Failing Forward Successfully
by Debbie Allen
Published on this site: May 12th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
Can Mistakes Be Good For Your Business?
Hopefully you make a mistake now and again, because failure can
actually be good for you and your business. If you havent
made any mistakes for a while, you may be playing it too close to
your comfort zone and not stretching yourself far or fast enough
to achieve high level goals. To aim high, you must accept some of
the risks that go along with learning something new.
Risks come with the acceptance that you will make some mistakes
along your journey, but you will want to avoid making costly mistakes
or making the same mistake over and over again. Use good common
business sense. Every business and every career has its share of
challenges. You will constantly be tested in business as new challenges
arise or as your business grows and expands.
You will always be challenged with new areas of your business that
stretch you past your current abilities and expertise. It may be
a big sale, the start of a new business, a new opportunity or an
extremely difficult challenge. Yet all failures will help you learn
more about your business and help you build your self-esteem at
the same time.
Learn from your mistakes and move On. (Actually I dont even
like the word mistake; I believe that mistakes are simply challenges
in disguise.) Realistically most of us dont get it right the
first time around.
Successful People:
- Make mistakes all the time, but the only difference is
that most of the failures go unnoticed because they dont
give up. They keep on going.
- Make it look easy. Although its easy looking in
from the outside, many dont often notice or acknowledge
their failures.
- Evaluate their failures, come up with new solutions to
the challenge and try again this time more educated
than the first.
- Dont allow the fear of failure to stop them from
achieving their goals.
A study of the failure and challenges of business shows the ultimate
success secrets of any enterprise. These are the key lessons an
organization learns as they grow, expand and compete in a changing
marketplace.
If you want to create shamelessly fabulous success, study all the
failures. Most highly successful people were not successful from
the beginning, they had to struggle a little or a lot to reach their
peak potential. Walt Disney was actually fired from his first job
because he was told that he was not creative enough. Not creative
enough? Luckily, he didnt listen to his clueless boss and
trusted his own innovative ideas.
We all have a tendency to focus on success and fear failure when
things dont go as planned. So dont be too hard on yourself
if you feel that you are making too many mistakes to make it to
the top. Hang in there and be patient. Once you overcome the challenge,
you wont have to do it again and you will be failing forward
faster.
Success takes time just as it takes time for you to adjust and
learn new skills. But, be aware that mistakes will continue to happen
even after you have reached a high level of success. You will always
need to be learning something new in business to stay innovative
and on top of your game.
When you think you have it all figured out and have made
all the mistakes you need to make to learn, something will
challenge you again and test your confidence. (Ive been
an entrepreneur all of my adult life and Im still making
mistakes, and plan to keep making them. Once I have it all
figured out I get bored.) Making mistakes, turning them into
challenges and then overcoming those obstacles in business
is extremely rewarding. There is nothing that can challenge,
motivate and build your confidence faster.
Mistakes and challenges are going to occur anyway, so the sooner
you learn from them, the sooner you will become more successful
in whatever you do. Most people tend to reach conclusions about
success, but until success is compared with failures people
dont truly understand the whole story of how business works.
Why Dont They Teach Failure In School?
Failures tend to disappear from business education curriculum?
Information about business failures is often scarce or ignored completely,
yet it is inevitable. On the other hand, information on successful
companies and their success strategies is in generous supply.
Companies that pursue unsuccessful strategies either change
their business strategies or they go out of business. A successful
company is described as having used visionary management and
innovative marketing strategies while a failing business is
accused of poor business management and overall bad business
skills. So why dont we teach future entrepreneurs more
about failure? Wouldnt that save us a ton of money from
mistakes that could have been avoided in the first place?
Can you imagine telling your banker to add an additional $20,000
for the mistakes that you plan to make in your new business venture?
They would think you were crazy. Yet that is exactly what is going
to happen while you develop the business. You simply must make mistakes
to see what works and does not work to attract new customers. It
is necessary to make mistakes as any business grows. The reason
why franchises have a larger success rate than independent company
start-ups is because they have already made many of the mistakes
and systemized the business around avoiding them in the future.
For the most part, franchises come with proven success systems that
were created out of learning from past mistakes. So mistakes can
indeed be good for business.
Debbie Allen is an international professional speaker who
has presented in nine countries. She is a well-known self promotional
marketing expert and author of four books. Her expertise has been
featured in Entrepreneur, Selling Power and dozens of other national
and international publications. Her award winning book, Confessions
of Shameless Self Promoters has been published in four countries.
Download a free chapter of this insightful book, sign up for your
free online marketing newsletter, and listen and/or view Debbies
dynamic presentations at http://www.ConfessionsofShameless.com
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