Have you ever felt like you’re not enough? That you failed in achieving your dreams? Perhaps you are constantly being flooded with images of friends/acquaintances/colleagues who are living a seemingly perfect life while you are struggling every day. There have been many days when I have felt like a failure at life. However, feelings aren’t facts.
Objectively, what makes a failure? What counts as failing? It’s not true to say it’s impossible to fail but the only places you can truly fail are in exams. You either pass or you don’t. Failing at life is something that I don’t think is possible.
It starts with our dreams and aspirations. When we are young, we form a picture of what our adult life will look like. As we get older, we start to adapt that vision to include the things that hold value to us. For example, when you’re young, you may see yourself living in your own house. As you get older, you see that house having four bedrooms and big garden so that you can have a dog and that your future children have somewhere to play.
When we start to reach our more mature ages, we start to look back at those aspirations and compare them to our current situation. If we haven’t reached those dreams, we feel as though we aren’t successful or we aren’t well accomplished. What makes the situation worse, is when we see people a similar age to ourselves who have achieved the things we wanted to.
These feelings usually start to arise in our mid to late twenties. We are pressured by society to have things figured out but more often than not, we don’t. Not living the dream life doesn’t automatically mean you failed. It will feel like that because we are used to setting certain goals, and if not achieved, that means we have failed (think about the school system, failing to get into a certain university, etc.) but in the real world, it doesn’t work like that.
The first thing to do if you feel like you’re failing at life is to sit down with a piece of paper and write down everything you have achieved in the last ten years. All achievements, no matter how big or small they may be to you. That can include stuff like buying a phone, buying a car, getting a job, getting a promotion, going on holiday, writing a book, releasing music, building a website, overcoming a fear, etc. It’s always hard to start, but once you do, you’ll be surprised how quickly your memory is jogged.
After that, write down a list of the good things in your life right now. A home, a car, a job, family, contacts, money, etc. Not only will this serve as a good gratitude exercise, but it is important for the next step.
Make a list of what is important to you. What do you want to have in your life and why? You may notice that they will be more extravagant versions of what you have now. This part of the exercise helps in two ways. One is that you will hopefully see that you already have what you need. It’s important to have money for food. Do you already have that? You want a roof over your head. Do you have that? The second benefit is that it will give you a direction to focus on. If you want a bigger house, you can look into the steps it would take to make that happen.
Remember, dreams change. Everybody is different. Just because your life looks different from other people’s and different than you originally thought doesn’t make you a failure. You have had your own set of challenges and you have overcome them. If not, then you are overcoming them. Hold close what is truly important to you. Focus on what you have rather than what you don’t.