gives you feedforward for improvement. It’s one way to use the past to nourish the present and enrich the future.

Let’s say your business startup fails. Turns out, this was due to inadequate market research. Failure as feedback in this instance highlights the importance of understanding customer needs and market trends. This retrospective insight can help you to strengthen your business strategies. It can be used as the feedforward you need to persevere with your business idea or adopt a new one. Armed with this knowledge, your next attempt would incorporate thorough market analysis before launching, to increase the likelihood of success.

Reflection is essential if you want to reframe failure as one of your stepping stones to success. If your goal is to learn from failure, then identify, list and describe:

1. What you knew before you failed.
2. What went wrong.
3. What worked, given the context.
4. What you know now.
5. What you need to consider next time.
6. What not to do next time.

Failure not only reveals what went wrong. It gives you actionable insights that guide better decisions, future strategies, and outcomes. Retrospective insights expose inherent weaknesses, shine a light on blind spots and highlight areas for development so that you can move forward again.

Failure will challenge your self-worth, self-esteem and self-confidence, but failure is meant to make you competent. Competence gives you confidence. Feel the fear and do the thing so you’re competent.