Thursday, 28 November 2013

Fail to plan, plan to fail and PLAN TO FAIL!

Following on last week’s newsletter on planning for success, this week I want to write a little bit about the barriers we have to success.

As many of my clients will know (well, my clients, my contacts, my associates and basically anyone else who has held even a one minute conversation with me lately), I am a new grandmother.  Our granddaughter is now nearly 8 months old.  Watching her lately is intriguing and even inspirational.

At the moment, Eleanor is learning to walk and, boy, is she persistent! At least a hundred times a day, she tries to get herself from lying, to sitting, to standing, to walking.  She falls, she gets frustrated, she gets back up and tries again.  This is how she will learn to walk.

We all learn to walk by falling over a lot. We are encouraged by all those around us to get up and give it another go and another go and another go until we are successful. A massive amount of praise is bestowed on us as we take those first tentative steps and even when we fail, we are celebrated for trying.

 As babies, there is nothing wrong with trying and failing; it’s just how we learn to get it right in the end, but as adults, this all changes and by the time we own and are running our own businesses failure is not just seen as a negative thing, but it seems to have connotations of weakness, inferiority, even incompetence.  So how does failure go from a necessary and positive practice required in order to learn and progress when we are children to professional suicide as an adult?

For more on this and other ideas on how you can turn even the greatest ‘failures’ into successes, read the next instalment of this week’s blog on Sunday.


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