Failure. Ooh, it gives me the willies. How about you?
As an achiever and, admittedly, a bit of a perfectionist, failure is not an option. 🙂 However, as an entrepreneur—and a human being—I know that failure is simply a reality. One day, I’m going to deliver an awkward close from stage and sell fewer products that I’d hoped. (Cringe!) At some point, one of my two sons will come home disappointed with a test score. And during some crucial game, Philip Rivers is going to throw an interception (and I’ll question my commitment to Chargers football).
However, I had a life-changing conversation recently with Sue Enquist, an 11-time NCAA women’s softball champion (once as a player and ten times as a coach). It really shifted the way I thought about ALL of these failures.
I interviewed Sue for the Coach John Wooden Pyramid of Success online training course and she taught me a HUGE lesson about how to fail. And it goes beyond simply having the courage to fail. That’s just the first step. The second step is the game-changer.
She taught it to her players at UCLA and it’s now being taught in companies across America to help them actually leverage every failure to get them back in the game and perform. I’ll share it with you in this week’s video.
Leave me a comment below! How does failure make you feel? How have you dealt with it in the past? I’d love to hear your strategies—either what’s worked for you or what hasn’t. How can you put Sue’s strategies into action in your personal life or your business?
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Thank you Pam, loved the video and very apropos for me. Ahh failure…very scary for a perfectionist like me but totally agree with you, we have to have the courage to not worry about whether we will fail or not, we know we will anyway at some point in our lives. Fail, recover and move on!!
Merci,
Raymond from Canada
I think many of us can relate Raymond. It’s facing those fears one step at a time and developing that muscle to quickly recover and move forward. I’m working on it too!
Remarkable lesson as always, Pam. Failure, from a fiction view is like the force in Star Wars – there’s a dark side and good side based upon the person experiencing it. What’s made the difference for me in moments of failure has been: experiencing the disappointment, analyzing where I erred, and focusing on a correction to the error, if one in the particular case, so I can get back to the original goal or lesson as fast as I can.
Two plus years ago I walked away from the Internet and all I had learned over an 8 year period and took a job at an orchard. I was utterly burned out not even an email the first 6 months. It looked like failure at it’s best. Thousands of hours and dollars spent to no avail. A year or so later and I still couldn’t do anything on the computer for myself only for a friend and that took some doing.
In my third season with the orchard, the idea that I started with during MML 2.0 in 2013 started stirring inside. Failures are merely moments that surface during the journey of success which is really about fulfillment versus the relics that sometimes come with it. As long as the flame still burns inside it’s not over.
Joseph, you are such a great man! I love your quote “As long as the flame still burns inside it’s not over.” Thanks so much for your post. Nice to hear from you! 🙂