After you walk that stage at your graduation ceremony, everything changes. You’re considered an adult now, you don’t have to go to high school every day. You’re one massive step closer to needing to fend for yourself. Every decision has rewards now, and even bigger consequences if you get it wrong. Whether you choose to go to college, get a job, or start your own business, failure can be around any corner. How high school graduates handle failure, that can decide how things go for you.
The Short Of It, How Do They, And How Should You In The Moment?
In the heat of the moment, many different things may come to your head. What those things are depends on your specific situation. Did you fail at something small, like dropping something? Maybe in the middle, like talking to someone of the other gender? What if it was something massive, like a car crash? No matter which of these scenarios it is, failures aren’t the end of the world. They may seem like it in the moment, I get it, but I promise they aren’t.
My first reaction, if the failure is big enough to allot it, is to reach out to those who care. Family, friends, a significant other, any of those. Everything is easier with those who care, they’d be happy to help you through a slump. The odds are they’ve gone through what you’re going through, and they’d know what to do to help. Depending on the scale, even your boss (if you’re working) would probably understand if you needed to take a day to recuperate. Employers generally want what’s best for the company, and a shaken-up employee could be detrimental.
What If My Failure Was Small, Or Only Mattered Much To Me?
You don’t have to call up every friend you have if you drop a pencil, I get it. Sometimes it’s nice to have the company either way, though. Whether or not you believe that your fail is big enough to bother others, if they’re really your friends, they’ll be there for you. That, quite literally, is what friends are for. If it matters to you, it matters to them. The worst thing you could do is not say anything, bottle it up and pretend everything is okay. That’s the equivalent of filling a milk jug with hydrochloric acid. It looks perfectly fine everywhere on the outside, until it doesn’t look fine anywhere.
I know that I have problems with expressing these small failures, that I try to keep them bottled up. That’s been one of my biggest flaws for awhile. Nevertheless, I know how bad it is for me to keep these things bottled up, so I force myself to talk to people about these things. It doesn’t matter how often at first, as anything is better than nothing, but try to make it more and more frequent as time goes on. With each time you speak up, it’ll become easier, and you’ll be less fearful to do it again.
Learning And Adjusting
With the issues that you’re bound to face, you’ve got to be able to take hits and keep coming. Each failure you encounter can’t be seen as a roadblock. Failures aren’t a bad thing, that’s the main point. With each failure comes a learning experience, a moral that can help you avoid that same issue again later. I’ve had my fair share of mistakes, both in and out of school. Every mistake though, those lessons still stick with me, and help me grow as a person. Those ensure that I won’t make that same mistake again, something even more valuable than the mistake itself could detract.
As a fresh graduate, this new world where you aren’t given step-by-step instructions can be rough. You weren’t allowed to make mistakes and learn for yourself in school, the teacher told you exactly what was expected. You couldn’t figure out for yourself how high school graduates handle failure, and not just because If you weren’t able to provide, they corrected you, giving you exactly what you needed to fix. Life was spoon-fed to you, basically. These mistakes that were being made, they were easily fixable, via exact instructions. Now, you have to make decisions for yourself, gauge whether it was the right decision or not, and then figure out how to fix it if your choice wasn’t correct.
Resilience
With each failure that you encounter, you get a new experience to keep with you forever. Each failure is a win in the long run, because you don’t learn anything if you always do it right the first time! However, I get that failure can still sting. Part of being successful isn’t the lack of failure, but the will to keep going despite failure. I personally have failed more times than I can count. Those failures don’t weigh me down, though.
That is what is important about failing, is that you gain the benefits of knowing what *not* to do, while not getting weighed down by the failure itself. With those new experiences under your belt, you can take on the world on your own, without repeating that mistake. As long as you can keep going without letting those mistakes tag along, then you’ll have a leg up on everybody else!
Moral, In Short
Some of the keys to how high school graduates handle failure are small, some are large. Either way, here’s the rundown. No matter the size of your failure, don’t be afraid to reach out for support, advice, or just company. Having people around, and being able to get these things off your chest, are two of the healthiest things for you. There’s almost nothing you can’t bounce back from with support and friends. With that bounce back, Kelly Clarkson’s words ring true, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. With every failure, that’s a new learning experience, and a lesson to heed in the future. If you can use that experience to avoid making the same mistake twice, you’re a leg up on the world. You don’t learn without mistakes! In ways, they’re even better than getting it right the first time, you just have to look at them properly!
