Picking yourself up

Failure is inevitable and having a great team around will make failure quicker or mitigate it, but how you practically deal with failure is the foundation for success.
Working hard at things is one way to succeed, but if you are working hard at the wrong things, success may not come. Learning from failure is the first step to turning it into a possible success. And like working hard, you need to learn the right things about what went wrong. Blaming all the external forces that created the failure is not a good way to go. There will always be the excuse of the wrong time, financial failures, dog ate my homework. The list goes on.
What you need to do is look at everything you did and see what *you* could have done better, faster or not done at all. This may not be clear, but if you really look at what went wrong, you will find that a lot of it would have been down to many things that you shoulda, coulda, woulda.
What you don't need to do is dwell on it or beat yourself up about it. Have a little time to mourn what went wrong and have a small pity party, but don't spend too long. After you have given yourself that. Stand up, dust yourself off and critically evaluate what happened as though it was someone else who did it.
This will allow you to look at it critically and, I hope, constructively. Break it down, look at what went well, look at what went badly. Look at what you should continue doing, what you should stop doing. If you need to get feedback from clients, partners or your team, ensure that you are asking questions that give you those answers. Collate it all together and determine what is useful and what is just moaning and whining.
When you have this list you can determine what you would change for next time. If you have a few things that you think need changing, but don't know which would be best. Be scientific about it and change one thing at a time. Give it a little space and a chance to work, then decide. Move on or keep the change?
What you need to do is keep moving forward, if this didn't work, go back to the drawing board, don't give up. Pivot and change, but don't stop.
Previously posted on Medium. Thanks for reading!
In the simplest terms, I help people to get ready to profitably scale. What you do with a room full of people is very different to how you do it when they cross cities, continents or oceans.

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​Ghilaine Chan
Activating people to work better together and flourish. Working on interesting projects with people I like to work with, strengthening how you motivate yourself and collaborate with others.