By Sara Urquhart. Photography of everything is okay concept store.
Things get hard when you’re building a business, and you’ll likely find many opportunities to practice getting up again after you’ve fallen flat on your face.
Returning to your failure is hard, but if you do it in a healthy way, it becomes another opportunity to refine your business. Ask yourself how the situation could have gone better and if there’s anything you can do to improve it.
These are important conversations for your personal growth, and essential conversations if the failure involved sponsors or collaborators. If you’re going to survive as an entrepreneur, you have to communicate with others when you mess up. Frank, honest conversations allow you to own up to your failure and find ways to move on.
Having a good listener around can also help. Whether it’s a spouse, a blogging friend, or your sister, sharing with someone in your life can help you stay solution-focused. Your listener’s job isn’t to solve the problem, although questions like, “Are you being too harsh?” or “Could you think about this differently?” can really help. Sometimes feeling validated and getting out of your own head is all you need to see the next step.
We’re often tempted to ignore other things that are difficult—like questions we don’t know the answer to, or angry emails. Instead of addressing them, we might just hold onto these burdens and let them weigh us down. I’ll sometimes allow myself a few days to avoid a difficult situation or an angry letter but I always schedule a time to deal with it. I might set aside an entire morning to tackle complications. There’s no pretending—it’s not a pleasant morning, but I feel so good when I am finished.
