Autumn of a loss: A quick guide to deal with failure
Are you trying to launch your venture? Starting a side-project? Creating your own music, a new website, are you learning a new language? Or do you have any kind of project in your life? Well, I’m glad, and I’m rooting for you.
Have you considered the possibility of failure?
Read about failure from someone who already “failed”.
Where do your goals come from?
I have always been proud of not living a “borrowed life”, and not chasing somebody else’s goals, or traditional expectations: finishing college, getting a job, buying a house, marrying, and being successful. I thought I was going against it, looking forward to my own goals, “the online business dream”, living a meaningful life, and not falling into the “rat race” trap.
7 years ago I launched my first business, but I was still chasing a partially borrowed dream.
If you don’t know where your goals come from, you still may be operating from a hurtful and damaging paradigm. These prevent you from seeking your true self.
When planning my venture, I considered the technical aspects I thought were necessary for success. But I didn’t consider the emotional side of it.
No wonder, a couple of months later, I had to move out of my apartment, lost the love of my life, had no job, no money, and no courage, and my newly acquired anxiety and depression were slowing me down and almost took an entire year of my life.
Ask yourself the real purpose behind your goal. Where does it come from? I recommend the book “Start with why” from Simon Sinek to explore in depth the reasoning behind, and the origin of your current goals.
If your motives aren’t well rooted, you’re going to quit the first time you have doubts.
The danger of expectations
Your entire life, you have created and accepted sets of rules, influenced by the world around you, your parents, your own thoughts, your college friends, your geographic environment, religion, the media, the internet, etc. Psychology calls them paradigms.
And these paradigms create expectations about different dimensions of your life.
You have an expectation and a paradigm about money, not about how it truly is, but how you accept it. You have paradigms for success, relationships, spirituality, etc.
Your monkey brain creates new paradigms in response to new events. Your business failed? Then the new paradigm should be that you suck at business and should never try this again.
These paradigms may serve you for a while, but others are preventing you from achieving your goals. Identifying which ones don’t help you at all is a hard task.
For example, I had a wrong paradigm about failure.
The thought of being recognized as a failure by my friends, family, and girlfriend was much stronger than any loss of money, time, or resources.
I had already failed, but instead of moving on right away, I kept suffering for months because of this paradigm, but I was wrong. My loving ones didn’t care at all. I was the same person to every one of them. The prolonged failure only existed in my head.
Confront your paradigms. What would you consider a failure? How would you feel if failure arrived? What would you do in that situation? Definitely get a therapist early in your career.
Credit
How you handle stress, loss, and defeat is a big deal.
Mental paradigms play a huge role in how you deal with stress, loss, and defeat, if you’re incapable of handling stress your health will be severely affected.
During those months I couldn’t manage stress at all, I was having health issues related to high blood pressure.
If you can not handle loss, you will unconsciously sabotage yourself as a defensive response.
Even if my business had become a success, I would have continued to have health issues, because of my lack of emotional maturity, and stress management abilities.
Constantly check your mental and physical health. Accumulated stress can make you age faster and eventually kill you.
Recognize your defeat and move on.
As I mentioned before, I was affected more by what others would think of me, than by my actual failure. This was very dangerous, and it was the first time this happened to me.
I unconsciously made terrible decisions that left me broke, single, alone, and without a job. In retrospect, it is easy to conclude I did that as a defensive move, to not expose myself as a complete failure, but the outcome was worse: I was dragging a totally useless business because of my inability to recognize my defeat.
Consider the opposite had happened: yes, I would be alone and with zero energy, money, or resources, but not clinging to a dead cow. I could still need help moving on, but it would have taken much less time, effort, and resources.
Accept your defeat when it is clear and move on.
Physical activity (+ audio conferences) could help against depression.
The ride goes on! I had a depression that lasted for several months. In the beginning, I was in denial. I was stuck with my past choices and couldn’t wrap my mind around anything.
I understood why people become addicts, and it took me a lot of weeks to make my first move. I no longer had stress, but it was a false state of calmness. You don’t get stressed if you’re secluded from the world.
One day, I started to listen to an audio seminar by Brian Tracy. I had learned about sales, hiring, and management from him in the past, there was a chance I could learn something about this state of mind.
Surprisingly, I started to listen to it every day, even 3 or 4 times a day.
(I wasn’t doing anything else). This made me take a step in the right direction. I started to exercise.
Physical activity stimulates the release of dopamine. Low dopamine levels could cause certain symptoms of depression.
My new state of mind made me take another huge step: going to therapy.
Physical activity + audio conferences can help against depression and other negative emotions and states. Incorporate them to your routine before anxiety or depression kicks in. If you add a therapist to the recipe, you will certainly increase your chances of not getting ill.
Check on your network as soon as possible.
After therapy, I started to see my friends again some of them found my story and experiences very interesting. In summary, my business wasn’t a complete failure, I simply failed at handling my “defeat”.
In reality, I have gained a lot of industry and market insights that I could share with others.
I met the person that would eventually help me get back on my feet. It was a career director from a state university. He didn’t know anything about me but my story of failure, which he also considered a valuable asset to share my insights and newly acquired experience with young potential entrepreneurs.
This eventually gave me the confidence to start over. Before I knew it, I was a subject professor at a prestigious state university.
A former colleague heard about my story and wanted me to join his team as a marketer. A couple of months later, I was giving seminars and keynotes at marketing events, sharing my expertise with others.
You can deal with everything, but not everything at once. Your network might be able to help you, either by hiring you or contacting you with someone else. This works if you have a therapist in your network too! Visit your therapist regularly!
Back to the top: Failure, stress, and loss are still there.
I was back on my feet. A few years later, I launched my second business.
Guess what? Not much has changed around me! Stressful situations are still there, defeat is still a possibility, as well as doubts, fear, etc.
But inside me? A lot has changed. I have a new set of skills that help me live a life of balance. There’s a lot I can still improve because life moves on. You can not let failure stop you from living.
Life is about growing. You can always question your paradigms and learn new things about yourself. “The Only Constant in Life Is Change.”- Heraclitus
Learn from everything; good experiences, bad experiences, external support, your inner thoughts, your paradigms! (Some are good paradigms)
A particular set of soft skills
I couldn’t be happier, I live up to my standards and I’m currently in the process of reframing my current paradigms. The company I work for helps hundreds of people, and I found creative expression as a mechanism to deal with stress and anxiety.
Are you trying to launch your venture? Starting a side-project? Creating your own music, a new website, are you learning a new language? Or do you have any kind of project in your life?
I’m glad that you have considered the possibility of failure. If you’re skilled enough, you will learn from the mistakes you just read, so you don’t have to go through them yourself.
Now take your time, the journey is more important than your goal, understood? Good, meet me at the top.
