What does it take to be a truly successful woman? At the top of the list is the ability to take risks. But if you risk, it may not always work out. So to be truly successful, women must have the ability to not only tolerate, but learn from their mistakes.
I’ve made mistakes and had some whopping failures. Like when I rented seminar space at the Hilton for a big seminar and then failed to market it adequately. (Looking back, I don’t think my mailing list was large enough to support a seminar of that size. There is a learning!) When I ask women about their business failures, they often look at me blankly, or they simply recoil. Failure! What a loaded word! We don’t want to talk about them, let alone brag about them. But failures are simply mistakes—and we all know logically that you can’t really learn anything without making mistakes. Mistakes can be our greatest teachers.
The bottom line is that often times women don’t risk enough to make any big mistakes in the first place. If you can’t easily come up with some whopping failures—things you tried and didn’t work—that is a sign that you are not taking big enough risks to begin with. We should all have failures that we are proud of. They are badges of honor that show we are out there taking risks and trying to move forward.
It’s semantics, I know but I feel compelled to comment on this…
Similarly to “mistakes” as in “feeding the goddess of mistakes”, I am not a fan of using the word “failure”. As a coach, I can’t see that it does any good, for women especially, to emphasize the word “failure” in respect to any aspect of themselves? We are our own worst critic as it is.
Failure, in my mind, connotes an end, a loss, a non-performance, a lack of success. With that thinking, I haven’t had any “failures” in my business but I sure have had a lot of “learning experiences” or “tests” as Dan Kennedy might say. Things that we tried and didn’t work or were okay enough at the time aren’t “failures” in my mind. Would someone classify my 6 iterations of my business card over as many years as “failures”? Maybe but I wouldn’t. Each card is better than the last. I think “failure” is a loaded word that doesn’t allow us to see the potential for greatness that we have because, when we use it, we are too locked into the mistakes that we have made.