SELF IMPROVEMENT

4 Tips To Defeat Your Setbacks

Setbacks are as much a part of life as false promises are part of politics

Whether at work, in love, losing weight, or in life, you cannot avoid failures and defeats. On the contrary. The bigger your goals are and the more you want to achieve, the bigger your setbacks will be.

So it’s not about avoiding setbacks. It’s about how to deal with them better.

Why setbacks, failures, and defeats are so important

Setbacks make you feel bad. No one likes to fail or enjoy being rejected. Sometimes setbacks are so painful that we feel broken. I have experienced that too.

However, no matter how painful the setbacks, failures, and defeats are, they lead to your growth. Many of the most successful, happiest, and most remarkable people in this world have faced major problems, failures, and defeats.

• Successful entrepreneurs are not successful because they have never failed, but because they have failed more than once.
• Happy couples do not have a healthy relationship because they never experience crises, but because they learn from their crises and grow from them.
• Happy people are not happy because they have never had problems, but because they have learned to deal with their problems.

To grow, strengthen and get to know yourself better, you need challenges, problems, and setbacks.

Setbacks make your life better in the long term

If all went well in your life, you would be stagnant. And probably even unhappy. Difficulties and struggles give meaning to our lives.

Raising a child, starting your own business, writing your doctoral thesis, or losing 40 pounds is anything but easy. And that is exactly why they are so important to us. What’s the point of running on a marathon if it was easy? It is the difficult and exhausting tasks that give our lives more meaning and ultimately make us happier. And that’s why setbacks are an important part of our life.

You can’t expect to achieve something big or make a difference in something important without experiencing even one setback. We learn a lot in life by trying things and making mistakes. And the more mistakes we make, the more we discover who we are, what suits us, and what makes our lives better. Setbacks are therefore comparable to a green smoothie. It may not taste good, but it will make you healthier and stronger.

Self-made setbacks

There are setbacks, failures, and defeats over which we have little influence:

• Your partner cheats on you or leaves you.
• A loved one dies.
• You leave your job or they do not give you the promotion you expected.
• Your investment loses value and you lose a lot of money.

The truth is that life is not always fair. But what is also true is that many setbacks are self-inflicted. Because a setback often depends on your goals and expectations. You set the bar for success and failure. And this is often a problem. We often set goals or require ourselves to achieve unrealistic goals. If we do not achieve them, we are frustrated and disappointed

Many of your setbacks have to do with your unrealistic goals and expectations:

• You decide not to eat sweets again.
• Your goal is to write every day.
• You want to have your first child with a beloved partner before the age of 30 (but you are currently single).
• Your solution is to never fight with your partner again.
• You want to lose 10 pounds in 30 days.

Such and similar goals automatically lead to setbacks, failures, and defeats.

The “all or nothing” mindset

Many people have an “all or nothing” mindset (also known as black and white thinking). They look at things in absolute terms such as day or night, love or hate, success or failure.

But in reality, nothing is absolute. No human being is inherently good or inherently bad. We are all just people doing things. Some of them are good, some not so much, and some are damn bad.

So don’t expect to do things perfectly, always stay stick to your goals or never stray off course. Be mentally flexible:

• You can lose weight even though you sometimes eat sweets or sometimes you overeat.
• Just because you’re dumped doesn’t mean you can never have a fulfilling relationship again.
• You can develop good habits even if you miss a day.
• Just because your child got an F at school doesn't mean you have failed as a parent.

Stop seeing things in black or white. Stop making demands on yourself that you can not meet. Stop trying to make things perfect. You will experience enough setbacks in your life over which you have no control. So don’t make your life even harder by thinking in black and white.

Develop a positive mindset that allows you to make mistakes, look at problems anew, and adapt to new situations.

When setbacks lead to avoidance

Setbacks also have a positive side (although it usually takes a while to realize this). However, we reap the benefits of failures and defeats only when we face the whole. The greatest risk of setbacks is that they lead to avoidance.

Maybe you were disappointed in love and therefore unconsciously decide to close your heart and not get involved with anyone anymore. Or maybe you’ve had a major setback on the road to self-employment and decided to give up your goal.

Setbacks are sometimes so painful and discouraging that they lead to avoidance. You get away from your goals, you lose your momentum and you drown in self-pity. But realize that while avoiding it relieves your pain in the short term, it only worsens your condition in the long term.

Below is a great article from Libby Shively McAvoy on how to commit to yourself in order to achieve all that you desire

When avoidance leads to unhealthy behaviors

In some cases, avoidance even leads to unhealthy behaviors. Some people cannot cope with a setback and turn to alcohol or drugs. Others avoid social life, become withdrawn, and spend their days watching series or video games. And still, others seek comfort in food and gain a lot of weight.

Everyone falls down. Everyone gets disappointed sometimes. Everyone experiences defeat at some point. The question is how we deal with setbacks. Some cannot cope with it and get caught in a negative spiral. Others, on the other hand, use it to grow and get more out of their lives.

So, how do you overcome setbacks? Every human is unique. So are his setbacks and defeats. There is no patented prescription for dealing with difficult phases and problems. But these 4 tips can also help you a lot.

1. Setbacks are just feedbacks

The major problem with setbacks is when you infer your worth as a human being from them. So when you fail, you treat failure as something that makes you think you are not good enough. If you say to yourself that you’ve failed, that you’re not doing anything right, or that you’re never going to get anywhere, a setback is like a knockout in the last round.

Be aware of the meaning of a setback. When experiencing a setback doesn’t mean you are a failure. It just means that what you are doing right now won’t work in this case. Once you learn something from your setback, it is not a setback, it is an important lesson.

So ask yourself what you can learn from your defeats and failures. This is not always obvious at first glance. After all, no matter how crappy the situation, there is always something useful to take with you. Learning from a past situation is also extremely important to let it go of emotionally and move forward instead of constantly living in the past.

2. No more self-pity

Self-pity is a lousy asshole. Cause it makes you feel good…

• It’s easy to blame others.
• It’s easy to say there’s nothing you can do about it.
• It’s easy to use your pain as an excuse.

Self-pity is like setting fire to gasoline. By feeling sorry for yourself, you convince yourself that you are weak and helpless. You think you can do nothing about your situation — and that’s what gives you so much strength in a setback.

No matter how serious your setback is or how unfair life has been to you, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Stop complaining. Stop seeing yourself as a victim. Stop telling yourself that life is unfair. Instead, try to find a solution.

The moment you stop being the victim and try to find a solution, you will feel better. Because you suddenly shift your focus from what you can’t control (the conditions) to what you can control (your actions). And that gives you new impetus and new confidence. Stop rolling in self-pity. Instead, think of these as actions that you must take on a regular basis.

3. Don’t expect it to be easy

Often people with setbacks struggle because they expect things to be easy. They want to find the right partner, build a business or finally lose weight and expect it to be easy and quick.

For several decades we in the western world have had more freedom and more prosperity than ever before. This has led more and more people to believe that they need to be well. They are waiting for their needs to be met, their goals to be met and life to be easy. Really? Who said that?

Life owes us nothing. And as long as we wait to always get what we want, we’ll experience disappointments over and over again. However, if we accept that life isn’t always easy, that setbacks are part of it and that we’ll always face challenges, we’ll be able to handle them much better.

So do not expect things to be easy. Because they often are not.

4. Focus on the process

The more time we spend on an activity, the more we expect certain results:

• When you sign up for a dating site, you want to meet someone amazing.
• When you invest, you want to increase your money.
• When dieting, you want to lose weight.

But the more you focus on your results, the harder failures will hit you. If you made a great first date and he/she doesn’t get back to you, you are devastated. And you will probably curse every woman/man on this planet.

If you’ve been on a diet for 3 weeks and haven’t lost weight, you’re completely disappointed. Out of frustration, you eat a pizza, a bag of pepper chips, and a tone of vanilla caramel ice cream.

Especially when it comes to setbacks, it’s extremely important to focus on the process rather than the result. Instead of trying to lose 15 pounds, focus on building the right habits and following them. Instead of hoping to finally find the right partner online, focus on being more open and generally meeting more people.

After all, you have no control over the outcome of your life. You can only influence your actions. Instead of focusing on your goals, try to do them regularly. Because the more you focus on your actions, the fewer setbacks can hurt you.

Don’t hope for a better hand, just play it better

How well you deal with setbacks, defeats, and failures depends primarily on your mindset. Do you immerse yourself in self-pity and think that you can’t change anything anymore? Or, on the contrary, do you learn from your setbacks and come out of the crisis stronger?

Winning in life is not about having the best cards. It has a lot to do with playing your existing cards as best you can. So focus on making the most of what you currently have. Instead of hoping for a better hand, learn to play your hand better.