Today I got an email from my brother1 …who is a partner with me in one of our businesses. I have edited his email slightly to protect the innocent (or is it the guilty?).
I know this very well, as I am afraid of failure too. Someone I know is so afraid of failure that he will not get out of bed. It takes a daily thought process to embrace failure and move on, learning from that failure. We are lucky that, when we fail, we only get upset. If a surgeon who is operating on you fails, you die. On the other hand, we feel good when we do close a deal. What a wonderful business! You are in control. Embrace failure, as it is the seed of change that will result in success. Just trying to use failure is success. The real failure is letting it get to you. So breathe in five times, each time expelling the negative feelings as you exhale … so you can think about how we can improve.
Do what you can with this client … but thank them either way. If we failed them, we will make changes that will make us stronger.
Just writing this has helped me feel better.
Spoken like a true warrior or a warrior in the making. How wonderful and eloquent! I agree with everything he had to say. Embrace your failures. Success is based on the carcass of failure. Without failure, we cannot succeed.
Think about when a child learns to walk. Just how many times did they fail? Falling down over and over, before they were actually able to walk? Then they kept walking, and got better at it. Then they learned to run, skip, and jump. Woohooo!
We have talked about the fear of failure—the number one symptom of which is not even starting. The number one symptom of the fear of success is screwing it all up on purpose, either by commission or by omission.
Let’s get our thinking straight. It is okay to fail. It is okay to make mistakes. It is not okay to give up or to keep making the same mistake over and over again. It is not okay to fail to learn from your mistakes and failures. It is not okay to fail to take advantage of failure. We must embrace failure, analyze failure, and learn from failure. We must conduct a post-mortem, and often when that is completed, the first element that is found to have contributed to the failure is simply the failure to conduct a pre-mortem. We use tools like the Five Whys to get a solid understanding of what went wrong so that we can develop a strategic game plan and profit from our failure! Yes! Profit from failure!
You are warriors, and you will profit from your failures. You will use the tools to learn and understand, to come to believe in a way that allows you to turn the ebb into the flow. Warriors, you will succeed. So it is written.