Start With A Win - Conquering the Fear of Failure

Episode Date: July 2, 2018

Our topic on this episode of the Start with a Win podcast is conquering the fear of failure. Adam outlines the 4 steps to failing better and not being discouraged from continuing to try.Accepting failure – Recognize that it has happened and that you need to set aside your ego so you can get over the feeling of failure.Taking failure out – Do some kind of significant mourning action that will create closure for you: take a walk or a run, meditate, apologize to others involved, cry it out, or whatever works best for you and the situation.Learn from the failure – Take the time to debrief what caused the failure to occur, where the missteps occurred, and how this failure can be avoided in the future.Make something from the failure – Recognize that failure is not the endgame, so you shouldn’t treat it like one. Do not be afraid to get back in the game and continue failing forward, always improving yourself and the world around you by creating better methods of communication, structure, and planning.Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/adamcontosREMAXCEO/https://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/

Atop of the 12th floor of the RE-MAX World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With A Win with CEO Adam Kantos. Hey everybody, Adam Kantos here at RE-MAX World Headquarters with the Start With A Win podcast. Looking at our beautiful Denver downtown skyline, sitting here with producer Mark. How are you, Mark? Fantastic. Awesome. So glad to be here. Excited about today's topic too. We all have to talk about failure, right?

Yes, we do. Oh man. Yeah. And last time we began the podcast with Start With A Win, that was episode one. This is episode dos. Boom. Yeah. We're twice as good as we were before, man. Look at that. We're evolving. That's a win. There it is. We started with it just now. There you go. This podcast has started with a win. What do you know? So today we're talking about conquering the fear of failure. Everybody fails. In fact, you just look back through history and you can find some great

quotes like C.S.wis failures are finger posts on the road to achievement you got to fail in order to achieve right yeah and then even like michael jordan you know he had a rough go at trying to make a basketball team yeah i heard when he was like first starting out like nobody wanted him and yeah like he wasn't that great in college and yep he kept failing forward. Yeah. And eventually, he got there. In fact, I think it was he invited one of the coaches that said,

you'll never make it to his Hall of Fame induction. He said, I want you to see this. But he had some failures in his life. In fact, he said, I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something, but I cannot accept not trying. That's the thing. You just got to keep going forward because failure is part of trying, right? And then speaking of trying, Samuel Beckett says,

ever tried, ever failed, no matter. Try again, fail again, fail better. Failures happen in business. They happen in life. They happen in relationships. It's how do you recover from them? We got to accept that we fail. That's a big key component. And really step one to success is accepting failure. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, it is. It's interesting because you don't think of it like that. You don't think like

successful equals failure, right? Yeah. When you really look at it, it starts to make sense where it's inevitable that you're going to fail, right? It's inevitable that something's not going to go your way. And how you deal with that, how you channel that energy is what's going to happen next. Yeah. You know what stands in the way of that? Ego.

That's it. That is the only hurdle to getting over failure. Really? Yeah. Isn't that bizarre? Yeah, it is. It's an intangible. And then it's like you're your own worst enemy, right?

Totally. Because you're getting in your own way of your own success. Yep. It's the number one reason why people fail and stay as a failure is because their ego gets in the way of them going, okay, hit the reset button, get past this bad boy. And I'm good. I'm good. Time to move on. And that's it. It's a personal thing. So get over your failure. Yep. You know how you do that? How do you do that? Take it out, buddy. That's the second thing. So first thing to consider is accept that you'll

fail. The second one is take it out. And what do you mean by take it out? It's like mourning, if you will. If you're sad, you kind of have to get over the mourning. You got to take it out. You got to maybe go for a walk, cry it out, meditate, do some pushups. I don't know what it is. It's different for everybody. It might be going and apologizing or something like that, but you've got to take it out. You've got to take an action to get past the failure. And that action creates the closure for you in the failure. It's like a checklist.

All right, failure, check. Step two is take it out. Do something. Because we have to close that loop in our mind that I'm past the failure now. I'm going to go cry it out. Do something. Because we have to close that loop in our mind that I'm past the failure now. I'm going to go cry it out. Now, here's the downfall of that. When somebody has rage to try and take it out,

they're not taking out their failure, they're perpetuating the failure. Temper tantrum, that post on social media that they wish that they hadn't done or something like that. The email they wish they would have just drafted. Yeah, exactly. Send it to yourself, right?

Or just write it down on a piece of paper and mail it to yourself. But it's, I mean, you got to get past it. But there's a right way and a wrong way of doing that. You know, assaulting somebody or threatening somebody or whatever it might be. Insulting somebody. All those things are ways that people try and take out their failures typically. They blame something on somebody else and try to take it out that way, wrong way. So it's getting over it.

There's a forgiveness process that happens. You're forgiving yourself for your failure instead of blaming somebody else and handing the blame onto them. But ultimately, got to get past it. Yeah. Mourn it. Mourn it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's natural. It is a human process. Yeah. But do something. You know, draw a picture. Draw a big heart on a piece of paper or something like that.

I love my failure. And then crumble it up and throw it away. That's right. Yeah. It's gone. Next thing, we got to learn from it, baby. Learn. Failure is an education. The best school, right? That's it. The school of life, the hard knocks. School of hard knocks. I mean, that's probably where that came from. So if you take during the learning process and debrief your failure, you'll learn so much.

Write it down. I failed at this. Maybe your failure is you got a speeding ticket. That's a failure. You weren't paying attention or you're doing something stupid or not following the rules or didn't even notice. Maybe you just didn't notice that the speed limit changed. You got a speeding ticket. Okay, I would call that a failure.

It's going to cost you something. Not exactly what you want to do happen, but, all right, what happened? You don't pound on the steering wheel and go, all right, I'm over it. I mean, you know, figure it out. Go take it out with some push-ups or whatever it is. Pay your fine, something like that. You know, or contest it.-ups or whatever it is. Pay your fine. Something like that. Or contest it.

I don't know if you didn't do it. But you've got to learn from it. Write it down. Debrief yourself and figure out what can you learn from this. There's a speed limit sign right there. I shouldn't be speeding. Or maybe I was road raging. Maybe I was in a hurry.

Maybe I could have left home sooner or something like that. That's why most people get tickets is they're in a rush or they're just not paying attention or maybe they don't care. Or let's say a business failure. Lost a client. You hear that one a lot. Lost a client. Not a good thing.

Losing money for your company, what have you. Why? Get over it. Go grab a soda, a beer, I don't know what, and then figure out, mourn it, and then debrief it, and figure out what you lost on it. Learn from that. It's an expensive education, but it's one you shouldn't have to take again. Right, exactly. Well, it seems too, I mean, I think about, I have other friends who are entrepreneurs and business people, and you hear them say, okay, I made this

huge mistake and I lost this client, or now I have to pay back this client monies or whatever it is. I look at that and I say, well, that's awesome. It sucks that that happened, but then it's also awesome because you no longer will make that mistake again. And you failed, and so now how can I learn from that failure and adjust and then go out, get a new client, and then do it right? Yeah, exactly. I'll be the first one to say, I fail. I have.

I will continue to fail. People go, I don't want to hear that. That guy's the CEO. He's going to fail. Well, we're not trying hard enough if we don't fail every now and then. That's how we build a business. That's how we grow what we're doing, grow our network, grow the assistance, the services that we provide to our customers, is you have to test things. You have to fail.

You have to fail intelligently. You can't fail recklessly in business. If you are, you're not going to be in business very long. But ultimately, you've got to understand it's going to happen calculated failures you got to build them into your budget so uh you got to build them into your life but if you don't get past them learn from them make something from it what what was the point you might as well close your doors you're not getting anywhere it's just like a relationship. First time you have an argument with people,

do you throw in the towel and go, all right, we're done. I'm out the door. We're done. I wouldn't be married as long as I am if that was the case because I failed many a time in conversations. And if I'm not willing to go back and apologize,

get over my failure and learn from it, guess what I didn't do again? That. So that's how it works. Yeah. How do you think some people get over that fear? Because I think some people don't start because of that fear of failure. One of the big ones is the ego. They don't do it because they think that failure is an end game. Failure is not an end game unless you're skydiving or something like that. You can only fail at that once.

Right. Yeah. Failure is not an end game. And people that look at it like an end game, treat it like an end game. And they're the ones who like an end game, treat it like an end game. And that's, they're the ones who can't move on from it and they can't get over it. You can't walk back into the same situation if you haven't gone through these steps of mourning it, doing something about it, you know, either for yourself to get over the failure or for the person that you failed to, you know, it takes some discussion, some communication, some emotional intelligence, empathy, things like that, and then figuring out what did you learn from it before you move on.

And people fear it because they don't know what's on the other side of that. They don't know what the unknown is there. Fear is false evidence appearing real. Take a deep breath, go, all right, I screwed that up. Be big enough to admit that. And sometimes, you know, it might not be entirely your fault. Or if it's your business failure, but it's not your fault, guess what?

It's still your fault. Right. Your business, if you're a member of the team, team loses, every member of the team lost. Okay. That was their failure. You got to own it. And you know, I run a company, something happens in this company, whether or not I had my hand in that process, that's my failure. I own it and got to be big enough to admit to it and move on, take the consequences, get going. So that's how it works. That it so yeah it is and here's the cool part

the way that you determine your failures is how you move on i mean that's that's it you got to get up got to dust yourself off and get back on the horse you failed as riding the horse and got thrown off or whatever guess what it's your fault not the horse's fault right horse was doing the horse stuff you came off the horse you got to get up okay what did i do i i zigged when i should have zagged or something like that i don't know i'm not that much of a horse guy but i can tell you i've you know seen people fall off a horse before yeah you got to get up and get back on it and learn from what you did. You know, same way you crash on your motorcycle or you fail at a test.

Say you're in school. Fail at a test. All right, why did I fail? You just can't go, oh, that was a stupid test. Not getting over it. Okay? But you got to fix it. You got to move on.

Failure is a forward process. You got to move on. Failure is a forward process. You got to fail forward. In fact, think about this. Did you know that every time you walk, you're failing to stand? You're falling over. I didn't know that. You're falling forward, man. Yeah.

You can stand there. That's true. Yeah. You lean forward and you got to put a leg out there. Otherwise, you're going to hit the ground. So you're failing forward. That makes me think about, you know, like a baby, right? They're constantly falling and tumbling into things and, and learning how to crawl and then learning how to walk. And, you know, they just keep pushing no matter how much

failure is happening. And then all of a sudden they're running, you know, and I think you apply that to your own life. It's like, it's going to be clunky and difficult. You're starting a business or you're doing a new venture, whatever that is. And you're not going to do it perfect. But if you keep getting up, keep moving, keep pushing forward, all of a sudden you hit that stride and things will be good, you know? That's it. Running, you're failing pretty fast.

Yeah. So, but you're right. Yeah. I mean, how does a baby learn to walk? They learn how to catch themselves while they're falling. Yeah. Failing to stand. That's it.

And they're catching themselves. So, I mean, it's just so cool when you break down failure, it's typically, it's a breakdown. It's really all it is. Yeah. It's either a breakdown in communication. It's a breakdown structurally all it is. It's either a breakdown in communication. It's a breakdown structurally, a breakdown in planning. And you could pretty much tie it

into any of those three things, you know, breakdown in parts and technology and what have you, if it's mechanical. But ultimately it's a breakdown. What failed? What stopped?

Debrief that stuff and get moving. The same way with business. You look at product launches, things like that. Why do they fail? Usually, it's just one component. It's not like a total failure. It may be the market. It may be part of the product. It may be the marketing. Who knows? But you just can't throw in the towel go alright I'm done yeah go back and adjust make that stuff work and you're better off for it so it's you know in business it's like salespeople you know in the next episode we're gonna talk about this but but salespeople, when they fail, it's for typically one of three reasons. And I'm going to get into that on the next episode, but you got to fail every day.

When you're in sales, you got to look for those no's. Finding as many no's as you can leads to a yes, right? Yeah. Having enough of those and understanding the three reasons why salespeople fail, help you fail less, help you be more successful. Well, cool. Adam, thanks so much. Failing, it's part of winning. That's it.

Fail forward, my friend. Thank you so much for joining us today. Make sure to head over to startwithawin.com to get more great content. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Adam on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And remember, start with a win.