Looking Back, I Never “Lost” – I Just Learned

Looking back at my past experiences where it may have been considered a “failure” or a loss”… it wasn’t really.

I’m not saying that to sound like I figured that out all on my own… I’ve had the help of my faith, and lots of personal development books.

Only recently I had looked at failures and losses at a different way. It took me some time to change my mindset from “sometimes you win, sometimes you lose”, to “sometimes you win, sometimes you learn”. And honestly, it’s still a work in progress sometimes.

But I am getting there, and if I compare the difference between my mindset from how I handled things in the stories that I am about to share, and events that had happened in the past, there’s a difference… and that’s all I’m happy about!

So I’m going to share two stories where I didn’t win BUT I learned. (it was initially going to be one story but something recent just happened and I decided to write about it too). The first story is about how I didn’t “win” the grade that I wanted but instead failed the class, and the second is about how I “lost” a friendship with someone who I thought was my friend.

Then, after those two stories, I’m going to share with you my key takeaways from a book called Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn by John Maxwell. They are all five things that helped me turn losses into gains.

TWO Stories Where I Didn’t Win,

BUT I learned.

1) Didn’t “WIN” the Grade that I Wanted

Long story short, I failed one of my classes. I didn’t “win” the grade that I wanted.

I barely passed the exam and I didn’t pass the subject.

Now, had I gotten this grade and had this failure pre-doing any personal development, here’s what would’ve happened:

• I would’ve felt SO embarrassed about them. I would never talk about them to anyone. I felt that everyone who knew me had this expectation of me since high school that I would always do well in uni…. and it felt embarrassing that I didn’t live up to that.
• I would’ve placed the failure under the rug – I wouldn’t have ever looked at it again, I would never speak of it… I would never learn from it. I would have the mindset of “what is done, is done”.
• I would have gotten emotionally stuck… and stayed that way – I would’ve kept dwelling on it without doing anything about it. I would’ve probably played the blame game and blame someone else other than myself.

It was so easy to be in denial about that failure and get so upset about it that I don’t do anything about it. But, learning many, many times I learned that I could only really just learn from it and move forward.

So is here is how I learned:

• I stopped getting mentally defeated not just with this particular failure, but will all the other failures following that. Yes, my self-esteem may have dropped a bit but it was a better idea to not let it stay there. I’m still working on this till this day, but I’m working on enhancing my capacity to manage challenges and losses.
• I trained for losses – the book had mentioned a really good point which resonated with me. Everyone wants success but we should train our mind for the failures and losses. Failure is not avoidable and is guaranteed. Instead of letting them build up and bring us down, we should face them as we go and build our strength and character. That is something I’m also still working on till this day.
• I turned the loss into a gain – Yes, I “lost” the grade that I wanted, but that was turned into a gain. It wasn’t a perfect journey but there was a huge lesson behind it. That lost of a passing grade in that class was a gain because it gave me a chance to sit back and reflect on my priorities. I learned what didn’t work for me and what did. I learned what was a good experience, and I learned what wasn’t. I learned what I was interested in, and what I was not interested in.

I’ll admit, my journey is not perfect, and there’s still so much to work on with this… but I do believe in the power of small steps, one step at a time!

2) I Lost a “FRIEND” (well, who I thought was a friend)

This wasn’t on my original outline for this blog post. But I had recently had a friend block me from all socials simply because she misunderstood me and sadly believed things she gotten from someone else (who I never spoke to in my life; they only “knew” me through my social media). This “someone else” was someone who heard things about me that are not accurate, and we had never spoken before… only following each other on social media.

She questioned my intentions. She questioned my decisions (which really wasn’t any of her business)… she was pretty much claiming indirectly in front of my face that I should be making better decisions. I won’t go in too much detail with what happened, but honestly I respected the fact that she had her own opinion and there was nothing that can be done to change that. I went to message her saying that there were no hard feelings …. but she blocked me before I got to.

Let me tell you, I haven’t felt this frustrated about something in a while. Mainly because I couldn’t believe that someone would question my own decisions on my life, while she made a decision to block me from her socials, based on what she has heard from someone who hardly even knew me.

And it hurts…. a lot. Mainly because I knew that I was not even close to that person who she claimed that I was. But at the end of the day it didn’t matter. Between God and I, he knew who the type of person I was, and he knows that she is completely wrong about who I am.

How I learned from this “lost”

Yes, I lost a friend… and it may not fit right with some people, but that loss was also a gain. I knew in my heart that I want to be surrounded by people who support me, who have my back, and will not put me down. The friend that I “lost” wasn’t someone who supported me, who had my back (but backstabbed me instead), and had put me down where for a second I questioned myself on my worth.

But at the end of the day, it wasn’t a loss, because I learned something from it. It’s making me much more selective with the people I become friends with, and not letting them define me is still a work in progress. However, the last thing I want is to let my losses keep me in the same place. But that’s not going to happen.

5 Ways to LEARN

rather THAN LOSE

1) Turn a Loss into a Gain

Lets face it, we are guaranteed to face many losses in our lives and there’s no sugarcoating that. But while there is a choice to just dwell on the loss, there’s also another choice that would actually make the loss… not a total loss.

We can turn it into a gain.

And we can turn this loss into a gain by learning from it.

Because when you think about it, it’s not really a loss if we learned something from them.

So pretty much, we have a choice on whether we learn from the loss, and just let it be stuck in our minds. If we ask anyone, a common sense answer would be that we rather allow the loss to change us, allow us to grow and learn.

Now, the next time we “lose” at something, just remember that you can turn the loss into a gain. Learn from that loss, and it eventually becomes the ultimate win.

2) Have the Right Attitude

To be honest, reading this book, I learned that the whole “sometimes you win, sometimes you learn” only happens if we have the right attitude for it. Having a right attitude is key for those who learn from their wins and losses… that leads to the accomplishments of big goals.

Firstly, I thought that it sounded ridiculous when I read it. This was because I hear about many people who have accomplished their goals and achieved huge success even though they had the worst atittudes.

And yes, that does happen, but if they had a perspective of having a good attitude towards their win and losses, they probably would’ve gotten more success. This is why:

• A good attitude gives us a bigger perspective – when you think about it, looking at our wins and losses make us more humble. We acknowledge that we are not always going to win, and when we don’t win, there’s always something to learn from. It also gives us the bigger perspective that not everything is going to go our way. I mean, think about your favourite successful people; I know that the few I think of in my mind are my favourite because of their heart and their willingness to give back, I don’t know if anyone else would agree, but that has to come with a good attitude.
• A good attitude allows us to grow when we face failures and losses – I’ve experienced this myself where I changed the way that I looked at my failures and mistakes. Like what I mentioned above, learning from my failures had helped me grow into a much better person, than when I was in denial of my failures and did the blame game. Honestly, it took me a long time to accept that we could never fully eliminate all our mistakes and failures, and the best we can do is train ourselves for them. But that’s okay, it will allow us to become a better person in the best way that we can be.
• A good attitude allows us to make the most out of our mistakes – look back at some of your own failures and losses and see how much they had changed you as a person. Did they change you for the better or kept you the same? The reason why I like making mistakes (for my blog and YouTube channel) is because I have the mindset that “the earlier I make the mistakes, the better” because it will save me so much time in the long run. Mistakes don’t have to be a bad thing! We can turn them around just by having a good attitude towards them and learn from them.

3) Use Losses as a Foundation for Growth

I don’t know why, but there’s something so satisfying about that statement.

For us to achieve what we aim to achieve, and learn from our losses, we first need to face the reality and the reality of those losses.

I’ll admit, this is really hard, especially if the experience is hard. I’ve felt how easy it was to blame other people for my failures and losses, and make excuses for them. And that’s the key thing… excuses!!

Think about building a house, in order to build a nice house, we obviously can’t go straight to doing the interior and exterior otherwise it will fall down. We don’t want to focus on making the house looking good if it’s not even going to stay upright. We need to build a foundation that would help the house stay solid.

It’s the same with us… human beings! We’re like a house. We can’t just go straight to looking like we’re good people in the eyes of others because mostly behind the scenes would contradict that character. We need to build that foundation of growth that will continue to build as we experience more losses. As we continue to build through our losses, we become a much stronger person and a better version of ourselves.

4) Face the Realities of Life

I’ve mentioned this a few times already… we have to face reality.

For everyone, it’s different based on their experiences, but in general and as a whole, our realities are similar. The book pointed out three key realities of life that I felt was very accurate:

1. Life is Difficult – Agree or disagree with me on this, but I still can’t believe that there are people out there that still think that life is supposed to be easy. It’s crazy to think that there are those out there who expect their lives to be free from problems and hassles… where did that come from? The truth is that we only grow as people once we accept that life is hard and is always going to be hard. What we need to do about that is that we don’t let them defeat us, we learn from them to grow ourselves and our character.
2. Life is Difficult for everyone – Same thing as above. It took me forever to accept this. It took me so long to accept that in order to make progress and grow, we need to deal with our problems and failures, and learn from them… that’s the only way. Sometimes life is unfair, sometimes we get disappointed. Just like with this pandemic, we don’t have a right to say that it’s only happening to us… when it’s happening to everyone around the world.
3. Life is More Difficult for Some Than for Others – It’s funny how this is obvious… but not clearly obvious. We’ve seen it on TV or on the news, worst stuff have happened to other people than it had ever happened to us. I’ll admit, sometimes I have to remind myself about the conditions of other places in the world before I begin to complain about my own problems.

5) Don’t Make Life Harder for Yourself

Okay, the final way to learn from our losses is to not make life hard for ourselves… I laughed at this one because I’ve done this.

Here’s how we can make life harder for ourselves, and how to prevent that:

Make Life More Difficult By Stopping the Learning and Growing

We may have already gotten an idea on how our circumstances would be much more difficult if we stopped learning from our losses. And when we stop learning from our losses, we stop the growing. When we stop the growing, we make life harder for ourselves.

How to prevent that: Learn from each loss, failure, and problem you face. Remember that they are not permanent and are not going to “ruin” your life unless you allow it to.

Make Life more Difficult When We Don’t Face Reality

This is probably another “obvious but apparently not clearly obvious” point. When we refuse to face reality, it may make it harder to learn from our losses and our failures.

I’ve been in the mindset where I said that I “will only be happy if-” and that drifted me away from my reality… my present moment.

An extreme example but let’s just say that you’re in the middle of the ocean and a hungry shark comes. What is going to happen to you if you don’t face the reality that a shark is there? Well, the longer you wait, well you would know.

How to prevent this: Live in every moment that you have been gifted with. The sooner we face reality the better.

Make life more difficult by not correctly responding to challenges

The book had wrote about how the people who respond correctly to problems is what impacts their overall outcome.

Looking back at some of the things I’ve faced, I’ve realised that every outcome had mostly came from how I reacted to it more than from the actual event that happened.

It took me a while to start acknowledging the reality of a situation, because I always believed that I needed to be optimistic and positive about everything. But what that did is that it never went away and it just escalated even more.

I had to get to a place where the only solution was to respond accordingly and find solutions, rather than being in denial about it and never learning from it.

How to prevent it: It’s hard, but when we face a challenge, a loss, or a failure, we can turn it into a gain, or let it takeover our whole life. That sets up the foundation of our growth and success.

Be kind to yourself

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog posts, you would know that I’ve ended a lot of my blog posts with “be kind to yourself” because as you start implementing stuff, it’s easy to get caught up with other stuff, and it’s important to not beat ourselves up when we’re not 100% perfect.

This whole experience with turning losses into gains and learning from my failures had led me to remember…. to always be kind to myself.

Everyone comes from different mindsets and has different ideas based on how they grew up and what they were exposed to. If they are not used to dealing with certain situations in a certain away, it does take time to adjust to a clearer mindset that will help us grow rather than keep us in the same place.

But at the end of the day, when seeing things from a different perspective, be kind to yourself. Remember that what you were exposed to and what you consumed involuntary was out of your control, so you don’t have to beat yourself up if you’re not 100% perfect.

Remember, you’re not defined by your losses. You’re not defined by your failures.

Stay kind to yourself, allow yourself to grow… you can do it!

Book(s) this post was inspired by:

(not sponsored in any way!)

• Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn – John Maxwell

Disclaimer: If you think that any of what I had written was good, the credit actually belongs to the one whose book was the inspiration for this post. If there’s anything on here that you think is quite stupid, that’s 100% blame on me 🙂

Share This Blog Post Here:

Related Articles:

Similar Articles:

Seeing the Bigger Picture of Failure

What I Learned When I Failed My College Class

Training our Mind to Immediately Find Ways Instead of Excuses

---

---

CONNECT with ME!! 🗯

Instagram:

@laurenlbarri (blog Instagram)

---

---