Any kind of failure – be it personal or professional – is difficult to deal with.

The sting of it can linger, discredit previous achievements, affecting your current mindset and tarnishing future accomplishments.

Failures are inevitable on your way to success.

They are common, and even necessary in certain respects.

But just because failure is an integral part of life, doesn’t mean that people have to live with it.

Failures can bring you down and keep you there if you let it, but the latter is no longer necessary or inevitable.

Picking yourself back up from off the ground after suffering from a spectacular failure, may be incredibly difficult but it is possible.

As with many of this life’s great challenges, recovering from an incredible failure will require one thing more than anything else, and that is time.

Time is needed, first, for accepting what has taken place. Time is then needed next for examination, for understanding exactly what went wrong, why it did so and perhaps even the how behind it.

Time is again required for further processing and prevention, to make sure that this enormous mistake in the rear view mirror remains there and that nothing that even remotely resembles it will again rear its ugly head in the future.

But there is a risk inherent to letting time take over as the salve for failure and that risk can be amplified by our innately impatient nature.

Rushing to recover and to redeem for the mistakes of the past is understandable but not ideal. Such an approach only opens the door even wider for an even greater failure to occur.

One major mistake is enough, and its lessons must be sufficient.

The only way to recover well from failure is gradual, that’s just how it is, nonetheless, out of this long, drawn-out process, we continue to thrive and make the failures of the past the cause for success in the future.