Few things in life can be as painful as failing at something that your heart was truly set on.

Failure can kill your confidence, break your heart and suck away your motivation…all in one step.

Failure can’t always be avoided. You can work your hardest for the best results possible and still fail, which is when failure hurts the most.

So if failure can’t be helped, what can you do? What can you do to prevent yourself from feeling miserable after a failure? The answer is nothing. But there are some things you can do to prevent yourself from letting failure stop you from taking future risks.

1. Embrace your feelings

There is nothing wrong with feeling sad or depressed after failing at something. It is natural. So don’t fight these feelings. Feeling sadness and loss right after failure is your mind’s way of coping.

Stopping yourself from feeling this way will be counter productive and make you hold onto the feeling of loss for even longer. Allowing your feelings to come as they do will allow you to get over them quicker.

Give yourself time to be sad. You may not want to talk about it or be cheered up right after a failure. This is fine. Just allow yourself some time to feel sorrow.

2. Talk to a confidant

Once you are feeling a little better, try to speak with a confidant about your feelings and your thoughts on your failure. It will feel good to get it out after taking some time to grieve.

Tell them about why you are sad, why you think you failed, why it isn’t fair…whatever. Just vent to them. If you selected this person as your confidant it is because they truly care about you and want to listen.

3. Spend time with friends

After grieving and venting, going out with some friends or loved ones is a great opportunity to get your mind off of things and put yourself in a better mood.

You have already allowed yourself to feel sorrow and depression, so now would be a good time to keep yourself from getting into a slump.

By now, you probably want to be cheered up and you do not want to think about the failure any longer. Do what your feelings are telling you and try to use this opportunity to move on.

4. Stop doubting yourself

You will certainly feel a lot of doubt in your ability to succeed after experiencing failure. See my article on dealing with self doubt. This will surely help if you have another business idea that you want to work on but are uncertain of yourself.

5. Do something you love and enjoy, especially if you are good at it

Doing something you love and enjoy will cheer you up again and help you focus your attention on something more enjoyable. Allowing yourself to enjoy some activity will help to keep your mood up and maintain a healthy level of confidence.

An added bonus to this is if you are doing something you are good at as well. Take note of your skill at this task and allow yourself to admire your proficiency in this activity.

Seeing how skillful you are at something will build up your confidence since you have the opportunity to realize that you are quite talented at other tasks.

6. Use caution when looking for the cause

Looking for the reason why you failed is important, since you need to learn from your mistakes. But be careful. If your confidence is still fragile and your self esteem is pretty low, finding something bad about yourself as a leader or manager might only make you feel worse.

If you are looking into the reasons why you have failed, try to avoid drilling down into the personal aspects of your failure until you have regained some confidence.

When depressed and self-conscious, you aren’t in any state of mind to learn from your mistakes. You’ll either deny the whole thing or avoid it.

Do yourself a favor and wait a little bit before looking into anything that will reveal your inadequacies as an entrepreneur.

7. Look for motivations in other activities

There is a chance that this failure may motivate you to succeed elsewhere. Pursue this. It will bring your motivation and confidence back and allow you to work on something you love.

8. Give yourself time

Similar to number one, you do need to allow yourself some time to heal up and feel better over the failure. Taking too long may be detrimental, but you certainly deserve some time to recuperate.

Stop feeling obligated or unproductive because you are feeling miserable over your loss. Allow yourself time to recover and you will find that you will return to work stronger.

9. Consider that this failure may have happened for a good reason

It can be very comforting to feel that this failure may have happened for a good reason–that there is some fate that decided that your calling or motivations are better served elsewhere.

Blaming failure on external reasons can certainly feel a lot better and make failure easier to confront. As long as you are committed to learn from your mistakes once you are feeling better, this tactic isn’t unhealthy.

Ultimately, try to look for the positives and what you got out of the experience itself. Just doing this might reveal to you that you were meant to experience this failure to make you stronger.

Can anyone come up with a 10th tactic to dealing with failure?

Is your business facing a problem, any problem? Want to fix the cause of the issue instead of the symptoms?

It can be difficult to determine the root cause of any problem. This proves to be especially problematic if you want to prevent the same issues from repeating themselves in the future.

So how do you identify and attack the root issue as opposed to its symptoms? By conducting the age-old “Five-Why Process”.

The Five-Why process is so simple, you may even doubt its ability to work. However, conducting a Five-Why analysis can reveal some very important flaws in your business that you may have otherwise overlooked.

Here are the steps to conduct this analysis:

1. Identify the issue
2. Ask yourself: “Why is this happening?”
3. Repeat step 2 four more times

Thats it! Simply identify the problem and ask yourself why this issue is occurring. This will reveal another, more deep rooted issue. Again, ask: “why is this issue is occurring?”. Repeating this process will reveal even more deeply rooted issues than you would otherwise see with general observation.

While the process seems simple, it can be quite powerful. What makes this process especially effective is that it reveals the path of where a problem originates from. And here is the especially interesting part: the problem often originates with management. The organizational culture, atmosphere, training processes or incentive pay structure are often some likely causes of various issues.

These are vital areas of your businesses that should be monitored and optimized whenever possible. Because this technique often traces back to key functions such as these, you will be able to identify the exact problem in these areas and fix it so it wont happen in the future.

So your business has failed, huh? It seems as if all hope has been sucked down the drain.

What do you do? Learn! Learn from your mistakes so you wont make the same missteps in the future and instead become a better leader and entrepreneur.

Here are some very important points you should take note of after a business failure so you can emerge from the rubble as a stronger and more savvy business owner.

In what areas did you spend too much time and/or money?

It is important to examine where you allocated most of your resources. Allotting most of your time and money to an area of your business that wont yield positive returns is an inefficient practice and should be curtailed in the future.

Perhaps you spent too much time on designing an IT infrastructure? Maybe you spend too much money on office furniture and supplies and not enough on advertising? You might have even spent too much time researching.

While I can’t emphasize enough the importance of research, doing too much of it may be counterproductive–it may discourage you from taking any risks and may lead you spending too much time and money into preparation and not enough on action.

Either way, evaluating areas that prove to be a money/time drain for you and your business is important and will allow you to invest your resources in more efficient and effective areas of your business in the future.

In what areas did you spend too little time and/or money?

Similar to the last point, perhaps you underfunded certain areas of your business with little of your time and/or money. Look at all the vital areas of your business. Sales is a top priority regardless, but some other areas might be more important to certain businesses while insignificant to others.

For example, if you are a web design company, chances are you will need to spend more money on web design and graphic software as well as more powerful computers than a interior design firm will.

Therefore, consider all areas of your business that added value to your product and determine if these areas were receiving enough support. For some businesses, this may be fairly obvious, while for others this might require some thinking. The important thing to remember is that you are trying to determine the optimal funding that each area of your business requires so that your operations will be as efficient and effective as possible in the future.

What strengths of yours were utilized while this business was running? Which were underutilized?

Are you naturally a good manager? Salesman? Leader? Visionary? Wherever your strengths lie, leverage them! Especially in the early stages when you need these strengths the most. If your business failed, you should determine whether or not you used your strengths to your best advantage.

Take this one step further and make sure to determine what your strengths actually are. Maybe you thought you were good at something but your performance in this area proves otherwise. Knowing what strengths of yours to leverage and what weaknesses either need improving or avoiding are very important skills a leader should have.

Knowing this will allow you to produce for your next business more effectively.

What weaknesses of yours, as an entrepreneur need improving?

Do your leadership skills need some work? Maybe you need to become a better listener? Or perhaps you have hang-ups on certain little things that aren’t as important as you think they are.

Whatever your weaknesses are, it is important that you locate them and either improve upon them or ensure someone else handles them. Again, delegating something according to skill (even to yourself) is an important ability for any leader or manager to have.

What particularly missed the mark? Was it targeted customers? Bad branding? Bad product? What could you do to improve this in the future?

Try to pinpoint the exact reason why your business missed the mark. Perhaps it is fairly obvious, perhaps not. However, knowing this will allow you to, in the future address these problems more effectively, more quickly and allow you to notice them before they actually arrive.

Does anyone else have any important lessons from business failures that they would like to share?