Everybody who has ever attempted anything has failed at least a couple of times before they actually succeeded. In the words of author, inventor, and consultant Dr. Edward de Bono, “It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” And sometimes your ideas will be wrong, and your plans not work out as you anticipated. However, the sum of our failures is equivalent to the mass of our opportunities to learn. The real trick is dealing appropriately with failure so that it becomes a strategy to eventual success rather than an unassailable impediment to it.
The first thing you need to consider in light of a failed business venture is to address secondary causes of stress. Keep in mind that you may need to make some adjustments to your life now. This may require moving, re-budgeting, examining your savings, changing your kids’ school, or any number of other alterations to your life that when viewed in context of “this is because I failed” add up to a lot of guilt and depression. Take each of these tasks one at a time and do them as separate from your business. Dealing with these smaller things will not only make the larger issue seem less important, it builds a momentum of successes with things that you can accomplish, helping to reshape your confidence.
The next thing to keep in mind is that while your business may have failed, that does not make you a failure. A huge part of business is confidence, recognizing your own worth and the value of your product. You’re undermining your future by seeing yourself in terms of failure by preventing yourself from projecting the confidence that is necessary to succeed. This will hinder your ability to find a new job, to start a new company, and reduce your social interactions. Actively work on divorcing yourself from the concept of failing will help keep you positive and ready to take on new challenges.
Finally, don’t become desensitized to the idea of failure. Yes, it hurts a lot when we don’t accomplish our goals. It’s supposed to hurt. That pain is the catalyst we need to pick ourselves up and try harder so as to avoid it in the future. Once we accept that failure isn’t so bad, that there’s no difference between it and success, then we lose one of our major motivational tools. More to the point, you have no impetus to learn from your mistake, to examine it for ways to avoid doing the same thing over again, and you no longer have as great a stake in your endeavor.
To try is to risk failure, and nobody wins all the time no matter how hard they try. It’s as true in real life as it is in great literature. It’s what we do with those failures that shape us and determine if we will succeed in the future.
