Don't Let Fear of Failure Slow Your Business Growth

Is your fear of failure causing you to turn down opportunities that could help your business grow? Of course you want to be smart about your business, but for it to grow, sometimes you have to take risks. Get past your fear of failure so you don't hold your business back.

Failure – it’s one of people’s biggest fears in the business world. They fear it so much they end up running from anything that seems like it would lead to it. This causes them to miss great opportunities that could have resulted in big success Instead of running away from failure – what if you ran to it? What if you took every opportunity, and didn’t worry about it failing? This would likely lead to many failures, but some really great growth opportunities for your business.

The problem is getting over the high anxiety of failure. The good news is that all it takes is changing your perception, and using failure to help you rather than hurt you. This is how you can do it.

Turning Failure into Business Success
The reason you fear failure is because you believe it’s a bad thing. That makes sense since even as a child you were probably told doing something incorrectly was bad. Now is the time to look at not doing something right as a good thing.  

Working with Failure
Your first reaction to failure is probably anger and frustration. After you get over that, you become depressed. Why? Because you wanted a different outcome, and you didn’t get it. You’re mad you didn’t get it and you’re really sad that you’re going to have to end that dream.

Instead of ending it, see how you can change things. For example, you tried a new marketing plan. You made NO money from it. Instead of dropping it, why not figure out what made it unsuccessful and change that part of it?

The more you fail, the more you learn. Take the lessons you get from the fails, and use them to do something different. It doesn’t have to be something radically different, just enough that you may end up with different results. Just because something doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean it failed. Something only fails when you abandon it completely. Moving forward with whatever you’re doing shows you’re working on making it a success.  

Moving Forward with Failure
Sometimes, you have to abandon what hasn’t worked out. This doesn’t mean you can’t use what you learned. For example, you have a client who is unhappy with your work. It was unsatisfactory because the client believes it was low quality or didn’t follow the instructions given. You can take this information and beat yourself up, or you can move on and use it to better your business.

If the client believes it was low quality, find out why. Take that information and use it to ensure other work you do for other clients isn’t the same. If the work didn’t follow instructions, be sure to be more mindful of instructions from other clients. This may have been a good lesson in how you need to step that part up, which will make your others clients happy with you.

When you are able to learn from unhappy clients, failures won’t make you feel so bad. Not only that, they will help you do more for others, which will in turn lead to more referrals and business. If you’re able to do that, those failures turn into more money! Don’t look at failure like it’s a horrible thing that will destroy you. Look at it as an opportunity to grow your business.

All you have to do is step back, look at what happened, and plan what you’re going to do to keep the same thing from happening. It’s all part of the growing pains of business. Learn to love it.