It’s so interesting, when we’re little kids, we give ourselves permission to fail all the time. We actually don’t even recognize it as failure. If you think about learning to walk, learning to ride your bike, learning your alphabet, how to spell your name, we continually fail our way to success.
Something happens when we become adults and we stop giving ourselves permission to fail, or if we fail we tend to hang our hat on that, and we think oh I’m not good enough, I shouldn’t try that again, I don’t want to get hurt again. We fail in love and we don’t want to put ourselves out there again. We fail in business and we think we’re not meant to be in business.
He said “Welcome to the club. We've all done it!” Just by sharing the experience with him, I felt this huge release of the energy. I was hanging on to it as a secret was now out there, and now that it was out there, somebody's telling me hey this isn't that big of a deal, it happens!
Today, I want to help you reframe those failures so you can see them more as stepping stones rather than setbacks. I was speaking to somebody recently and they were speaking about a business failure they had, and the guilt that they still have about it. Even though they’ve had an extremely successful 30-year business career, it’s this one decision that they made that had an impact, that they’re still carrying a lot of shame and resentment about it.
It made me remember a time not that long ago where I made an investment in a company. It was a startup company and the investment I made was a pretty significant one for where we were sitting at financially, and it was a startup company. I felt optimistic about it, I felt good about it, I did not do what I would say is proper due diligence, and that company went under, and we lost the money.
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I felt so guilty about that. I felt irresponsible, I felt embarrassed, I felt shame. I didn’t want to talk about it, and there was this real feeling of bitterness and never wanting to invest money again, and that this happened TO me. And a lot of that was happening at a subconscious level but it certainly had some charge around it.
When we finally decided to write this investment off, I was talking to my accountant about it, and he said “Welcome to the club. We’ve all done it!” Just by sharing the experience with him, I felt this huge release of the energy. I was hanging on to as a secret was now out there, and now that it was out there, somebody’s telling me hey this isn’t that big of a deal, it happens!
That’s a really powerful question when we experience a failure or a setback. We can either ask ourselves how did that happen? Why did that happen? Or, we can take a look at it and say what’s next? What did I learn from this experience? What will I do differently? Once you have that learning, take it to help you step forward into the next thing. That failure now becomes a stepping stone rather than a set back.
Do you have a failure from your past? Maybe you made a poor investment like I did. Maybe you made a decision in your business that didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to turn out. Maybe you put yourself out there in love and you got hurt. Because you saw that as a failure, it’s prevented you from really moving forward.
Are you willing to look at that failure and say this is how we grow. It’s how we learn how to walk, it’s how we learn how to ride a bike, it’s how we learn our ABC’s, we learn by falling down. The opportunity is either stay down, or get back up and try again. Acknowledge your failures, stand yourself up, dust yourself off, get the learning, and ask yourself what’s next?
As you do that, it’s going to help you really grow, and grow faster.
Here is to you living a life you love,
Stacey
After 16 years of climbing the corporate ladder, mentoring entrepreneurs in marking, operations and finance, I made the decision in 2014 to teach success principles full time, combining my love of business and personal development.
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