We’ve all been there. We think we’re well on our way towards a specific goal – whether it’s a new career or a new lease on life – when all of a sudden disaster strikes! We have a setback. Perhaps you didn’t capture the heart of your crush, the promotion fell through, or somehow your perfect plan just didn’t work out.

Disappointment is only human. However, knowing how to accept, manage, and strategize beyond disappointment is the real key to success!

Here are some excellent tips to enable you to stay on track, remain motivated, and defeat your disappointments so that you can overcome them and reap your success:

1. Accept reality. Disappointment is a necessary part of life. In order to experience success, every person must face setbacks or disappointment sometime in their life. The reality of life gives us the polarity of setbacks and successes to better appreciate our wins. Such setbacks also encourage us to strive harder to achieve our goals.

• Overcoming challenges brings us the wisdom to reach even higher goals.

1. Accept relativity. Facing up to the fact that life will always bring trials to overcome will help you beat disappointment in your current mission. Hindsight will inevitably show you that no setback is as big as you thought it was at the time.

• Realizing that life could have handed you a much larger disappointment helps you put the setback in perspective.

1. Do not dwell. When you are hit with a challenge to obtaining your goal, it can be very easy to sink into disappointment. If you find yourself having a pity party, pull yourself up with some positive thinking. Above all else, do not dwell on the last snafu in your struggle to succeed. Dwelling on your disappointment will not change the fact that it happened.

• Spending your time feeling sorry for yourself will delay your success as well as permeate your life with unnecessary pessimism and futility.

1. Create realistic expectations. Like many people today, you may be harboring an unrealistic expectation of yourself. Perhaps you had this inspiring idea to change your life in some grand way. Naturally, you want to achieve your goal now and without anything less than stellar performance! However, realistically, you must recognize that achieving your goals may take some time. You can always adjust your expectations higher and higher as you conquer new goals!

• Having unreal expectations of yourself will only set you up for failure, as you cannot reach impossible heights.

1. Learn from your mistakes. When a setback occurs, the first thing you’d like to do might be to toss in the towel on the whole enterprise! However, a much wiser person bent on success will acknowledge the disappointment as a learning experience.

• If you examine how and why the unwanted situation occurred, then you may be able to restructure your strategy for even bigger and better things than you had originally planned!

1. Stay positive. Lastly, you can surely find your success and win your prize by obliterating disappointment with positive thoughts. Know that you will obtain your goal! Pessimistic thoughts can swallow you whole if you let them, forcing you to delay or give up your dreams altogether.

• Following your positive thoughts with decisive, confident and positive action will propel you to new heights.

Even though disappointment may creep into your life when you least expect it, you can take it in stride by following these techniques. Setbacks don’t define your life; it’s how you react to them that will determine your success. When you face disappointment, learn from the situation, deal with it positively, and confidently move forward toward your goal. Success is yours!