Failure is a word that’s easily misunderstood and often feared. Especially when it comes to your business, failure is not something we necessarily want as part of that entrepreneur journey. But the truth is, failure is something that’s inevitable and necessary for success.
By embracing failure and seeing opportunities for growth, it takes away the power that fear holds over us. It’s what you do with that failure that determines the outcome of your business.
If you shift your mindset, you’ll understand that through failure comes the growth we need and the lessons we learn to reach successful milestones.
Let’s explore seven keys to help you turn failure into success.
1. Change Your Mindset
Easier said than done. But the most important part of turning failure into success is shifting your perspective. Look at failure as something you go through in order to gain more information for the future. When you go through an experience that ends in “failure,” take a closer look at it.
What are things you did right? What are some things you’d do differently?
Reflect on the situation, take what you’ve learned, and apply it next time around. That way, if you’re faced with a similar situation, your outcome will be one of success.
2. Letting Go of the Fear of Failure to Move Forward
Doing something imperfectly is better than not doing anything at all. Oftentimes, it’s the fear of failure that keeps us from trying something, especially when it’s something unknown.
Maybe you work in financial services and see an opportunity to advise your clients to invest in an innovative company that embraces new technology. It’s risky, as investments can be, but you believe in the technology and stand behind the company’s values. If it pays off, there’s a huge opportunity for growth. But there’s no way to know that unless you take that first step forward and try.
3. Take a Pause to Reflect
When we understand why we failed, we can understand how to do better next time. If you start a business that ultimately fails, don’t jump right into the next one. Take some time to pause and reflect on what happened. Analyze the things you’ve learned from the experience, and take the time to implement tools or processes that can help you avoid going down the same path again.
4. Stay Focused on Your Goals
When you set out to hit a goal and don’t reach it, it can be demoralizing. And that’s why it’s okay to take a pause to reflect.
But don’t forget that this is one goal on your roadmap - dips will happen, and you just have to keep pushing on to try again and continue reaching the rest of your goals.
When you stay focused, short-term failures won’t affect your long-term vision. Those failures will just be a blip on your radar as you get back up and move forward towards your goals.
5. Ask for Help
As a business owner, it can be hard to face failure. You may feel like you have to set an example of success for the rest of your team, and let’s be honest, it can also be a blow to your ego.
What’s more important, and what your team will take away from the situation, is how you handle it moving forward. Asking for help puts you in a vulnerable position. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. By asking your team for potential solutions or ways to avoid failing again, you’re showing them that you trust them to figure things out and come up with great solutions.
Additionally, you can ask for help from a mentor, colleague, or accountability group member. Sometimes an outsider’s perspective is what you need to see something that you may not be able to see yourself.
6. Give Yourself Some Grace
Fear of failure is an endless cycle. It can be easy to get down on yourself and be discouraged to keep moving forward towards your goals. Once it’s happened, the fear of failing again is there, and can prevent you from trying in the future.
Give yourself permission to fail. It’s not something to be ashamed of, but to embrace in your journey of growth. Your failures do not define you, and just because you have failed does not mean you are a failure. Once you are able to separate the two, you’ll understand that failure is a necessary part of life, and success.
7. Choose Resilience
How you choose to respond to failure says a lot about who you are and is very much that — a choice. You can choose to give up, or you can choose resilience. Many people choose to stop or give up when they experience a failure; therefore, never breaking through to get to ultimately where they want to take their business and their life.
To turn failure into success, choose resilience. Remind yourself that because of what you’ve gone through, you can handle even more next time. When you get knocked down, choose to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try again.
The more resilient you are, the more you can handle, and the closer to success you’ll get.
A lot of what differentiates failure from success is perspective. When you choose to see failure as a positive aspect for growth, when you let go of the fear of failure, when you take time to reflect and stay focused on your goals, you shift your mindset from a negative one to a positive one. Failure is something to be grateful for, because it provides us with the lessons we need to get up, try again, and ultimately reach success.
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