Successful 2025? Here's the approach you'll need to change!

It's going to be hard for you to have a successful business unless you change this one approach. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the weeniecast.

It is impossible to do big things in your life, in your business and in the world if you can't be with failure, if you can't handle failure happening, if you can't handle being a failure from time to time. As I record this this week, I had a couple different conversations with clients where we talked about different program and different offerings failing and what that meant about the person who did it.

Now, in one instance, one of my clients had this top tier offer that was really expensive that they just never promoted because they weren't actually that interested in selling it. And looking back on the year, if you were to only look at the fact that you didn't sell it, yeah, that failed. And as we were kind of dissecting this and taking the data from it, that this program that they had put together is something that they didn't actually want to sell.

It wasn't something that they actually wanted to do for their clients. We were able to really understand where the failure was. Right. The failure was not in not getting any clients for it. The failure was in not doing the self check in when they created the program in the first place to make sure that this is something that they actually wanted to do with their clients. And as we were talking through this, I shared with my clients a couple failures that I've had in the past year.

And I had one failure in particular that was very similar to this. And if you've been listening to the Weeniecast for a while, you'll notice I'm no longer promoting the Hyper Focus membership because I shut it down like my client. I had the failure in the very beginning of understanding what it would take to get this thing off the ground, doing the self check in to see if I actually wanted to do those activities to grow the community.

And ultimately I never promoted it except for on the podcast, which, if I'm being totally honest, was mostly my producer because I recorded it once. He put it in in every single episode for a while there, a little behind the scenes moment. If you're thinking about doing a podcast, one of the cool things that you can do is a mid roll and they are actually dynamic. Meaning that as you grow your podcast or it evolves and changes, you can actually change the mid roll.

Say you record something in September and you have a little promotion in it that can be a mid roll. You can change it out in October and in November and in December and it changes it retroactively for every single episode, which is super cool. So you can't even go and find these promotions anymore. They don't exist. They got deleted.

Now, in the same conversation as I'm sharing this, another client, because this is a group call, started doing all these mental gymnastics trying to figure out how it could be true that I didn't actually fail, that the thing failed, that this didn't go well, that that didn't go well, but that the failure wasn't at my doorstep. And how often do we do this?

When we say we're going to do something or we try something new, we do a launch in our business, we set a New Year's resolution or what have you and it doesn't work out. How often do we do all the mental acrobatics to try to figure out how the failure wasn't actually ours?

And I bring this up right now in this moment because this episode is going to be coming out a couple days after the New year. And I know many of my listeners will have already failed at their New Year's resolution by the time this is released. And here's the funny thing about New Year's resolutions. They're a great example of how we can be with failure and success and how we treat ourselves when we aren't quote, unquote consistent.

And I can fairly safely say that however you treat yourself after failing at something like a New Year's resolution is absolutely how you treat yourself after you fail at something in your business. It's how you feel about yourself after you fail at something that's big in the world that can have impact. So, for example, I know a lot of folks tend to set New Year's resolutions around their fitness, right?

So let's say as an example, I set a New Year's resolution that I want to go to the gym and do weightlifting five days a week. I create a whole plan. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I'm going to be doing leg day and I write out the exact workout I'm going to do for all three days, including cardio and stretching on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the fewer of the days, because I don't like doing upper body, I'll be doing upper body. It just doesn't hit when you can only do like a five pound bicep curl.

It doesn't feel quite as impressive as doing like a squat where you can squat 100 pounds on those days. I again have my whole workout planned along with stretching and cardio. And this is what I'm going to be doing. I'm telling myself for the entirety of 2025, this five day routine, Monday through Friday, I even go through my calendar and I block off times because, you know, I got that advice somewhere that if you block the time off in your calendar, you're more likely to do it.

Day one, go and do leg day, no problem. I'm really inspired. Day two, I go in and do upper body, you know, do some arms, do some back, maybe some crunches. Now day three, my legs are still really sore and so I might go to the gym and walk on the treadmill and kind of half ass it with the workout. And I'm going to leave the gym feeling like, oh no, I didn't live up to my promise to myself. I'm going to start feeling really bad about it.

Now. Let's say I have a lot of motivation to go to the gym and I actually go on day four and I do upper body, but I'm still feeling bad because I didn't do the whole workout the day before. And by day five, I'm exhausted, my whole body hurts and I justify to myself why I can't make the time to go to the gym. Can you guess what happens next? I never go back.

That whole plan that I had for how I was going to show up every single week, five days a week, it all gets thrown out because I didn't do it perfectly on day three. And then I failed completely on day five. Now that's if I have a really unhealthy relationship with failure, I'm never gonna go back and do it. And of course, like, this is kind of a superficial thing to be talking about is, you know, our gym workouts, right? But I want you to think about it in the context of your business.

Say you've been working with one on one clients for a couple years now. You love the work you do, you're really successful at getting new clients and you decide, because all of your clients seem to have issues with the same thing, that you want to do a digital course, right? Which a lot of online business owners do, and they do it really successfully. At least that's what we see.

And so you put in all this work, you create this digital course, you create a whole launch plan, you start marketing it, you start trying to sell it, and you get a couple bites, a couple nibbles, where people are like, oh, this sounds great, I think I should probably do this in the future, but you don't make any sales. And so launch day comes, you release it to the world. You get some likes from, you know, friends and family, and maybe some current clients are like, oh, this is so cool.

I'm so glad you're doing this. But when you check the cart at the end of the week, it's a big fat zero. If you have that unhealthy relationship with failure that I described in regards to a New Year's resolution around working out, here's what's going to happen. You're going to give up. You're going to say, okay, cool, that didn't work. And you're going to move on to the next idea where you launch a group program, or you're going to move on to the next idea where you offer something new.

You're not going to sit down and look at this and be like, cool, this is data. This is just data. Cool. So I did this whole launch, I marketed it this way. Here's what I thought the problem was. Which part was wrong? Where does the failure actually lie? Does it lie in the ideal client for this? Was I marketing this to the wrong people? Was I convinced that this is an interesting topic to everyone? And it's not. They don't actually see themselves as needing help with this.

I market it on the wrong place, on the wrong platform. One of the trials I've done over the last couple years is, you know, marketing my services on multiple different social media platforms. And one of the things that I have learned is that TikTok is the hardest place to market a high ticket program. So if I were to create a whole marketing plan to launch a whole new like $20,000 offer, I know now that TikTok is not the place for that.

TikTok is the place for a $100 offer or a $50 offer, but not a $20,000 thing. But say I was trying to sell something for $20,000 on TikTok and just didn't work out, would it make sense for me to just give up that thing? Absolutely not. When you have a healthy relationship with failure and you're not afraid to of getting labeled a failure, it opens you up to being able to look at the data in front of you and see what went wrong so that you can iterate and change it in the future.

In a world where we are programmed from a very young age that you either pass or you fail, it makes total sense that we have so much shame around this idea that something we did didn't succeed. That we got a big fat F. But if you want to have a major impact on the world around you, you're going to fail. You're going to fail a gazillion different times in a bunch of different ways before you actually get to success.

Edison, his team found a thousand different ways to not make a light bulb that works until they figured out the right way to make a light bulb that works. They didn't invent the polio vaccine on the first try. It took time and they had to fail a bunch of different ways before they found something that was successful. We see it all the time in the world around us. How many items do you have in your home that have potentially had a recall?

Big companies fail all the time, and yet they don't give up. They don't say, oh God, like we really failed on that one. Let's just like shut down business, close our doors and call it a day. No, they recall the item, they fix it, they change it, they replace it in some instances, but they keep going. Do you understand how hard it is to get elected to office? The folks who run for high office in different countries, they fail so many times, they fail publicly.

And it's literally that not enough people liked this them as a human being or thought they were capable enough. Like that is the reason why they fail. Or maybe something came out about them that just really struck a chord with people that made them not want to vote for them. Could you imagine if folks just ran for office once and they were like, oh, well, I failed, guess I'll never do that again. That's not how it works.

Could you imagine then getting into office and wanting to enact change, say protect the environment or protect women's rights or, I don't know, make a law for marriage equality and trying just once to make it work and then failing and thinking, oh well, that's that. I'm just gonna wash my hands of this idea and move on to the next? Absolutely not. That is not how anything worthwhile ever happens.

Starting a business will open the door to all the shadow work that you have never had a reason to actually look at. And for many business owners, that thing is failure. And if you're so afraid to potentially fail, then here's the thing. That first failure that hits you, it's going to be the end because you're gonna be too afraid to fail again.

And a big part of this is that all or nothing mentality that we have the five day perfect workout routine say, my New Year's resolution was to work out five days a week and I'm coming to it. Having not worked out at all in the last few months, just living a very sedentary lifestyle and instead holding myself to that standard right off the bat of needing to go to the gym every single day, Monday through Friday, and doing that very specific work, say I made that the goal.

To get to that point, I decided, okay, by the end of July, I want to have it be a habit that I'm working out at the gym five days a week. And instead of making it an all or nothing right off the bat, I start off with going to the gym two times a week, one for lower body, one for upper body, and then I prioritize going for an hour long walk two other days a week. That's still dramatically better than me not working out at all. And guess what? It's less than 50%. Technically.

Two gym workouts out of five gym workouts, that's a 40% success rate. If we're living and dying by the all or nothing rules that we set for ourselves, that is a massive failure. And yet, if you're able to consistently stick to that for several months, imagine the impact that would have on your body and your health.

And imagine in your business, I see you creating those ambitious social media plans and mapping out how many clients you're going to get per month and counting the dollars of that group program launch that you have mapped out in your brain hole. Imagine if you just cut 20% of that. Imagine if instead of showing up for 100% of your social media plan, you showed up for 60% and that was still considered a win.

That's a hell of a lot better than the failure avoidant style where you would try it for a little bit, fail at it, and then just completely give up.

So as you start this new year, as you start looking at the different ways that you're going to be doing self care and different ways you're going to be showing up in your business and for your family and for your hobbies and for anything that really matters to you. I want you to notice what happens in your mind when you do not stick to the plan. When something goes wrong, doesn't work out the way you want it to, do you continue to show up even though you're not doing it perfectly?

Or do you throw your hands up, back off and walk away? Because you can't be perfect here. If it's the latter, then I'm sorry to say it's going to be incredibly hard for you to have a successful business. Unless you're willing to change that. Unless you're willing to do the work to overcome that fear of what it means to be a failure. Because here's the secret. Your worth, your lovability, your deservingness are not tied to these pass and fail standards you set for yourself.

They are not contingent on you doing everything perfectly. When you fail at doing something, it is simply that you failed at doing that one thing. It doesn't mean you are less worthy or deserving of the things that you want. All it means is that you now have a new data point to show you how you can do it better next time. You now have a deeper understanding of what matters to you, of the things you enjoy doing, of the systems you need to support you along the way.

And with that data, you can go and do anything. But again, only if you can handle having failure attached to you. So stop being a weenie and go and fail already. By the way, this sweatshirt I got at my favorite secondhand shop and the T shirt I'm wearing under, and they're basically new. This is my new favorite game is like every day when I get dressed, I'm like, ooh, what can I what? Which one of my finds can I incorporate in my outfit today?