Strategies to Learn More from Your Failures

Dean A. Shepherd

The more someone is emotionally attached to a “project” (task, object, person, or activity), the more he or she experiences negative emotions when failure causes it to be lost. The personal strategies here help you “undo” the emotional ties to a project lost. At the same time, they empower you to process information about the failure to learn from the experience. The processing can even lead to a gain. It can make you stronger. It allows you to personally grow from the failure experience.

Projects can and do fail. That is, they cease to exist. Project failure occurs when the project is terminated by key resource providers due to their assessment that the project’s performance is unacceptably ...