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125. 6 Lessons in Failure (and How to Recover) · Burning Brightly

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  Every time there's a problem, There's actually two things happening.
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  Number one is the actual problem, and number two is the meaning I assign to the problem.
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  Be very careful about what meaning you assign to each problem Because a poisonous thought that you attach to a, a problem can cause a lot of issues for you.
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  It can make you stop working on your business because you feel so terrible about that problem, if you're a Latter-day Saint or another woman of faith feeling called to build a business, welcome.
• 0:25
  I'm Bonnie Wiscombe, and each week we'll combine faith and practical business strategy to help you answer that calling with confidence.
• 0:32
  This is Burning Brightly.
• 0:37
  Okay, friends, I have a hilarious story to tell you today about one of my failures, because I think it's so valuable that we talk about the things that do not go right.
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  More experts, I think, need to talk about the ways that they fail and how they come back from it, because that's so much more valuable than talking about what works all the time.
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  Obviously, talking about what works matters, too.
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  But I thought you'd, first of all, get a kick out of my story, and then also we can talk about some of the lessons that have come to me over the years of trying and failing and trying and
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  failing multiple times.
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  All right?
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  So let's talk about what broke for me today.
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  It was so fun.
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  I'm telling you.
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  I really can laugh about it now, but that wasn't always the case.
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  So I am starting a new strategy where I am running ads to a live webinar.
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  So people are opting in via meta ads, and then they're coming directly to a webinar.
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  So these people don't know who I am, they're strangers, and they're coming to a training where I try to help them out.
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  So I went to start the first live webinar of the week, and I clicked the button to start the Zoom call right on time, which is, whatever, mistake number one.
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  I should have tried a little early to make sure everything was working, and the Zoom link was broken.
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  Apparently, when I set up the Zoom meeting via Google Calendar, my integration with Zoom was not firing as it should, and so there was no Zoom meeting.
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  So all of the links that I had sent out to my audience, were not going to work.
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  So here I am frantically at the last second trying to email people.
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  I was sending out text reminders as well, so I'm trying to mass text people saying, "It was the wrong link.
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  Here it is."
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  So then I start the webinar, and nobody is showing up, and I'm thinking, "This is really weird.
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  Where is everybody?"
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  And then I go check my reminder emails and realize that I also goofed there, and not a single one of my reminders went out.
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  Not a single email, not a single text.
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  Somehow, when I was testing them, I changed the trigger for the workflow, and I just never turned the trigger back on, so none of them went out.
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  No one had been reminded, which if you know anything about live events, if people are not reminded, they will not come.
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  So no one was showing up, and then I started playing around with the workflow, seeing if future signups would work, and somehow, I managed to send out all the reminder emails, texts, everything at the exact same time two
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  hours after the webinar.
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  You guys, I can't.
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  I can't...
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  you can't make this stuff up, and you can't not laugh at it.
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  So these people registered for a webinar, got one confirmation email, then no reminders.
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  Then they got a frantic email and text from me the minute the webinar was starting saying, "You got the wrong link," which, in fact, was not the case.
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  They didn't get any links at all, and then two hours later, they, they got a massive spam amount of emails and texts saying, "The webinar's starting in a day.
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  The webinar's starting in an hour.
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  The webinar's starting in one minute."
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  Oh my gosh, it was hilarious and a little demoralizing, but this is what happens in business.
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  We goof.
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  Tech breaks.
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  Things don't work as expected, But the most important thing is what we do afterwards, and that's what we're gonna dive into Thankfully for me, I've now had enough experience in business to realize that these things do not have
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  to derail my business or even my day as they might have years ago.
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  And this is why.
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  I've learned a handful of lessons that I'm gonna teach you today that has made things so much better for when things fail, for me personally, and I hope they do for you as you learn these lessons.
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  All right?
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  Lesson number one: when you know that you have value for people, not intrinsic value, we'll talk more about that later, but when you know you can help people, failure loses some of its power.
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  Why?
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  Because it can't take away the value you can give people.
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  The fact that my emails didn't go out on time mean nothing about how good of a coach I am.
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  They don't mean I can't help people.
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  They just mean I forgot to push a button, right?
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  When you're new to business, it's very easy to tie your confidence to external results.
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  If something works, you're like, "Yay, I'm capable.
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  I'm a good coach," or, "I'm a good business owner."
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  If it doesn't, you start questioning yourself, which is normal, but that eventually goes away when you know the value that you bring to people.
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  In the early days, you might look at a failed launch or a webinar where nobody showed up or a broken website or something as evidence that you're not cut out for this.
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  I told myself that a lot in the early days of business.
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  "Well, this might not be for me because I messed something up."
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  But as you grow in your understanding of how much you can help people, you develop a more stable foundation for that confidence, all right?
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  Failure doesn't nick at your confidence like it used to.
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  You're like, "Oh, well, I screwed up.
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  Okay."
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  Right?
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  Just like an adult is more confident than a child because we have more experience in life, and we know that it doesn't really say anything about us when we goof up.
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  If we need to, we apologize, and then we move on.
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  When you know you have something valuable to offer and you know you can help people, then a technical failure means nothing about how good of a coach you are, okay?
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  If you struggle with this, which we all do, you might wanna ask yourself, "What do I know about the value I bring that maybe I didn't when I started?"
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  Or can a broken piece of technology or a mess up that I made at some point, can it change my ability to help people?
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  And the answer is probably no.
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  I mean, obviously, if you don't send out reminders, people can't come to the webinar, then you can't help them.
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  But that's just a logistical thing that I eventually figured out.
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  So the takeaway for this one is your technology can fail, your marketing can fail, an offer can fail, but none of those intrinsically means that the value you bring to the world has changed.
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  All right, lesson number two, experience has taught me that the good people will still come even if I mess up.
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  Isn't that amazing?
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  People are actually really good at their core.
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  When you mess up, they actually kinda like to see your, your humanity.
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  Have you guys ever followed an expert who never seemed to do anything wrong, and her Instagram feed is perfect, and everything goes exactly as planned, or at least she says it does?
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  It's kinda hard to connect with a person like that, right?
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  It's kinda hard to see yourself in them because you know all your mistakes.
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  The fact of the matter is, the big experts have mistakes too.
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  They just don't share them publicly.
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  I have chosen to share a lot of mine publicly because I think it's important when you're building a business to know that it happens to everyone.
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  So this lesson is a little bit different from the first one, Because in the beginning when you first start a business, you don't have a lot of evidence that things are gonna work out.
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  You think they might, right?
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  You have a business plan or an idea, but you're not exactly sure.
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  You might actually be really scared at the beginning that if you mess up, people will lose trust in you and then no one will buy, and that it might ruin your opportunity.
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  But the fact is, that just is not the case.
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  Like I said, people are really good and they're understanding, and even if you mess up over and over and over, they still keep coming.
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  I have a friend who, has told me about an expert that she follows who messes things up a lot.
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  My friend told me that she has not opened an email from this woman in the last three or four months that has not contained some sort of a typo or a broken link or something that was not perfectly
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  curated.
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  And people are still signing up and still getting help from this woman.
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  They don't actually care, right?
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  Obviously, it gets to a point where your mistakes can be so egregious that it becomes hard to get help from you.
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  We don't want that.
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  But B-minus effort is solid effort.
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  It's okay when we make mistakes, and it doesn't actually mean people don't trust us.
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  Once you start working with real clients, and you'll know this if you already have, and you help people make meaningful change, your confidence in doing that grows dramatically, and their confidence in you grows dramatically as well.
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  You develop these relationship through your work, and you begin to understand that Connecting with these people and helping them is gonna happen if you just keep trying.
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  And they have found you, they have trusted you, they've worked with you, and you know people are gonna keep coming even if you keep goofing up.
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  So one imperfect experience or a dozen imperfect experiences don't erase all the other ways that people can connect with you, right?
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  So yeah, the people that were on my webinar list didn't get the email, but I'm gonna do it again next week and try again, and it'll be fine, right?
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  It's not actually a problem So if this is a problem for you where you start wondering, "Oh, are clients gonna come if I'm messing things up or if I, I make mistakes?"
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  You might ask yourself this, "What have past clients taught me about my ability to help people?"
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  If, even if you've only had free clients.
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  Or, "How has my confidence changed now that I have actual experience helping people?"
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  After I sold my first handful of one-to-one coaching packages, I remember thinking, "Oh, I've got this.
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  People come in, I know how to help them, they pay me money, they walk away happy.
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  Cool.
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  Let's just keep moving forward.
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  Let's keep going no matter how many times I make mistakes.
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  It's, it's working, right?"
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  As you guys know, I often compare business to a science experiment.
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  The marketing, the sales is all experimentation.
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  Every time you try something new in business, you're just testing an idea.
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  So my webinar this week was testing an idea.
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  If I set it up in this way, will it work?
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  Well, yeah, it will if I don't forget to turn the workflow on and, you know, And I troubleshoot all these other things that, that created issues.
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  So sometimes it works perfectly, but often it doesn't.
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  Sometimes something completely unexpected happens, and it's all okay.
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  It just gives you information.
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  It just gives you data.
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  What we need to watch out for is turning that failed experiment into a commentary on our worth.
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  All right?
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  I don't think that a broken Zoom link means anything about me.
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  Could I have double-checked it and made sure that didn't happen?
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  Yeah, but I didn't do that, and it's okay.
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  It's all okay.
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  Instead of saying, Oh, this failed, I'm so frustrated, I broke it," whatever.
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  You can say, "Interesting.
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  That didn't work out the way I expected.
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  What else can we try?"
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  Instead of, "I'm bad at this.
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  I don't know what I'm doing," etc.
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  In the end, a failed experiment just tells us something about the experiment.
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  It doesn't really tell us anything about ourselves And that leads us into lesson number four.
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  We want to make sure we separate the problem from the story we're telling about ourselves Every time there's a problem, There's actually two things happening.
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  Number one is the actual problem, and number two is the meaning I assign to the problem.
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  All right, so let's look at my, quote-unquote, "failures," the goofs that happened this week with my webinar.
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  Number one, I had a broken Zoom link.
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  Okay, that's the actual factual problem.
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  The link didn't work.
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  I could assign lots of different meaning to it.
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  Number one, I could assign the meaning that I'm bad at details.
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  I didn't triple-check the link, and I'm not detail-oriented.
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  Or the meaning could be, "Oh, now I know that integration didn't work correctly.
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  I'm gonna double-check that next time."
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  Do you see how there's a little bit of a different feeling coming out of those two thoughts, right?
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  The first one makes me feel somehow bad, like I should've been more detail-oriented.
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  The second one is just like, "Hmm, now I know that integration sometimes is finicky.
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  I'm gonna triple-check it next time."
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  Be very careful about what meaning you assign to each problem Because a poisonous thought that you attach to a, a problem can cause a lot of issues for you.
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  It can make you stop working on your business because you feel so terrible about that problem, okay?
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  A, a few other examples.
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  Another problem might be my ad didn't get results, and the story you might tell yourself about it is I'm bad at marketing, which is hilarious because you really can control so little about the ads.
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  You just try different copy and try different creative and, and start throwing stuff out there and see what works.
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  Or, I launched something and I didn't sell anything.
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  That's the problem, right, or the experiment.
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  The story you could tell yourself is no one wants what I offer, which is a Just a very victim-based mindset that we really don't want to keep.
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  So don't keep that one.
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  Just watch out for what the factual problem is versus what the meaning is that you assign to it All right, lesson number five.
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  You do not have to solve everything perfectly to move forward.
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  So let's go back to my webinar on Monday.
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  I wanted to run another one two days later, and in order to make sure that was 100% perfect, I was gonna have to recreate the entire workflow.
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  It was gonna be a lot of work.
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  So instead, I just winged it.
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  I just sent out emails manually.
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  I just did things in a way that I knew would work, even if it wasn't the perfect way you cannot master all the technology and learn everything you need to know before taking your first step.
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  That is a surefire way to fail, by doing nothing until you feel 100% ready.
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  It's like parenting, right?
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  If we, none of us ever had kids until we felt 100% ready, we would all be walking around with no children.
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  You will always be learning some new technology.
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  Your platforms will change, integrations will break, processes that worked before won't work now.
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  One example is Facebook ads.
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  I've been running them for a long time, and I feel like For a while there, they were changing every single day.
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  It was driving me crazy.
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  I'd go in there, and one button wouldn't be there that it was, used to be there.
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  We have to constantly iterate and learn and improve.
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  So just take a step, even if it doesn't feel like you understand it perfectly Being a business owner means you have to troubleshoot things you do not understand.
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  And thankfully, we have AI.
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  It helps a little bit, but even AI goes astray.
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  Guess what?
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  AI was the one that told me to push the button that accidentally sent all my reminders out at the same time.
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  So we have to be careful about where we get our advice, and we have to be willing to make mistakes.
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  Otherwise, we'll never take any action at all So resourcefulness matters so much more than perfection.
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  You do not need to know everything before you begin And lesson number six, your ability to recover, like I said, the way you get back up after a problem, is so much more important than avoiding failure in the
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  first place.
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  Avoiding failure in the first place is not possible.
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  In fact, I've mentioned this before, I don't really like to call it failure.
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  I like to just call it mistakes or unexpected results, okay?
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  You cannot build a business that guarantees nothing will ever go wrong.
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  That's just not gonna happen.
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  You're never gonna be certain about the outcome of something.
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  You're never gonna know that it's gonna come off without a hitch.
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  In fact, I'm about 99% sure I can tell you that it will not work perfectly, ever.
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  Maybe if you're really lucky.
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  So here are a few steps you can take When things go wrong, and this is what I kinda went through, without even thinking about it on Monday.
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  Number one, you pause.
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  You just give yourself a moment to feel frustrated.
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  I got mad, I was frustrated, I was angry, and I didn't ascribe any meaning to it.
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  I was just like, "Dang it, why did that happen?"
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  And, and I laughed a little bit.
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  Number two, I got curious.
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  What actually happened?
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  What was the root of the problem?
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  Instead of just going, "Oh, I can't do this, I'm a failure," whatever, I got curious.
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  And then I found the next step to work on, right?
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  Okay, The first thing I can do is fix the Zoom link.
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  That's the most important thing.
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  The next thing I can do is this, right?
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  Identify just one thing you can test or change or ask for help with.
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  And then the last step is just learn and adjust from there, I learned what to do next time and what not to do next time.
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  I learned where to watch out for problems because something did not go right this time.
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  So pause, get curious, find the next step, learn, and adjust.
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  The more you practice this, the less frightening it becomes.
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  Those mistakes and failures become just something to laugh about.
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  You don't stop caring about your business, but you trust yourself enough to respond in a healthy way when something goes wrong.
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  It's the same with parenting.
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  When you're a new parent and your kid scribbles on the couch with a Sharpie, you are gonna lose your ever-loving mind, and you're gonna scream and rant and rage, and you're gonna probably be unkind to your child, and
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  you're gonna be unkind to yourself, and it's gonna be a whole thing.
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  And then when you've been a parent for 20 or 30 or 40 years, you're gonna giggle a little, and you're gonna hug that baby and go, "Well, Mom or Grandma needs to learn to keep the Sharpies up higher,
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  don't I?"
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  Because you've been there and you've seen it before, and you understand that that Sharpie on the couch is, like, the smallest problem that that child could possibly cause.
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  You learn about bigger problems.
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  You learn about the importance of Your value and the value of the other human you're interacting with, it's exactly the same.
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  We're just trying things out, right?
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  And then we learn how to react better because we learn what really matters.
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  In conclusion, what I wanna teach you in this episode is that you don't have to make failure mean more than it actually means.
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  You don't have to blame yourself.
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  You don't have to go down a shame spiral.
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  And maybe it's something much bigger than technology.
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  Maybe you had a client who hasn't succeeded yet, and you're having some drama around that, or maybe you had a client complain about your process, and that made you feel really bad.
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  It's all gonna be all right.
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  It's all part of the process, and it doesn't have to mean anything about you.
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  But it can cause you to change some of your processes or strategies or how you look at things because maybe there is some improvement to be made.
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  We can all improve.
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  Just be careful about making it mean more than it has to Here are a few questions to ask yourself if it feels like your problem is weighing heavy on your mind.
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  What if this is a problem to solve rather than a sign to quit?
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  So very often, especially in my early years, for me and my clients, I would have a problem happen and think, "Gosh, maybe I just won't do this."
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  I was about five steps away from quitting all the time, right?
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  What if you just knew there was gonna be 100 problems between you and success, and you were gonna have to solve all of them?
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  Would that change how you react when the problems come up?
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  What if you can learn something from this without judging yourself for it, right?
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  That becomes so much more of a compassionate view to have for yourself and would probably be a little bit more like how you would approach this problem if someone else had caused it.
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  Maybe you're a solopreneur, but let's pretend that your assistant had caused this problem or an employee versus you.
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  Would you treat that person any differently?
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  Would you be kinder to them than you are to yourself?
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  That might be something to think about.
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  What if the result of this one attempt, this one experiment, doesn't get to determine what you believe about the future?
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  What if this failure means nothing about how you're gonna succeed in the future?
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  It's just today's failure The fact of the matter is God calls us to paths that are hard and rocky.
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  I recently heard a talk from a church leader where she said that sometimes we believe that the gospel is like an umbrella.
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  It's gonna keep us from getting wet, and it's just not.
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  We're gonna get wet in this life, in business, in our families, everywhere.
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  Hard things come, storms come, sometimes we get pelted, she said.
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  But instead, it's like the solid foundation.
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  When you have the solid foundation of knowing that God called you to your business, it doesn't matter what rain comes.
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  You're like, "All right, we're getting wet today," And it doesn't have to mean anything about me or about feeling inspired to do this thing.
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  You are not going to be a woman who never fails, but you can become one who knows how to respond when failure comes, or one who knows the kind of value she brings to people, who trusts what she's
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  learned and trusts that she knows how to help people.
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  She can look at a disappointing result with curiosity and maybe even humor and can be willing to try again.
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  Your business is just something you're building.
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  It's not a measure of your worth.
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  It's just a fun experiment where we try and we fall and we get back up again All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful for you.
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  I would love to hear about your failures.
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  Come to Instagram or Facebook and tell me where you failed last.
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  I would love to hear.
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  It's my favorite thing to celebrate failures because it means you are trying.
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  All right, friends, talk to you next time.
• 18:36
  If today's episode encouraged you, my book, Burning Brightly, is the next step to answering God's call to build a business through faith and confidence.
• 18:43
  Grab your copy and the free companion workbook through the link in the show notes.
• 18:47
  The world needs more women willing to burn a little brighter.