How failure can help your business

Today, I'm talking about why failure is a great thing.

This is something that I've really started celebrating in the last six months or so, is just how important failure is on the path to success. It's been such a big lesson for me, how much I needed to go through the failures that I went through to get to where I am today. And now I'm really trying to champion this idea of failing is good because it means that you tried. I know so many of you are afraid to try because you're afraid to fail. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with failing because it means that you tried.

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My failures have got me to where I am today

Failing means you can learn from it, it means you can course correct, and it means you can get to where you need to be. If I look back on all of the low points in my business that I've had … and believe me, there have been a lot. I've had failed launches as well, I've had failed businesses, I had to shut down my first business. I quit my corporate job too early and I had to go and get another job at a startup because I ran out of savings. I've also had those failures. I know it's really easy to look at where I am now and say, well, of course you feel like it's safe to fail. But you've got to remember, I know a lot of you only started following my journey maybe in the last year or two, I've been through a lot of low points in my business.

 

Without failures, we wouldn't know what needs to change

I know that had my failures not happened, I wouldn't have course-corrected myself and I wouldn't have taken the actions that I needed to take to lead to the success that I've finally achieved. It's taken me four years, five years to get to where I am now and I believe that every single thing that happened along the way has led me there. I also feel like I appreciate where I am now so much more because of the failures that happened. Where is the fun in getting what you want immediately? It's like, we wouldn't appreciate the moments of joy in our lives if not for the moments of sadness. We wouldn't appreciate the moments of peace if we didn't also have moments of fear and anxiety. We don't really appreciate success as much if it's handed to us on a silver platter.

 

Why do we view failures as bad?

So, what even is failure anyway? Why do we believe that failure is so bad or so wrong? It's because somebody has told us, if your life or if your journey doesn't follow this pathway, it's failure. But the thing is, one person's failure is another person's success. And if we look to the online world, somebody might say they only had a $10,000 launch and therefore it was a failure. But then somebody else might hear that and think that they would absolutely kill to have a $10,000 launch. So what we're really afraid of isn't actually failure itself, we're afraid of what failing would mean about us. So we're not afraid of having a failed launch, we're afraid that that failed launch might mean that we weren't good enough or that we did something wrong or that we're not cut out to be in business, that we're not good enough for what we're trying to do.

When you think of failing, your brain is jumping ahead and trying to assign meaning to what this failure would mean and it's determining what meaning you are going to assign to that failure. So let me give you an example. If you grew up in a family where money was tight, you might have this belief that you'll never have enough money. And because of this belief, you might make a failed launch mean that you wasted money trying. So you're not actually afraid of that failure, you're afraid of wasting money and you're afraid of what wasting money would mean for you. Now, I know it's really easy for me to say, okay, well, we need to embrace failure, we need to be okay with failure. It's really easy for me to sit here on my soapbox and tell you that and maybe you're not quite ready to embrace failure as the beautiful beast that it is. That's okay.

 

Shift your perspective of failure

It has taken me a lot of work to shift my perspective on failure, and I still constantly have to work on it. And a really easy place to start with getting comfortable with failure is just by getting curious. So instead of thinking, I must succeed or else? What would happen if you started to think, I wonder what will happen when I take this action? When I started writing my book, I had absolutely no idea where the journey of writing was going to take me. Instead, I sat down and I started writing and I chose to see it as a fun adventure. I really wanted to know what would happen if I just started writing and allowed inspiration to flow out of my brain and through my keyboard.

And I'm still writing it, I have no idea if anyone's going to want to publish it, let alone read it. There's a lot of potential chance for failure there, but because I'm getting curious and I'm enjoying the process of it, it feels a lot safer. So, I'm going to leave you with one last little truth bomb. The fear of failure is worse than actual failure itself.

 

This is a weird example, but for nearly three years, I spent every afternoon in pretty bad pain. So 2:00 PM would roll around and I would get this light ache taking over my lower back. And by 5:00 PM, I was usually in so much pain that I was curled up at my corporate cubicle like a little pretzel. I used to cross my legs a strange way so that I would not be in pain. And I saw a doctor about it and she told me that it was because of my poor posture. She referred me to a physio to work on my core strength, and it just didn't work. The pain only got worse and worse and worse.

And it wasn't until I actually found myself in hospital with a severe kidney infection that I learned that the pain was because my kidney was obstructed. So I'd been sitting at my desk, mindlessly chugging bottle after bottle of water, not realizing that I was making the pain worse because my kidney wasn't draining properly. Now, after that infection, after I was in hospital, the pain got even worse. And fortunately, by this point, I was already working for myself. I'd quit my corporate job, so I could spend my afternoons working from bed. But it wasn't comfortable and the only solution was surgery, which terrified me because it wasn't really a minor surgery either. So I sat in pain for an entire year because I was afraid of having surgery. And then when I finally got around to having surgery, the actual surgery itself and the recovery was so quick and I've had no pain since.

Had I known how much it would improve my quality of life, I would have done it so much earlier. So I was actually afraid of the pain and the recovery. The fear of the pain and the recovery was worse than the actual pain and recovery itself was. And that's how we treat failure. We're afraid of what failure would look like, of how it would show up, of what it would mean. And then when it actually happens, it's not even as bad as we thought it would be. So once you give yourself that permission to fail and once you start to feel okay with the possibility that you might fail, the fear of that failure loses its power over you. And then once you're no longer driven by this fear, you can start to take action that feels inspired, that feels aligned, and that's more likely to lead to the outcome that you actually want and you're going to enjoy the journey a lot more along the way.

 

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