As an entrepreneur, you will inevitably take risks, try new and unproven strategies and experience failure – both big and small. When things don’t go as planned, it can be easy to get bogged down by failure and regret.
How can you handle the inevitable failure of an entrepreneurial journey with grace and the ability to bounce back even stronger after each setback?
First, recognizing the unhealthy ways we deal with failure can help us avoid these pitfalls. In her new book “Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better,” Pema Chodron shares three common traps people fall into with failure:
1. Sweep it under the rug.
Failure is incredibly vulnerable, it can feel very raw, and because this is an uncomfortable feeling, many of us don’t want to feel it. There is a tendency to want to ignore it, sweep it under the rug or distract ourselves with addictions like eating, drinking or watching television.
However, ignoring our mistakes or failures does not make them go away and often, it leads to an even bigger issue down the road.
2. Find a scapegoat.
The second strategy many people employ when things don’t work out is to find someone else to point the finger at.
It’s human nature to avoid our own sense of shame and failure, so we quickly toss the hot potato of failure to someone else. Whether partially justified or not, this strategy damages trust, hurts team cohesion and does not address the underlying issue.
3. Beat yourself up.
If we aren’t blaming someone else, then we’re blaming ourselves. The biggest confusion people make at this stage is to look at a failure and interpret it to mean; “I am a failure,” instead of “this situation was a failure" or "this product failed to meet expectations, etc.”
Negative self-talk is neither productive nor helpful, and it takes focused awareness to notice and stop these negative trains of thought.
What is the best way to approach failure? Start by reframing it.
James Joyce said in Ulysses that mistakes can be the “portals of discovery.”
How often have you heard someone else’s success story and it begins with a big failure or a moment when all the chips were down? Steve Jobs is a great example, he was fired from his own company only to come back with even greater success and creativity many years later.
This is a common pattern, and yet when we face difficulty ourselves, we rarely have the perspective to see that we, too, could be at a pivotal moment where something amazing, new and creative is about to emerge.
In order to tap into the greater things that can emerge from failure, Pema suggests we learn to “fail better” by feeling our feelings and acknowledging our story.
1. Feel the discomfort.
Failing better begins by getting curious and allowing yourself to “feel what you feel when things don’t go the way you want them to.”
We’ve all experienced that “raw, visceral feeling of having blown it or failed or made a mistake or hurt someone’s feelings,” Pema suggests you go beyond blaming yourself or others and instead allow yourself to feel the rawness of it.
It’s from this place of allowing ourselves to feel what it’s like to be human, and to be flawed, that we can connect with others in our shared humanity because we’ve all suffered, we’ve all experienced failure and loss. This takes courage and can feel scary, and yet it creates connection and opportunity.
2. What’s your story?
In addition to feeling whatever you’re feeling, Pema says “noticing what words come out and what your internal dialogue is, this is the key.
If you have a lot of negative self-talk such as; ‘I’m terrible, I’m not doing a good job,’ just notice it and see if you can soften it a little by saying ‘What am I feeling here? Maybe what is happening is not that I am a failure – I am just hurting. This hurts.’”
To “fail better,” according to Pema, “means you begin to have the ability to hold the rawness of vulnerability in your heart, and see it as your connection with other human beings and as a part of your humanness. Failing better means when these things happen in your life, they become a source of growth, a source of (moving) forward. Failing better means that failure becomes a rich and fertile ground instead of just another slap in the face.”
The best managers and leaders are those who have experienced failure and are humbled by it, acknowledging that it hurts and then moving on to take decisive action rather than dwelling in thoughts of self-blame.
The choice is yours. The next time you experience failure, how would you like to be in that space?
