The fear of failure!
BY: ABID WACHKOO
Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible and that is the fear of failure!
An examination is not everything in life and infact life itself is an exam that we need to pass. If we learn from mistakes and don’t repeat them, we shall surely succeed. If we realize the purpose of life, we pass.
Overcoming failure is all about finding it in you to start again even after worst failures. First, you must overcome the sense of failure. The failure of a project, relationship, or other goal might initially overwhelm you, but if you acknowledge your disappointment and accept your mistakes you will be able to move on. Realistic optimism will help you form a new plan without setting yourself up for failure again. Remember, your long term goal is resilience: the ability to adapt and thrive. Each failure is a chance to grow stronger and wiser. After the first shock of disappointment wears off, work on accepting what happened and that is the key to succeed. It will be harder to move forward if you blame yourself or others, or pretend that what happened didn’t matter. Write down or reflect on everything that happened, what lead to it and what the consequences were. State only the facts, without blame, judgment, or justification. Write in a journal if you have one, or write yourself a letter. If writing is not a helpful form of expression for you, find someone you can talk to- a trusted friend or family member, or a counselor- who can help you move past denial. Solicit the perspective of any involved parties who were not emotionally invested in the situation. For example, a friend might have seen early signs of fissure in a failed relationship. Sometimes it can be very difficult to predict the outcome of your exams, whether you be in secondary school or even university. This is probably because exams are arguably one of the most feared things in education structures. Whether a student is confident in his/her abilities in the chosen subject(s) or not, exams can often both predictably and unpredictably bring out the best, and more than often, the worst, in a student.
If the worst does happen, failing your exams can be one of the most devastating experiences for a student, especially when not expecting such a result. One way to cope with exam failure is to talk to people. Talk to your family, talk to your friends, discuss the options you can take now. One thing you must remember is that failing your exams is not the end of the world.
Exam failure is one of the many hurdles you will have to surpass in your life, and there are always possibilities to learn and rise above failure. After all, I’m sure most of you have heard the saying ‘failure makes you stronger’. Funnily enough, it really does. It gives you an understanding of what it means to fail, to lose, to receive a negative outcome that you may not have expected to get. A common worry amongst student’s who have failed some of their exams, is that they will now never be able to get the job they wanted after graduating, or even the university degree they were first opting for. Wrong. You should never let exam failure force you into believing that you now cannot achieve any of your dreams. Sure, some things will be harder to reach, but that does not make them unreachable.
Failing exams does not make you any less of a person, any less intelligent, or any less able to achieve what you want to, than those who may have gotten better results in their exams than you. It is fun if you fail in your college exam. For engineering students- you are not qualified to be so called engineer until you fail in semester exams. Despite working hard if you fail in competition exam, it feels horrible. It is more painful when people around you know that you prepared for exam and could not clear it. They tease you by asking about the result. This is the time to ignore what is happening in your surroundings, backup yourself, realize your potential and work hard.
Failure makes us feel sad and very hurtful. A multitude if emotions will be felt. Ranging from sadness to anger and to helplessness that might even take ugly turn and fill your heart and mind with the feelings of uselessness, failure can really enforce certain mental blocks that sometime become fatal.
I feel like after failing an exam, you should realise your mistakes, accept them and move on. Don’t keep on thinking about it. MOVE FORWARD. NEVER STOP AT SUCH THINGS. Many things will come in life where you will fail, but never giving up is what courage means. It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay. Don’t worry.
The writer is a Civil Engineer & can be reached at [email protected]
