Do You Know Why You Failed?
We can either cope with life or participate in it. Those who are coping, usually do not scale up and start looking out for contentment, satisfaction, solace, retirement, sabbaticals, etc. Those who participate, harness the abundance that life offers. They fall and grow with the rhythm of life. Life is an act of destruction and creation resulting in abundance at all times. It is a continuous motion of change that never results in permanent death.
While preaching is easy, implementing this is where one has to sweat it out. Just one worry creeps in, and the wisest of all may lose their sanity and start projecting a doomsday. Just one hurt is enough to create disbelief. Just one reprimand is enough to trigger rejection or revenge. Dealing with Failure is one of the toughest things that humans have to face. The inability to deal with failure is a mistake that has cost the most brilliant of humans to lose track of their ingenious endeavours. This is one of the most common and deadly mistakes of all.
Experiencing Failure is Important
Once a Vision gets formed, the key lies in its implementation. Remember, if you are entitled to make mistakes, then your people are entitled to make mistakes as well. If situations and circumstances can overwhelm you and your plans, then these may overwhelm others also. If you have never faced a defeat or a failure earlier, then this may be a good time to start experiencing it. The same is true for your people as well. Some of your people are brilliant and privileged to have succeeded in whatever they put their minds to, or so they think. This may be a good time for them to experience failure.
It is how you deal with failure that gets you to your destination. Humans are so programmed to feel rejection, despondence, timid, small and inadequate, that these feelings get ignited the moment they face failures. And when they don’t face failures, they worry about it or remain anxious and stressed thinking of it. I call all of this a mistake. And mistakes can be rectified.
Identifying the reasons and overcoming your failure!
Think and introspect around the following points to understand and rectify your mistakes. Remember your answers lie with yourself alone.
1. Feeling Over-Responsible for things gone wrong
When you very strongly feel responsible for things that went wrong. Being plagued by self-doubt and low self-worth can both be a cause as well as a consequence of this. This is usually overcome by people by blaming others or external factors and situations. This is an easy approach to live with oneself. It is always easier to blame others and difficult to look inwards. Looking inwards does not imply only the aspect of knowing where “we” have been wrong, but also how to handle the emotions arising inside us out of failure.
2. Feeling lonely amongst a group of mediocre people
Looking at the people around us, many of us feel we are surrounded by mediocrity. This is the top reason cited for most failures. The question that such people need to answer is, “why did you decide to sail to a destination through rough seas, when you knew your people were mediocre?
Whenever you feel lonely in a sea of people wondering who should you talk to because people are not as intelligent as you are, you must understand that you have an inner inability to deal with your own failure.
3. Not reaching out for help in time or at all!
Most people have a habit of not reaching out at all or not reaching out in time. I still recall an instance where this particular gentleman came to me for advice on his new joint-venture he intended to sign with an Italian company. After discussion and deliberation, he went away saying he understood what he needs to do. In a months time, I received a call from Milan with him at the other end requesting me to fly over urgently. When asked for the reason and current situation, he explained the terms that he had agreed to with the company and to my surprise, those were exactly opposite to what he had understood in our meeting.
The reason why he did that was, an impulsive decision, driven by his fear which had compelled him to agree to such terms that would ruin the project. And now, he needed me to come over to help him rectify and mend the situation. It was already too late. He lived with that mistake for more than 14 years of his life in that venture. Since he knew his own personality was driven by fear and impulse, If only he had reached out in time!
4. Overestimating your people and yourself
Most failures are caused by the fact that people overestimate themselves and their people. Inability to deal with failures also comes from this overestimation. When one just can’t see the situation objectively and ends up blaming situations and other people. Their initial overestimation about their own abilities, their people’s abilities, about markets, number of favorable responses from customers, etc. become the cause of failures. Later they are unable to cope with it simply because they have always considered themselves extremely good.
5. Making too many assumptions
Whenever plans are created on an excel sheet and on powerpoint presentations, they sound nice. Execution makes people realise that the smooth looking road is in reality like the lunar surface, full of craters.
Common assumptions like people will join us when we need them to, people will deliver because they are hired and paid, we will be able to motivate them, customers will like our product, market will understand our marketing campaigns as we understand it, people will pay, our machines will actually deliver, suppliers will supply on time, we will produce the right quantity with the right quality, the weather will support our activity, people do not tire, people remain disciplined, etc. are amongst the countless assumptions we make while making our plans.
6. Not having any faith in Grace
While having faith and confidence in ourselves is imperative for success, along with all the intelligence, efforts and hard work invested into our projects and life, the fact remains that without Grace we do not get the required outcomes. No one can invoke Grace as their right, yet it is available in abundance to everyone as long as their conduct within themselves and towards others remains Graceful, when you do something with the correct “Intent” you are bound to have grace by your side, slowly each failure leads you to an even bigger success.
This was the 8th of 10 mistakes an entrepreneur should avoid while scaling up!
Tune in every Monday to follow this series.
Here are the links to previous mistakes:
1. Lust: https://www.skc.world/your-lust-can-destroy-your-business/
2. Worrying instead of thinking: https://www.skc.world/if-you-worry-too-much-you-are-making-a-huge-mistake/
3. Entrepreneur not aligned with his people: https://www.skc.world/5-reasons-why-your-people-dont-listen-to-you/
4. Emotional Vulnerability: https://www.skc.world/your-low-emotional-consciousness-is-making-you-vulnerable/
5. Baseless Assumptions: https://www.skc.world/why-are-we-unable-to-execute-our-business-plan/
6. Personal Inconsistency: https://www.skc.world/6-simple-hacks-to-becoming-consistent/
7. Vision: https://www.skc.world/set-a-vision-which-is-truly-your-own-do-not-fall-into-a-trap-2/
If you truly want to eliminate these mistakes from your life and business, the explore SKC programs! Click here to explore.
