“There’s no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love. There is only a scarcity of resolve to make it happen.” – Wayne Dyer
People fail for many reasons. Here are just a few:
● They are listening to the “wrong” people. They learn and take advice from people who don’t even have what they want.
● They have a low teachability index. They are not willing to accept change; they are not willing to give up on old patterns of thinking.
● They spend too much time on the how. They worry about details of how their plan can’t happen and how they don’t have the means to do it.
● They don’t spend enough time on the inner work. They don’t invest enough on changing their inner worlds, installing new patterns, going for the new unconscious competence.
For you to create the life of your dreams, you need to create a fertile environment, inside you. For seeds to be planted, for you to water them and see them become as intended, you need the fertile ground.
You need to get your mind to be supportive and thinking in new ways. Get aligned with nature around yourself and be in its flow. In order to build a skyscraper, you need a strong foundation.
Someone always says “but I know this stuff”. Really?! A great author, Stephen R Covey said: “To know and not to do is not to know”. If you think that you know this stuff and you don’t have the results to show it. I can guarantee you that you don’t know it!
We have attached a bad connotation to the word “fail” and that has made many people to avoid failing, yet failure is a big part of the natural learning process. In business we say if you are not failing, you are not inventing enough. You must understand that failure is just feedback that is informing you that something has to be fixed or learned within your implementation process.
When you are new in business, you will be faced with many things to learn about that particular business, and the learning process is inclusive of “feedback”. Therefore, it is imperative to change the way you view failure, because without failure, you don’t learn and without learning, you won’t improve, and you will ultimately remain in one position.
We also must work on training our minds on how to get back up after a setback, this we must work on before we experience any failure, so that we know how to get out when we find ourselves in a particular set back.
I have a simple system where I start by grieving the loss that I didn’t attain, I ensure that I don’t spend too much time in the grieving process. When I am in a better mood and I can think straight, I write down everything that went wrong, I then ask myself what that failure was teaching me, I sit on this part of the process until I have processed all the learnings that the process is teaching me, this step is very important because if you don’t take the learnings, they will come back to continue teaching you.
This article is written by Mpho Mohapi, the founder of Mpho Ama Mohapi Coaching. She works with entrepreneurs, business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs to help them achieve their business goals.