How to cope with Failure in Your Business? Failure is often seen as negative in business. When we hear the term, it sounds bad. The dictionary defines failure as a lack of success, especially in specific activities. However, we need to change this viewpoint.

Famous Examples of Overcoming Failure

Walt Disney

Walt Disney faced rejection 300 times before his idea of Mickey Mouse was accepted. Consequently, he built a legacy of theme parks and entertainment that lives on.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey, born into poverty, was fired from her first job as a news anchor. Although she faced many challenges, her hard work and resilience led to immense success.

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison famously said he found many ways that didn't work before succeeding. When he died, he held over 1,000 patents. Thus, failure can lead to incredible achievements.

Dealing with Failure in Business

Acceptance and Responsibility

In nearly 30 years of business, we have faced many failures. We lost money and made bad decisions. Nevertheless, each mistake taught us valuable lessons.

Firstly, we must accept and take responsibility for our failures. Blaming others does not help. Instead, we should reflect, learn, and move forward.

Enjoy the Journey

Secondly, reframe our mindset. Set milestones and goals, but appreciate the journey. Enjoy the process and growth along the way.

Positive Self-Talk

Additionally, avoid negative self-talk. It’s crucial to build self-confidence and focus on learning from setbacks. Negative thoughts can hinder our progress.

Patience

Lastly, practice patience. Success takes time. Overnight success stories are rare. By measuring progress and setting realistic timelines, we can stay motivated and on track.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, learning how to cope with failure in your business is vital for success. Accept responsibility, avoid negative self-talk, and practice patience. Join a supportive community for further growth.

Listen to the I Hate Numbers podcast for more insights and tips on managing your business effectively.

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Failure is a term that's often banded around to be a very negative thing. When we hear that in business, it doesn't sound very good, does it? Dictionary definitions as given by Collins, for example, where failure is a lack of success in doing or achieving something, especially in relation to a particular activity, doesn't help.

Well, if that's your viewpoint, then add to that list Oprah Winfrey, Walt Disney, and Thomas Edison as three high-profile examples. Do you think they're failures? I think not. In this week's I Hate Numbers podcast, I'm going to be looking at the idea of failure. More particularly, how we deal with it. Failure, by the way, folks, is not always a bad thing.

Let's crack on with the podcast.

You are listening to the I Hate Numbers Podcast with Mahmood Reza. The I Hate Numbers podcast mission is to help your business survive and thrive by you better understanding and connecting with your numbers. Number love and care is what it's about. Tune in every week. Now, here's your host, Mahmood Reza.

Now, earlier on at the beginning, I mentioned Walt Disney, Oprah Winfrey, and Thomas Edison. Let me just share the story of those three, and then we're going to carry on with how we deal with failure in our own businesses. I speak from practical experience here, by the way, folks, having been in business for nearly 30 years along the way, along the path of my sort of business,

I've made many what you would consider now classic Clangers mistakes. I've lost money, I've had my fingers burned through making bad decisions. I don't consider myself a failure. I consider mistakes having been made, but it's what you take from them and learn that actually powers you on to the next steps.

Now Walt Disney, when he first introduced Mickey Mouse, it was met with rejection after rejection. Did you know he was rejected 300 times before he actually got somebody to accept his idea? Look at him now, theme parks, well-known, and his legacy lives on. Opera Winfrey, another classic example of resilience, faced an immense amount of challenges in her career.

In her early days, she was actually born into poverty. Did you know she was fired from her first job as a news anchor? And she made lots of cockups in the investments, including a restaurant and a movie studio. If you look at her now, her fame, fortune, as a result of hard work, resilience, and things she learned along the way, stood her in good stead.

Now, Thomas Edison, as another example. Now, Thomas Edison was claimed to say he's gotten lots of results, and he knew several thousand things that won't work. The reality is, you are going to fail many times in your business. And as a footnote, by the way, for Thomas Edison, we always think of Thomas Edison and the light bulb.

But did you actually know that when he passed away, he actually held and had more than 1, 000 patents? That's pretty incredible, isn't it? Now, how does this work for us? Now, at the outset, failure isn't an absolute thing. There are things that we do which are measures of failure. Perhaps we make wrong decisions about people we partner with, allowing customers too much flexibility in terms of paying their bills, not chasing up, not having adequate planning systems, making bad marketing decisions.

And it's all part of the learning journey. The key to success, ultimately, whatever your definition of success is, is to actually learn to take advantage of your failure. I know that sounds really strange, but to learn from it, this is not academic learning here. Move past it and keep on pushing. So I'm going to outline four key things to take on board if you want to accept and deal with failure in your business.

Now firstly, you've got to step forward and you've got to take ownership, as the Americans would say, and accept responsibility for what's gone wrong. Don't give yourself too much of a hard time, by all means, lick your wounds, but you're there to fight another day. There's a massive difference between accepting responsibility for something you've done or been culpable for your failure and passing the blame onto other parties.

Accepting responsibility means just that. You've got to acknowledge there are things you could have done better. Obviously, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it also means looking, observing, not taking it too personally, not shifting the blame onto somebody else when things go wrong. Because, as a business owner, ultimately you're in the driving seat.

The ultimate responsibility, the ultimate ownership of what's gone wrong lies with you. Again, it doesn't mean you beat yourself up harshly. You're over critical, you don't want to effectively ruin your own confidence here, but you've actually got to reflect, absorb, learn from that, and move on. Remember, each failure, and maybe that's not a word that we should use, is a learning step. Draw the lesson, move on.

And in fact, if you're even in the field of medicine, if you imagine where we are in terms of heart operations, all the things that we take for granted nowadays, at the early stages, there would have been an immense amount of operations, procedures that didn't quite work out as they should have done.

There's a lesson in every failure. Number two, enjoy the journey. Now, nobody looks forward to making mistakes. Nobody looks forward to things going wrong, but reframe your mindset. And what you need to do also is to set yourself what I call milestones and goals. Now, they're fantastic here, but the goal in itself is not the journey.

That's the destination point. You need to have a destination. You need to have the point that you wish to arrive to and you need to divide that up into what I call microsteps. Don't obsess on the end result, though. It's the journey, it's the activities that you're doing that really are going to get you to that end point, your Northern Star, your golden ticket if you wish, but you've got to embrace and enjoy the journey as you go along. That's where growth is.

That's where enjoyment is, and let's do that not lose sight of the fact you're in business for a number of reasons, and one of them is being in charge of your own destiny and having a major influence on that. Now, if you're tunnel-visioned and you're completely results-focused, you won't necessarily be able to appreciate the other achievements you've got, what you've learned, the skills that you've developed, the techniques that you've adopted, the people that you meet.

Number three, there's something called self-talk. Now, I'm not sure about you, but when I was growing up, there was this idea that, you know, we are polite and we're kind, and we speak nicely to others, but actually we tend to neglect looking after ourselves. Now, this is not about being narcissistic. This is not about being obsessive, but you've also got to make sure that you pay attention to yourself, and self-talk matters a great deal.

If you repeat that mantra that you're a failure, then your brain, your mind will be there to support you. And it will reinforce that view of yourself, and that's not a good thing. Again, it's not about being overconfident and being arrogant. It's about being self-confident in what you're doing.

Remember, if you keep saying you're a failure, if you keep saying that you're no good, if you keep saying you cock things up here, then what will happen is you will be blinded, you'll take less risk, you'll make worse decisions going forward. So kick that little tiny voice in your head, kick it into touch.

A setback in its own right does not mean the end, does not mean a catastrophe. Now, if the majority of your self-talk is on the negative side, then obviously it's going to be much more difficult to dust yourself off when something goes wrong and not draw the lessons from what's going on. It takes time and it takes practice, it's not an overnight thing, but it's worth working on that.

What else should we throw into the mix? Well, patience. Now I'm probably an example of somebody who's impatient in one respect. I want things to be achieved more immediate than they actually are, but I've learned over 30 years, patience and thinking on the long haul, the prize at the end, the steps that I'm taking along what I'm drawing from that, has stood me in good stead.

If you're impatient and your time scale is ridiculously tight, even your steps of progress here, like making that call to a customer, to a warm lead, firming up your credit control system, forming networks, launching a product that is not perfect, but it's good enough, that MVP idea that every small setback will assume a disproportionate image in your mind.

And it's going to feel like the end of the world. You need to work on your patience, and you’ll realise that overnight success is typically several years in the making. For most of us, 99%, and that's a figure that I've just made up, success is something that is many months, many years, many hours in the making.

That idea of instant success it's a very rare exception, it's not the rule. Now remember, just because you can't see certain results right now, does not mean you're not progressing. And certainly, I would fully recommend, for whatever size your business is, whatever industry you're in, is have a financial plan ultimately, that measures the outcome in financial terms, whether they're positive or negative, and break that down into milestones, weekly or monthly cycles, and do the same with your activity plans.

So if you're thinking that you need to grow your client base by a certain number, what are the steps you're going to be taking to get to that end point and measure that, and what you expect realistically to achieve on, say, a typical month-by-month basis? Your actions today, what you are going to implement today, will be sowing the seeds for the future success that you will have.

Think of those people that you've had conversations with, potential leads. They may not buy from you right now, but they might buy from you in the future. So nurture that relationship, keeping contact, keeping communication. For myself, in my business, I've had clients that I've met several years ago. I stay in their consciousness, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

And eventually, when that time comes for them to make that decision, I'm in the forefront of their thoughts. They'll come to me, and we become client and deliverer. Now, folks, final thoughts. If you want success, and who doesn't, whatever your version of success is, you've got to learn how to deal with failure.

It's vital that you learn to accept responsibility for your actions. Blaming somebody else for the shortfalls and the failures that are going on is not going to help anybody. It's not going to advance you forward, and in fact, it's going to create that negative mindset which you don't want in your business and in your head.

See the lesson, draw from them, make observations. Acting in isolation may be a difficult thing, so join a like-minded community. And a subtle hint there, folks, check out the show notes, by the way, for a Numbers Knowhow community, that's on the verge of being launched. Check out the link for further resources.

And you also need to rein in your negative self-talk. Learn patience, and most of all, enjoy what you're doing as you go along. With the right mindset, the right attitude, failure is not going to be that massive boulder upon your shoulders. It's going to give you the opportunity to build something fantastic and something great for yourself and your family.

Until next week, folks, happy dealing with failure. We hope you enjoyed this episode and appreciate you taking the time to listen to the show. We hope you got some value. If you did, then we'd love it if you shared the episode. We look forward to you joining us next week for another I Hate Numbers episode.