What Have You Failed At Lately?
Does the fear of failure prevent you from trying new things, personally or professionally? The greatest successes in this world were almost always preceded by lots and lots of failures. It’s learning to look at failure as a stepping stone to success that helps us succeed. If we don’t try anything new, we can’t experience new and better results.
Listen to this new 9-minute episode for some ideas that may help you look at failure in a different light.
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– What have you failed at lately? Want to find out what I’m talking about? Listen to this episode. Hey, it’s Alan Berg, welcome back to another edition of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. What have you failed at lately? The reason I’m asking that question is because failure is one of the steps to success. Failure is something that we need to come across in order to know that we’re trying things, that we’re trying new things, because they don’t always work. It’s the fear of failure that stops us from trying things, which stops us from achieving the success that we really could. I learned about this many different ways.
One of them was, I’ve mentioned before that I did Taekwondo. Now, I don’t know if you had heard that, but I started when I was 39, not when I was 9 not when I was 19, when I was 39. And I remember in this adult class that we had that the master would ask us to try a certain type of a, let’s say a kick, or a punch, or maybe to break a board a certain way, and we’d never seen it done. He didn’t show us doing it, he just described to us what to do and he said, okay, who wants to try? And half the class would go, I’ll try, and half the class would go, I can’t do that. And he’d say, well, why? How do you know you can’t do it? You’ve never tried. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just can’t do that, and that was already failure. It was failure for not even trying. Now the other half of us would go about trying. Sometimes we’d succeed, sometimes we wouldn’t, sometimes we would fail, and we’d do it again, and we’d do it again, and we’d do it again. And the key is the mindset of I won’t even try is the mindset that keeps back the success that you could be having.
So what are you afraid of? What’s the failure that you’re afraid of? I just went through this with my son. He was looking at changing jobs, and we went through, okay, what are the positive things? But also what’s the worst that could happen? And the worst that could happen wasn’t so bad. So yeah, he’s in a new job, right? So that’s what it is. But I think about the things that I’ve tried, I think about the marketing pieces, or the marketing that I’ve tried that didn’t work. And yeah, it cost me some time, it cost me some money, but I’m still here, and I’m succeeding because of the times where it did work, where that new messaging did work, where that new marketing piece did work, where going to a conference that I’d never been to before, giving it a try, trying a new audience, maybe, you know, maybe that’ll work, but I won’t know if I don’t go there.
I think about a lot of the international travel that I’ve done, and I’ve done it because the first time somebody asked me to come and speak in Ireland, and Annie Byrne, if you’re listening, thank you, that was you, and back in 2011 or 2012, it’s because of that that I met some folks over there who then invited me to speak in Ireland, and in Dubai, and in India, and going on from all the other opportunities I’ve had around. But the opportunity is not the success, the success is seeing the opportunity and then deciding what you’re going to do, and then choosing that path and then owning the failure. And that’s another part of this what have you failed at? Can you own the failures? Can you say yes, that was me, I’ve failed? Or are you always blaming other people?
And the thing is I’ve learned to own my failures because owning the failure allows me to own the successes, because if I can’t own the failures, if I have to blame other people when it doesn’t go right, how can I really take the credit when things do go right? Because other people are involved in that as well. So am I going to share the credit too? Well, yeah, I’m not afraid to share the credit either because very rarely do we do things and it’s just us on our own. But I’ve failed at things. One, a funny one here, if you’re listening to the podcast, I did a podcast and it was based upon the fact that one of my clients asked me about “How many phone calls did you ask your sales reps to do when you were VP of sales at The Knot?” And I said, I didn’t, I didn’t do that because if you measure phone calls, you get phone calls. I measured sales and profits, and that’s what we got because that’s what we measured.
And I put this episode out, and it’s very well received, but the title, I didn’t think about it when I put it out, the title says, “You get what you measure,” oh no, sorry, it says “Just because you can measure it “doesn’t mean you should.” Some of you are chuckling right now. When I wrote that I didn’t chuckle, because I knew what I meant, and there were other possible meanings to that. That’s not what I meant. Now, was that a failure? Yes and no, because when my wife saw that she said, why did you put that out? Why didn’t you show me that? But what then happened was people started posting funny things when I posted it on social, and it turned into this interaction with people in a good, positive way, even though I was the fall guy for that, and I take full credit for being the fall guy for that, because it was mine, it was me. I own it, I own that.
But we turned that, what do they say? Turned the lemons into lemonades. So what have you failed at lately? What have you tried something different? Maybe it’s a different package, a different service, a different pricing structure, right? Raising your prices or changing your prices is always scary, and the failure isn’t that someone says no, the failure is when not enough people say yes, or when you don’t own those new prices to the point where the confidence doesn’t come through. I’ve seen that happen where people raise their prices, and they’re not confident in that new price, so when they say it to someone, they’re not saying it with the big confidence, and people are feeling that trepidation, and then they’re not buying because they don’t feel you’re confident, because we know that confidence sells. So what have you tried that you’ve failed? I mean, I also learned a long time ago that being a wallflower, because many of you might find this hard to believe, but I was a shy child, and I was a wallflower, and I would watch people doing things because I didn’t want to try. I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to put myself out there. I didn’t want to look silly. And then I realized the people doing are almost always having more fun than the people watching.
So is it a failure to go out on the dance floor and not know that dance, and look a little silly, or is it a failure to never step onto the dance floor in the first place? And Rob Ferre if you’re listening, he’s got a presentation. Be the first on the dance floor, always be the first on the dance floor. And that’s Rob’s philosophy, get out there and do it, and I agree wholeheartedly with that. So what have you failed at lately? What are you not doing right now because you’re afraid of failure and think about what’s the worst that could happen? Right, I might have mentioned this before in an episode, I went skydiving for my 50th birthday, and my friends and I have t-shirts that say “Skydiving, what’s the worst that could happen?” Now, we know there’s a really bad worst that could happen there, but we bought those after we came down, so that was okay. But it’s funny, but by the same token, where’s my balance If the worst that could happen is I lose little time, or I lose a little money, or I lose little ground? I didn’t lose my life like I possibly could have, I guess, skydiving, but yeah, we had those bases covered. It was tandem, and we had experienced people with us. So yeah, we were pretty well covering our bases, but what have you tried that you failed? It just didn’t give you the result you want.
ßA friend of mine, speaker friend, Bruce Hale told me one time, “Failure is just an unintended consequence.” You tried something, you didn’t get the result you want, and then very often you get a different result that might even be better. And therefore he also said “Success is an unintended consequence,” because sometimes you get a success when you were trying for something else and you get a better result that you weren’t intending. And the world is filled with products and things that came out of technically failures because the original intent wasn’t achieved, but something else was achieved that was better.
So what’s holding you back now? if you can’t think of something you’ve failed at lately, maybe you’re not trying enough new things. Maybe you’re not pushing yourself outside your comfort zone enough. And I’m not saying go crazy, but do something, push yourself a little bit, because then you grow, the boundaries move out. When they move out, you grow, and that success could be personal, it could be business, but there’s a success there for you. So let me know what your next failure is. Thanks, thanks for listening.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
- Apple Podcast:
- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
- Pandora:
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