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Failing Forward Successfully
By Debbie Allen
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
haven’t 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 don’t even like
the word
mistake; I believe that mistakes are simply challenges
in
disguise.) Realistically most of us don’t 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 don’t give up.
They keep
on going.
· Make it look easy. Although it’s easy looking in from the
outside,
many don’t 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.
· Don’t 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 didn’t
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
don’t go as planned. So don’t 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 won’t 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. (I’ve been an
entrepreneur all
of my adult
life and I’m 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
don’t truly
understand the whole story of how business works.
Why Don’t
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 don’t we teach future entrepreneurs
more about
failure? Wouldn’t 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.
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948 words
Bio: 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 Debbie’s dynamic presentations
at www.ConfessionsofShameless.com