“A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.” Richard Branson
While you might understand the concept of failure being critical to your success, you likely avoid it like the plague. And you’re not alone. Fear of failure is not just a personal trait, it is a human one.
Uncertainty is terrifying to the human brain. 90% of CEO’s say that failure is their greatest cause of distress. In reality, that belief is based on an outdated program that’s been hardwired into our brains. Rethinking our fear of failure requires an understanding of where our beliefs come from, and why they no longer apply to our lives.
In 2019, after experiencing panic attacks and getting close to burnout working 80 hour weeks, my attempt to avoid failure resulted in the heavy decision to close my first business. It was then that my relationship to failure changed. With more hours to give to my coaching practice I asked myself what would be different if I sought out failure, instead of avoiding it. I set a goal of getting 100 no’s and within 6 months grew my business to six figures, then doubled that six weeks later, closing out the year at $270k and 100 no’s.
As a time & Productivity coach, I want you to know that things don’t take time, they take failure and failure is simply experimenting. Failure is setting a hypothesis, and testing that hypothesis. Failure happens when you don’t create the results you expected. From there you just iterate.
My formula that guarantee's failure will create success:
- Detach from failure resistance: Expect failure, and then expect the resistance, and know this is an opportunity to teach your primitive brain that it’s safe to fail.
It’s unlikely that failing in your business will actually be life-threatening, yet we treat it as such. So by asking the question of ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’, you can begin to form a more accurate perception of actually how lucrative our failure can become and in the process teach your primitive brain that failure is no longer life threatening.
- Seek Failure: While this might sound like an insane idea, seeking failure actually eliminates fear and leaves you free to make bolder decisions, take faster action, and stand out from your competitors. Not to mention, investors love teams that have proven they can experience failure and come out stronger. For your business to generate more money, it needs to make more sales. Therefore, in the case of making offers, seeking failure through embracing rejection, will ensure you get closer to your income goals as you aren’t hiding from fear of being rejected. If you know that say 10 in every 100 offers result in a sale, you will be encouraged to go out and get more ‘no’s’, as they are simply bringing you closer to a ‘yes!’.
- Find your repeatable winning formula: Celebrating failure as an evolutionary opportunity, helps us to break away from social programming. Without failure, we can’t learn the lessons that have been presented to us, in order for us to evolve.
Success is often accompanied by a belief that it could have been a chance occurrence. In that case, we’re unlikely to try something new, in case we cannot repeat the win.If you fail on the other hand, you get data, you get information, allowing you to create a repeatable winning formula. This is exactly what I teach my clients and how Michelle for example, went from quitting her job to a funded start-up within 9 months.
- How to Evaluate the Fail: If we don’t evaluate our failures, then they are not useful. It is about looking at the data and information from every move we make in our lives and in our businesses. Learning to not make the information mean anything negative about us personally to then make new decisions from a place of leveraging the failure for success.
On a recent episode of my Podcast, Hack Your Time I spoke into ‘Juicy Fails’ to give you clear coaching, encouragement to redefine your own relationship with failure and ways to actually implement the learning!
- Complete the Stress cycle: Stretching yourself to seek and embrace failure, meeting rejection and building your winning formula, activates the stress cycle within every entrepreneur. As a reformed hustler and 80 hour per week worker, I swear by rest and play as an essential success strategy in my business today.
Allowing your body to complete the stress cycle associated with building your failure conditioning. Remember solving for stress is different to solving for what creates the stress. And too often we skip over the first part. I suggest active as well as passive rest, and that could be playing table tennis with a colleague or meeting a friend for coffee and a walk, to ensure you anchor what you have just created from a regulated state rather than a survival one. This not only prevents burnout and exhaustion it also fuels creativity and productivity. In closing The most wealthy people in the world openly share that they have failed more times than they succeeded. Take for instance Jack Ma, the co-founder of technology conglomerate Alibaba Group, who applied for Harvard 10 times before being accepted. He was also the only one out of 24 applicants to be rejected by KFC when the franchise first came to China! Rather than resisting failure, embrace them as the key to gaining wisdom, self growth and becoming the person who exponentially increases their wealth!
