FAILURE is when we are unable to reach or meet a desirable outcome of which we expected to achieve.

In a nutshell, failure hurts.

While it is important not to get too down on yourself, there is benefit in taking time out to feel the pain offailure.

Unfortunately most of us don't stay with our deeper emotions around failure, rather we dash off into self-criticism, anger or blaming others in the hope these deeply uncomfortable feelings go away.

Although it may feel like they have gone, in reality we have disowned our deeper feelings by pushing them out of our awareness.

Then they have the power to become the unconscious driver of our behaviour, which may lead to further pain and failure.

Emotions move fast, especially when they are strong and overwhelming, and it takes courage to stay with difficult feelings that arise when we fail.

To effectively work through failure we need to slow down. Breathing is a great resource that is often overlooked as too simple. But it is an effective way to calm down so we can be with our emotions and feelings in a more productive way.

We can then reach out and speak to others, journal or spend some time reflecting on what we did well and what we need to do better next time.

We learn to trust ourselves in our ability to overcome setbacks, we learn that failure is not who we are, rather we weren't ready at that point in time for that part of our journey. We learn self-acceptance, patience, persistence and flexibility.