Failure never feels good, but trying to dodge it or downplay it keeps you from learning what you most need as an entrepreneur. In this episode, Dan Sullivan and Shannon Waller explore why you should let failure be failure, fully feel the emotion, and then transform that energy into better thinking, better timing, and bigger progress.

Here’s some of what you’ll learn in this episode:

Why people sometimes avoid thinking about a failure.

Why you should allow yourself to fully experience your first failure.

Where entrepreneurs set themselves up for the most unhappiness.

The new Strategic Coach® thinking tool that shows you how you handle your failures and your breakthroughs.

Show Notes:

If you don’t learn from your failure, you’ll fail the same way again.

When you fail, let yourself feel the full negative emotion once, then use that energy to decide what you’ll do differently next time.

A person who keeps failing at the same thing with no learning and no change in behavior becomes a failure in that area.

Repeated failures in the same way can start to erode your sense of who you are as an entrepreneur.

Every failure is sending you a message about your thinking, preparation, or timing, and your job is to pay attention to it.

How you handle your failures and your breakthroughs determines whether you’re actually functioning as an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurism is a daily back and forth between breakthroughs and failures, and both are raw material for new capabilities.

Many people try to avoid intense emotion, but dodging the feeling of failure also cuts you off from the insight it could lead to.

Most people measure their progress against an ideal, but an ideal is not reality; it’s an unreality that guarantees disappointment.

Often the “failure” is not the goal or project itself, but an unrealistic deadline or short game that ignores the actual capabilities and resources you have.

Your emotions aren’t attached to what happens outside you; they’re attached to how you choose to think about what happens, which means you can respond creatively instead of reactively.

Resources:

The Gap And The Gain by Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

What You Can Learn From Failure