The first step to turn failure into success

One of the challenges a business owner faces is how to accept failure and turn it into success. We all fail and failure is an inevitability of life. I think it's good to fail because it indicates you're willing to take a risk. People who avoid failure typically aren't business owners because they can't handle the stress of taking a risk. Owning a business is a risk, because you are ultimately responsible for your livelihood. No one is paying you to work at your business on an hourly wage or provide benefits, or any of the other things that can come with being employed by someone else. You are accountable for your own pay and benefits, as well as the success or failure of your business.

What discourages people about failure is how it makes them feel. If you fail at something, you feel depressed or feel like you aren't good enough. Those feelings are natural, and if we can learn to accept them, we can also learn to move past them and focus on what really matters: How can I turn this failure into an opportunity for success? There is always an opportunity for success in every failure. The reason is simple. Your failures teach you what isn't working in what you are doing. Once you know what isn't working, you can make changes and try again.

Growing success out of failure requires attitude, specifically an attitude of belief in yourself and an attitude of I will find the silver lining in the cloud. This doesn't mean you don't acknowledge failure, but that acknowledgement shouldn't stop you from moving forward with your life and business. The people who get stuck with failure are usually being hard on themselves. We all do that at one time or another, but being hard on yourself isn't helpful. It just puts you into a cycle of despair, and has you labeling yourself with words such as loser.

If you can look at a situation where you've failed and acknowledge what you did wrong, but also look at it as an opportunity to learn, you won't beat yourself up for long. Instead you'll focus on solving your problem. You'll look at your actions and try and discover what didn't work. then you'll make changes to what you are doing to either bypass the issue or solve it. And you'll try again, because you know you want to succeed.

I used to do social media coaching. It was a business that failed because I didn't want to manage other people's social media accounts and once I trained them on social media, they no longer needed my services. I looked at my model and I realized that I failed because I was coaching people on something that had limited needs. So I changed my business to focus on business coaching, which allowed me to work with people for a longer period of time, and enabled me to have return clients. My failure was having a business where I only had one-time clients with limited need of my service. By choosing to change the services I offered I was able to take my failure and turn it into success.

I use that example, because the first step to turning a failure into success involves examining what failed in your business, to learn what to change, when you try it the next time. Failure doesn't have to keep you down. It can lift you up, if you have the right perspective and the willingness to get up, dust yourself off, and try again, from a place of experience and willingness to take another risk. You'll get success eventually, as long as you are willing to try.