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Louise Barkle

Are you embracing your failures?

Pssttt - it's the secret sauce to achieving success.


A few years ago, I came across someone who is now a hugely successful business owner and wondered how he was so down to earth and committed to sharing his knowledge with other business owners. It was inspiring and a rare quality to find.


A little while after I had fangirled this person, I discovered that the first iteration of his business was a complete failure, he'd closed the doors, went and got a job for a couple of years before trying again. I'm sure some of us have felt that way more than a few times. But what I learnt from seeing him again recently was that although he had failed and then succeeded, he still had this shame that he carried around with him, that he didn't want anyone else to experience in their business - hence why he freely gives his time now to talk to other business owners. I'll admit I fangirled all over again with his honesty. It got me thinking... Truly failing or feeling like a failure in business often gets swept under the carpet. People talk about it, but do they go deep on the pain and how they built themselves again to take the next step? I don't feel they do, and to this day, I still don't know how that business owner did it either.


This got me thinking, it's time we flip that script! Start celebrating and openly sharing our failures as part of the rollercoaster ride of running a business.


Why? Because they teach us lessons, we become resilient, our creative and innovative brains kick in to find new solutions and rules to running our business, and when we share them truly and openly we see our community full of authentic connections, who often have a wide variety of ideas or kind things to say to lift us when we need it the most.


As most of us know, when we're in the trenches it can be so lonely and isolating, which makes it hard to celebrate our failures. But we need to feel the failure and grow from it, so we can ultimately grow our businesses.


So let's raise our champers to failure and failing forward – not as a stumbling block, but as a sign of our courage, resilience, and growth in business!

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