You follow successful people online. You feel inspired to see their growth, achievements, and accomplishments. But sometimes, you may feel intimidated when you look into your own life. You follow their morning rituals, daily habits, nighttime routines, and so on but you don’t get the same results as they do. Then you may doubt yourself, feel unworthy or hopeless about your own life situation.

You wonder  what am I missing? What’s the real secret to their success? How do they keep on growing while I keep struggling? The secret to their success is that they are big-time failures. They go through gazillions of failures before they show up as a “success” in front of you. But you’ve probably heard that before. You already know you need to fail more to succeed.

The problem is that we keep associating our failures with being a failure in life. That’s because we take failures personally and our ego doesn’t like failures. But there’s a simple solution to that.

Facing Failures Without The Hurt

When you were a child, you were always in play mode. If you failed, you tried again like nothing happened. You kept on trying without thinking of failure as a shame. Then, school and society conditioned you to avoid failure at all cost. Since then, every time you failed, you felt like a loser.

“Failure is a detour not a dead-end street.” – Zig Ziglar

Let’s break this negative pattern immediately . Stop being so serious. Give yourself permission to fail without feeling dirty. Start playing again and let yourself fall. Remember, your failures don’t define your character. In fact, they build your character. Your failures prepare you for upcoming success. Success may be close or far away - it doesn’t matter, what matters is how you feel on your way to success.

If you spend half of your life trying to succeed in misery and a half of your life enjoying the success, you lose the game. The key is to celebrate each season of your life.

Here are 6 ways to feel confident when you’re on your way to success:

1. Close your eyes and realize how far you’ve come

Drop everything, take a deep breath and realize the difference between where you are now and where you were a few years ago. You will feel a surge of gratitude when you realize all the failures eventually worked in your favor. Even when you’ve not made a lot of progress, you have grown personally, which will help you tackle the future challenges in life.

2. Live by your values to define your own success

When you know your values and live a life true to them, you stop feeling bad about your mistakes. You become the director of your life and feel aligned with every decision of your life. You feel peaceful and happy because there is no place for blames and complaints when you make value-aligned decisions. Your values act as a guide to define what success means to you.

3. Let your burning desire guide you

Although our basic needs remain the same, we all want different things in life. You must know what you desire more than anything because a burning desire can take you to the clouds even when you’re not talented or lucky. The path to your burning desire gives you meaning and fulfillment. But if you do what others expect of you, you won’t go far and you will remain unfulfilled. When you follow your desire, you make sacrifices and overcome all the obstacles with an intense drive within you.

4. Derive fulfillment from different sources

So often, we make the mistake of making our whole life about one goal. Having a laser-focus on a goal is not a bad thing, but it is always a good idea to derive meaning from different sources. When you have different ways to find fulfillment in life, you can remain focused on your bigger goals when the going gets tough. But if you quit other aspects of your life and well-being, you won’t stand the low points of your journey. You got to keep yourself sane to reach your big goals.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison

5. Define your purpose and live it today

A lot of suffering comes from focusing too much on  yourself. Working on yourself and your goals is important, but when you have a greater purpose that shifts your focus on serving others, your drive becomes much stronger. You don’t have to wait to start serving people. You can start today with minimal resources by focusing on one person at a time. A mission bigger than yourself is the secret sauce to life fulfillment.

6. Put on blinders to run your own race

We all know that comparison is the thief of joy, yet, we compare our lives with other’s lives whether or not we realize it. The reason is that humans are wired to form social hierarchies as our ancestors did. You have to rewire your brain to compare yourself only with your past self. We never know the full story behind people’s lives, just like they don’t know ours. Own yourself and your unique challenges to write your epic life story.

Struggling and suffering are two different things. Struggling for your goals leads to success and fulfillment. While suffering is no way to live or stick to your goals. Don’t wait for big successes to feel confident. Find success in your failures until you reach your goals.

When you stop letting failures make you feel like a failure, you allow yourself to open the doors to greater success. You may have been waiting for success to feel good about yourself but you don’t have to wait anymore. Success will come when the time is right. But the time to feel confident is today.