3 Things Failure Can Teach You About Success, According To These Athletes

In a few weeks, athletes from around the world will perform almost super-human feats of strength and agility at the 2016 Rio Olympics and Paralympics. When they win, their shiny faces will beam with joy and pride as the flags are lowered and their national anthems blare on the loudspeakers. And they’ll owe a lot of their success not to past victories, but to past failures. While it may seem counterintuitive, failing to reach the goals you set for yourself may actually set the stage for future success ― provided you have a perspective that helps you view your past losses as lessons, not as omens of more failure to come. Failure could help you face your fears. We all know what it feels like to fail. If we set a goal and don’t achieve it, we feel sad, embarrassed, dejected and discouraged. We may even feel paralyzed by the loss or try to convince ourselves that the goal isn’t worth achieving. But research on resilience suggests that grit and perseverance in the face of obstacles may be just as strong a predictor of success as intelligence, and that the most successful people are those who pursue their goals with stamina. Related research on a growth mindset similarly claims that children who believe intelligence is not solely innate and can be developed tend to succeed more in class.  In both cases, a person’s approach to mistakes and failure is a crucial part of how these traits play out in the real world. If one has a growth mindset, hardships a...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news