How to overcome your procrastination by learning from failure

Procrastination is a silent killer of dreams and aspirations. Everybody has dreams and visions of what they would like to accomplish and how they would like their lives to be. We have the ability to achieve most, if not all, of our dreams. It is usually at the point of action where things go wrong. Like rabbits caught in the headlights we become frozen with fear. Fear of failure leads to us focusing on the things that could go wrong; all that we stand to lose; and all the essential knowledge and skills that we are lacking. Rather than learning from failure; we allow this fear of failure to influence our decisions, and so we procrastinate. The truth about fear is that most of it is nonsense. The majority of the things that we focus on are highly unlikely to occur. Unfortunately, in those moments, it is not actual reality that is important. It is our perception of reality which shapes our decisions. In our minds, these fears do not just appear real, they are real. Failure seems like a certainty so we choose not to take action. We fail to see that by embracing failure, and learning from failure, we can continuously improve our performance and our results. We can choose to embrace failure.  We can choose to view it as a necessity and an opportunity for learning. Learning from failure allows us to gain valuable insights which will increase our chances of success in the long run.  It may seem strange to embrace failure, but when you see failure as just another step in the process you realise that it is a temporary experience.

A process for learning from failure

The following 6 stage process provides an example of how failure can be used to improve your overall performance.

1. Analyze

Once you have determined your goal; you conduct some research into the goal. You will have many options for pursuing your objective. The purpose of the research is to help you determine which option gives you the greatest chance of success. You can gather any information which may help. This may include lessons learned from previous attempts, by yourself or others, to achieve this objective. All the information is used to analyse the available options before selecting the most appropriate.

 2. Plan

Once you have chosen the option which gives you the greatest chance of success, you must start to plan the process.  You start by brainstorming a project plan and identifying the various tasks required to achieve the objective. The information gathered in stage 1 will help you to do this.

 3. Schedule

Having created a project plan, you will have identified all the tasks which need to be completed. To ensure that each of these tasks is completed, you must create a project schedule which will outline when each task is to be carried out and by whom.

 4. Act

Having created your project schedule, you now must ensure that each task is carried out and the schedule is adhered to. This requires a time management mindset.

 5. Evaluate

Evaluation is critical. You get to see what has worked and, just as importantly, what has failed to work. For short-term goals, evaluation is generally left until the end. For longer-term goals evaluations are scheduled at regular intervals throughout the life of the goal. This allows progress to be tracked and adjustments to be made.

 6. Feedback

Following the evaluation, you will have gained fresh insights. This information must be reported back to the relevant people, so that it can be included in a fresh analysis as you make the necessary adjustments to the plan and work your way back through the model again. As you regularly feedback new insights into the process; you will be continuously improving both your performance and your results. By learning from failure as well as success; the benefits of each experience are greatly increased.

To learn more great strategies to avoid procrastination, check out Stop Procrastinating.

This 6 step process can be used for any goal or project that you are working on. Using this model repeatedly will change your attitude to both failure and procrastination. You will no longer see procrastination as a friend who protects you from suffering. It will now be seen as an enemy which prevents you from succeeding in life. You will see that learning from failure is a positive experience, and failure will become a trusted colleague on the path to success.