How to Bounce Back From Failure (and Try Again)

The deadline you set back in January comes and goes, the savings account is roughly where you left it, or the running shoes you bought with such good intentions are still sitting by the front door. Nobody else seems to notice, but you do, and it stings more than you expected it to.

Maybe you’d told a few people about it. Maybe it was a goal you’d already set once or twice before, and this was supposed to be the time it finally worked. Either way, you’re now somewhere uncomfortable, caught between wanting to try again and quietly wondering whether you should bother at all.

If that’s where you are, this article is for you. It walks through how to bounce back from failure when a goal hasn’t worked out, in fourteen steps, from the first few days when it still hurts to the point where you’re ready to build a plan with a much better chance of holding.

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What a failed goal is actually telling you

When a goal doesn’t work out, most of us reach straight for the most painful explanation: I’m just not disciplined enough, or I always do this. It’s an understandable reaction, and it’s rarely the most accurate one. Far more often, a failed goal says something about the plan itself: a deadline that was too tight, a habit that never had a real place in your day, or too many changes attempted at once.

Part of the problem is that many plans are built on timelines that were never realistic. You’ve probably heard that it takes 21 days to form a habit. When the psychologist Phillippa Lally and her colleagues at University College London followed people building a new daily habit, they found that the time it took for the behaviour to become close to automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days. So if your plan quietly assumed that a new routine would feel easy after three weeks, it was set up to disappoint you long before you ever skipped a day.

That’s why it helps to look at a failed goal the way you’d look at a set of results that didn’t match the forecast. Most of what feels like failure is information about what to change. The part that’s really hard to recover from is deciding, in the sting of the moment, never to try again, and the fourteen steps below are designed to help you avoid exactly that.

How to bounce back from failure: 14 things to do

Let it land

The first part of dealing with failure is emotional, and it’s tempting to skip it by jumping straight into a new plan. Give yourself a few days first, because a plan made in the middle of that feeling usually carries the same mistakes forward.

1. Acknowledge that it didn’t work

Acknowledging a failure is the first step in dealing with it, and it’s often the one we’re most tempted to skip. We tell ourselves it didn’t really matter, or we quietly stop mentioning the goal and hope nobody asks. Brushing it off tends to stretch the disappointment out, though, and it makes it much harder to learn anything from what happened.

So let yourself say it plainly, at least to yourself: this didn’t work. You’ll probably feel some mix of frustration, shame, sadness or disappointment, which is simply what caring about something feels like when it doesn’t go your way. Naming it is what allows you to put it down and look at it clearly.

2. Be kind to yourself about it

Once the disappointment has landed, the next voice to show up is usually the critical one. You never follow through. You should have known. It can feel as though being hard on yourself is the responsible thing to do, the price you pay for having let yourself down.

The research suggests otherwise. In a series of experiments, the psychologists Juliana Breines and Serena Chen found that people who responded to a personal failure with self-compassion were more motivated to improve, and in one study they spent longer studying after failing a test than people in the comparison groups. So try treating yourself the way you’d treat a good friend in the same situation: honestly, and kindly. It’s also worth noting a few things you’re grateful for this week, because it widens the view beyond the one thing that went wrong.

3. Take responsibility for your part

Taking responsibility might sound harsh right after being told to go easy on yourself, but the two work well together. Some of what happened was probably out of your hands, because life is sometimes unfair and plans collide with illness, redundancies and other people’s decisions. Some of it, though, was yours, and that part is good news, because it’s the part you can change.

Owning it doesn’t mean blaming yourself for everything. It means looking at the choices you made with the same honesty you’d bring to a friend’s, and accepting that nobody else is going to turn things around for you. That’s what moves you from feeling stuck to deciding what happens next.

Understand what happened

With a little distance, you can start looking at what actually happened. This is where most of the useful information is, so it’s worth taking your time over it.

4. Reflect on what went wrong

Take an evening to go back over the goal with curiosity, and try to pin down where things started to slip. Were your deadlines too tight? Did you underestimate how much work it would take, or overestimate how much energy you’d have after a full day? Did a new habit never quite find its place, or did you simply burn yourself out trying to do everything at once?

Sometimes the honest answer is that something in you got in the way. Fear of failing can make us procrastinate, or quietly sabotage a goal before it has the chance to disappoint us, and that pattern is much easier to see once it has a name. If it sounds familiar, you’ll find more on overcoming the fear of failure and on why we self-sabotage and how to stop.

5. Notice what went right

It’s easy to remember a failed goal as one long disappointment, but that’s rarely how it actually went. Look back and you’ll usually find weeks where things worked, habits that did stick for a while, or skills you picked up along the way. Maybe you didn’t save the full amount, but you learnt exactly where your money was going. Maybe you didn’t finish the course, but you made it through the hardest module.

Writing these down matters more than it seems, because they’re the evidence your next attempt will be built on. They’re also a useful counterweight to the voice that says you’ll never manage it.

6. Identify the habits that got in the way

Habits shape most of what happens in a day, which means they shape most of what happens to a goal. A few small, steady habits can move you forward surprisingly quickly, and a few unhelpful ones can quietly undo weeks of effort: the evening scroll that eats the hour you’d planned to write, or the Friday takeaway that slowly became three a week.

Look back over the last few months and try to name the two or three habits that most often pulled you away from what you were trying to do. You don’t need to fix them all at once. Seeing them clearly is enough for now, because you’ll plan around them in the next stage.

Rebuild the plan

Now you can start planning again, this time with everything you’ve learnt. The aim is a plan that fits the life you actually have, busy weeks and low-energy evenings included.

7. Set a new goal from what you’ve learnt

You’re about to start again with a clean slate, and the timing can work in your favour. The researchers Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis found that people are more likely to pursue their goals after temporal landmarks such as a new week, month or year, partly because a fresh start helps us leave past imperfections in a previous chapter. A Monday, the first of the month or a birthday can give your new goal a natural starting line.

When you write the goal itself, it helps to make it SMART:

• Specific, so you know exactly what you’re aiming for
• Measurable, so you can see your progress
• Achievable in the time you’ve given it
• Realistic, and connected to the life you want
• Time-bound, with a clear deadline

Something like I want to run 10 kilometres without stopping by 30 June, by following a beginner’s plan three times a week gives you far more to work with than I want to get fitter, because it already tells you what to do on Tuesday.

8. Break it into milestones

A big goal on its own can feel so far away that it’s hard to know where to start, which is often where procrastination creeps in. Milestones break it into smaller pieces, each with its own deadline, so there’s always a clear next step and a date close enough to take seriously.

They also act as an early warning. If you miss a milestone, you’ll know within weeks rather than months, while there’s still plenty of time to adjust. Treat them as just as important as the end goal, because they’re what actually get you there.

9. Give your habits a better time slot

If there’s one thing my own failed goals taught me, it’s that a habit sometimes needs a better place in your day more than it needs more willpower. You’ve probably already worked out which habits would support your goal. What often goes wrong is when they’re supposed to happen, because sometime this evening has a way of disappearing after a long day at work.

So decide exactly when and where each habit will happen, ideally as an if-then plan: if it’s 7.00 on a weekday, then I go for my run before breakfast. Psychologists call these implementation intentions, and a meta-analysis by Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran covering 94 studies found they had a medium-to-large positive effect on reaching goals. For many people, mornings work best, because they happen before the day has had a chance to take over. If you’re not a morning person, that’s fine too: what matters is choosing a time you can protect.

10. Change your environment

Our habits are a direct response to the cues around us, so changing your surroundings is one of the simplest ways to change your behaviour. The idea is to make good habits easier and unhelpful ones more awkward: put your running kit out the night before, leave the book on your pillow and the phone in the kitchen, and move the biscuits somewhere you’d need a chair to reach.

Take smoking as an example. If the ashtray lives next to the sofa, lighting up takes about five seconds. If you’ve decided you’ll only smoke outside, you suddenly have to find your shoes, put on a coat, grab your keys, step out into the cold, probably curse yourself a little, and then do it all in reverse. Every extra step is a small obstacle, and small obstacles add up. So a good rule of thumb is to reduce the number of steps between you and your new habits, and increase the number between you and the ones you want to break.

11. Track your habits

A habit tracker gives you something memory can’t: an honest record of what actually happened. It can be an app, a notebook or a calendar on the fridge, as long as you look at it. Take a few minutes at the end of each day, or at least each week, to notice where things went well, where they slipped, and whether certain days are consistently harder than others.

It’s also a useful reminder that one bad day doesn’t undo anything. In the same study by Lally and her colleagues, missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour didn’t materially affect how well the habit formed. What matters is getting back to it the next day, and a tracker makes the gap visible before it turns into a week. There’s more on this in how to make habits stick.

Keep going

The last few steps are about staying with it once the new plan is under way, especially through the middle stretch when the novelty has worn off.

12. Make a little progress every day

When you think about all the months ahead, a goal can feel overwhelming, and that feeling alone is often enough to make you put it off. It helps to shrink the timeframe. Rather than worrying about how you’ll stay consistent until June, focus on making some progress today, even if it’s small.

At the end of the day, notice what went well and what you’d do differently tomorrow, without turning it into a verdict on yourself. Small steps taken consistently add up faster than you’d expect, and after a few months you’ll look back and notice how far they’ve carried you.

13. Find ways to stay inspired

Motivation fades, so it helps to build small reminders of why you started into your days. That might mean a vision board as the background on your laptop and phone, a book about the goal you’re working towards that you read a few pages of each morning, a podcast for the commute, or a few lines in a journal before bed.

People matter too. Spending time with others who are working on something similar, or finding a mentor who has already done what you’re attempting, can carry you through the weeks when your own enthusiasm runs low.

14. Protect your energy

This one sounds obvious, and it’s the one most of us skip. You won’t reach a long-term goal if you’re running on empty, because your ability to follow through depends heavily on how rested and well you feel. A plan that leaves no room for recovery is likely to fail for the same reasons as the last one.

So build rest into it on purpose. That might be a proper lunch break, an evening each week with nothing scheduled, time with friends, a long walk or an early night. Think of it as part of the plan, because it’s what makes the rest of the plan possible.

Starting again, with more to go on

Trying again after a failed goal can take more courage than trying the first time, because you now know exactly how it can go wrong. That knowledge is also your biggest advantage. You’re starting this attempt with a much clearer picture of what didn’t work, which habits tend to get in your way and what your weeks really look like, and that’s far more than you had the first time round.

If you keep finding yourself starting over, Make It Happen is the system I built for exactly that moment. It takes you from an honest look at where you stand through to goals, milestones and habits designed around your real energy levels, low-energy days included, so that your next plan is built to hold even when life gets messy.