Being an entrepreneur does not mean that success is a guaranteed result that we will produce. Sometimes no matter how hard we try, we will end up producing failing results. It can be frustrating to work so hard only to feel as if you wasted your time and money.
While failure can make you feel defeated, it does not mean it should hold your mind hostage. When you let failure define you, you defeat your ability to produce success. This is because your mind will only be focused on what can go wrong, instead of being completely focused on doing what is right.
If you are dealing with failure and trying to overcome it, the following steps will help you rebound from your setbacks.
Accept Failure as a Learning Process
Failure should be seen as the opportunity to learn from your mistakes. Although you failed, you are able to look back and determine why the failure occurred. This helps you eliminate the bad behaviors that led to your failure. Now you are minimizing the probability of failure happening again.
While failure cannot be completely eliminated, it is important to understand how to avoid it as best as possible. And the only way to do this is by accepting failure as your moment of learning what is involved in entrepreneurship. Every moment will not be a winning effort. It is better to recognize this and deal with it so that you do not believe that you have the golden touch. No one is immune from failure no matter how smart and capable they are. The sooner you learn this, the better off you will be as an entrepreneur.
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Don’t Get Emotionally Caught Up in Failure
You will go through a lot of emotions when you are dealing with failure. These emotions include anger, sadness, frustration, regret, guilt and shame. While all of these are normal feelings to have, do not get too caught up in these feelings. Deal with them for a moment but do not carry these feelings with you for a long period of time. Doing so will only make you bitter and unable to move beyond the past. And when you allow your mind to remain in the past, you can never completely move forward to the next endeavor.
Dealing with your emotions can be a tricky process. You may think that you are over your hurt of failure, but something can remind you about the entire process and cause you to be downcast. That is why it is important to get all the lingering emotions out of you. Go to the gym and hit the boxing bag or go for a walk in nature – do what you need to do to completely clear your mind of any negative thoughts that will only hold you back. Once you solve your issues completely, you will be ready to move forward and start over.
Be Accountable for Your Failure
Nothing gets accomplished by playing the blame game. But people tend to blame everybody and everything else for their failure instead of blaming themselves. This is a defense mechanism used to make them seem perfect. But nobody is perfect and everyone makes mistakes. The sooner this is recognized, the better you are able to handle entrepreneurship.
When failure occurs, you have to recognize that you are the cause of your failure. You put yourself in the position to fail due to the actions you took, the thoughts that held you back, the people you surrounded yourself with or the lack of work ethic that you operated with. The bottom line is that you were the one who was in control of what you did, how you thought and who you surrounded yourself with. Once you are able to accept this fact, you enable yourself the ability to hold yourself to higher standards – allowing you to produce better results in the future.
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Determine What Went Wrong
Failure is ultimately the result of doing a few or a lot of things wrong. The way you move past failure is by acknowledging exactly what went wrong. The thing about entrepreneurship is that it involves so many actions. So you will need to go back over your entire process to pinpoint the exact cause of your failure. This is not the time to guess.
Your failure can be due to your marketing strategy, sales process, bad products or services, bad communication with your partner or customers, or many other things. When you find out why, you know what mistakes to avoid making in the future. If is far better to know the honest truth of what you did wrong, rather than to keep doing the same mistakes over and over again and not knowing why you cannot be successful no matter how hard you try.
Create a Well-Designed Strategy
Once you have gone through your process of understanding what went wrong, it is now time to move forward towards producing success. This is now the time to eliminate your mistakes and implement a strategy that is more specific and detailed.
The goal of your strategy is to produce success. Going through the pain of failure will help you focus on doing everything right the next time around. You do not want to experience that defeat again, so you will think of every scenario possible, determining how you will move past them if they were to occur.
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Hustle Harder
Failure should awaken your passion for working harder. Nothing is more motivating than falling flat on your face and working to prove to yourself that you can actually produce something that works.
The key to hustling harder is working smarter. You should have learned from your past mistakes how to do this. Not only are you motivated to work harder, but you are also determined to recognize when the presence of a problem abounds. Thus you can quickly find another way when an issue arises.
We all want to avoid failure but we may have to face it when it occurs. The quicker we are able to accept failure and move past it, the sooner we are able to move towards producing successful results.
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