Dealing With Failure
We get so worried about failing. We view it in such a negative way, but there can be a lot of positive things about failure! Instead of being super afraid to fail and avoiding failure at all costs, we can easily reframe it and know that it's something that is inevitable in the world of business and not a bad thing at all. If we look at it in a different way, then it can actually be one of our best assets.
Failure means you're trying.
The only people who don't fail are the people who are too scared or lazy to even bother going outside their comfort zones to try something new. Failure builds character. It provides clarity. It transforms you into the successful person you are destined to become if you keep at it.
If these women had let their failures derail them, they wouldn’t be the household names they are today:
While working at her then dream job as a news anchor in her early 20s, Oprah Winfrey was repeatedly written up for being too emotionally attached to the people in her stories and demoted after several months on the job. They put her on a talk show to carry out her contract, where she found her passion and she now has a net worth of $4 billion that stemmed from her talk show career.
J.K. Rowling was rejected by 12 publishers for her first book in the Harry Potter series. She pushed through, continued to work on her craft, and was finally published. That book has, to date, sold over 400 million copies worldwide and has led to 6 other extremely popular novels and a film series.
Alicia Keys’s debut album, Songs in A Minor, was originally rejected by her record label. She pursued another label, where it was accepted and she went on to win 5 Grammy Awards for it.
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.”
Fail forward.
Don't look at it as failure, look at it as data collection. When you fail, you simply find out what doesn't work. Knowing what doesn't work helps you keep moving forward. The more times you fail, the more data points you have to see what's working and what isn't.
You don't have to start from scratch when something doesn't work.
Too often a business owner tries something once and when it doesn't perform as they had hoped, they scrap it and build a brand new thing. Sometimes all you need to tweak is a variable. Maybe the webinar wasn't a success because you didn't have enough time to advertise it. Maybe the title needs tweaking. Maybe the actual presentation needs some work.
“There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”
When you view failure in this different way and actually get really curious about it, you can truly grow from it. By working with a mentor or strategist like me, you can work together to assess the situation, find out what is and isn't working, where you can make those tweaks, and work on the mindset around it. This will help you to grow from the “failure” and realize it wasn’t such a bad thing, after all.
