Just think back to a time where you had just started your business. You most likely had the perfect picture in your head of how your life would be in the future. Maybe you thought running a business would bring you freedom and quick success. The question to ask yourself now is, have you learnt from your failures along the way and where is your business currently heading towards?
In this article, we want to explain why failure is an essential part of success for many business owners and although associating failure with success can be quite complex, there’s a lot to learn!
To think that well-known entrepreneurs could have had a trail of failures seems inevitable. If you think that they have always been successful, think again; the truth is, like many others, they’ve gone through some hard times, including failure, fear, rejection, and denial. Despite this, the key to success for entrepreneurs has been not to give up.
It’s not a simple task but it’s certainly not an impossible task.
Here are three tips that can help turn failure into success.
- Face your fears and keep on going. It’s vital to remember why you started in the first place, but also placing your goals and objectives before your fear will help you focus on ways to leverage your business.
A good practice we’d suggest is, analyse your key strengths and skills as well as your mistakes and weaknesses. Celebrate your strengths and learn from situations that could have worked better.
By balancing what works with what could be more effective you will feel less overwhelmed and energised to put the extra effort into getting out of your comfort zone.
- Consistent actions = consistent results. Let’s start by defining what consistency is. Consistency is focusing on the task at hand while maintaining your long-term vision. It’s about repetition: practicing the same habits repeatedly. But feedback from these actions and adjusting them accordingly helps us stay on track as we work towards the goal.
So, we’re aware that maintaining consistency is essential, but at some point, we can struggle to be consistent with what we do. The idea of consistency is based on patience, belief, and value. It’s important to give yourself reminders and rewards, but essential to give yourself time to see changes.
- Create new momentum. Even if you’ve suffered some losses, you should still promote a mentality to encourage your team to feel comfortable with taking risks.
As we know, in business there are different types of risks, including strategy, reputation and financial risk. Something important for business owners to remember when it comes to this is, you never know what will come out of it. It could seem scary to some people or be motivational to others, but ask yourself the question, “Is my goal more powerful than the risk itself?”
After taking the above into consideration, it’s clear to say that shifting your perspective and looking at failure as something valuable will give you a clearer understanding of why through failure we can learn to succeed. It allows us to create new ideas and fresh concepts. Ultimately, it’s a great opportunity to try again.
As Winston Churchill once famously said, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
Dive deeper into how to improve your business. Chris has authored Reflect, Dream, Do. In its pages you’ll find 101 ideas which will help you build a business that gives you the time and money to do the non-business things you enjoy in life. Get your free copy now.