What To Do When You Fail Spectacularly In Your Business – Episode 11

There is no such thing as failure! Or at least there isn’t once you listen to this podcast! In today’s episode of The Boss Life Podcast Miguel and Erin Carrasco give you key strategies to help you overcome your fears of “failure”!

Subscribe to The Boss Life Podcast

Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher

Resources From Today’s The Boss Life Podcast

Join The Science of Building Your Online Empire

Three Key Boss Points From Today’s Podcast

• Stop listening to the wrong people for advice.
• Start doing personal development yesterday!
• Stop trying to re-invent the wheel and instead model the successful.
• Stop waiting for other people to believe in you.
• Stop spending the money you’re earning, instead of investing it back in your business.

What To Do When You Fail Spectacularly In Your Business – Transcript

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about what to do when you fail spectacularly in your business.

Congratulations, you failed. What? I know. You never thought that you’d be congratulated on failing.

Well, failing is important. If you are part of our Science Of Building An Online Empire group, we’ve already shared how we have failed already in our business.

I think it was day two, and we made a massive failure. You know what’s funny about failure? The reason I said congratulations if you failed, it means you tried something.

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

You probably tried something that you were afraid to try. It didn’t go according to plan. In today’s episode, we really want to dive into those things. As we were brainstorming this for last couple of days, one of the thoughts that came to mind. Actually, Erin bring this up, because we were bringing it up in different points, because I hope you understand a lot of what we do in this podcast, there’s so much information on everything out there. What we really try to do is pull together just a golden nuggets for you, so you can really improve every single day. Erin, what’s the first thing they should do if they have spectacularly failed in their business?

I think one of the biggest things that we’ve learned over the years is that you need to relabel your failure. What we mean by that is that we actually don’t believe that there is true and utter failure unless you don’t learn anything from it.

One of the things I tell my kids, and they know this by heart, is there’s only two things in life. There’s only winning, and there’s learning. There’s no such thing as winning and failing because I want to tell you something right now. Most people don’t even start on their dreams or their business, or any specific life change, because they’re frankly just too afraid to fail. There are people literally that have a great idea in business, or they have a great idea to try something new, or they have a great life change they want to make, but they won’t even attempt it because they’re too afraid to fail.

That’s so true. When we’re talking about relabeling your failure, if you look at your life right now, and you think of something that maybe you have failed at in your life, if you have labeled it in your brain as a failure, we’re going to talk a little bit more about staying in that down space or in that space, in that shame spiral. We want you to enable yourself to relabel it as learning.

I mean if you look at even championship teams, and sports, and even in business I think you’ll find that a lot of times, really I even tell my kids, when you lose there’s way more lessons than when you win, typically.

Absolutely.

Lessons are everywhere. Winning, you got lessons. Losing you got lessons. But the end of the day, when you don’t get the outcome you want, and let’s say you lose in a football or soccer match 10:2, there’s a lot more lessons to be had from that. I think that’s really brings us to the next point. Once you’ve realized that you’re okay, you actually didn’t really, really fail. You learn something. You learn one more way that doesn’t work or a combination of things that combined don’t work. Once you figured that out, we go on to the next step. What’s that next step?

I think when you look at the path to your learning experience, let’s just go for it and call it a learning experience. If you look at the path to your learning experience, you have to learn from it, right? You have to look at the things, the steps that you took that enabled you to get that result.

I love it. One of the exercises that I’ll do with some of our clients is we’ll look at … Once they’ve come up out from their depression, sometimes. Sometimes they get a little depressed because it’s like, “Oh, no. I’m so crushed right now.” I get it. We talked about it. It’s totally fine to do that. Once we get out of that, we recognize, “Okay, this is actually a learning opportunity.” The next step really is to just write this stuff out. We’ll literally take out a sheet of paper. We’ll say, “Okay, what are the things that we did in this specific case?” I’ll always say we. Sometime myself in with their “failure”.

Yeah, absolutely.

It makes them feel better. I’m like, “What did we do wrong here? Let’s move it forward.” We start writing out all the things that led up to that learning experience. What led up to that learning experience. As you write those things down, a big thing I want you to understand here is that this is an important step. You can’t skip this step. Some people will say, “Okay, you failed. Okay, get up. Let’s go again round two.” That’s not going to work. The key step here is you got to learn from the mistakes you’ve made.

Yeah, you have to take the ownership of it.

Yeah, because I think a lot of people will say, “Well, it wasn’t the right timing to launch my product,” or, “If it was better looking, I could have sold more stuff online.”

Is that true for you, Miguel?

Absolutely. You could make a million excuses. Or you could say your business partner didn’t work out or whatever. At the end of the day, none of that’s going to help you move forward.

Totally.

Right? It’s obviously won’t help you whatsoever. What will help you is writing out and being real and saying, “Okay, here are the mistakes that were made,” that led to this learning experience so that you can learn from them. Some of them you might just flat out say, “Well, I’m not going to do these three things again.” In some cases, it might even be, “Okay, well, those three things I did there, they were actually pretty close. I just didn’t implement them hard enough.” Then you might have to tweak some things. Again, you can’t do any of that if you haven’t written it down first. You haven’t really come from that place of being accepting to learn.

Right. One of the things we do with our clients is I get them. If you want to do this, you can. If you’re driving, probably not a good idea. Make sure you do it when you get to your destination. I get people to put their hands up. I’m like, “I need you to accept where you are in this. I’ll get people to put their hands up and I’ll say, “I am in the position that I am in my business because I choose to be.” It’s that acceptance and the acknowledgement of their part in their successes, or in their failures, or in their learnings, that enables them to learn from those little things that they need to change.

One of the things that I really, really want to make sure you guys understand is that sometimes, it’s not a big a shift in order to get the success. Sometimes it’s just tweaking, tweaking the little tiny parts of your business, or the little things that might not have worked timing, or placement, or text colors. Sometimes it’s really small.

Yeah, I mean, we’ll meet a lot of people as well that, in some cases, they’ll just start from scratch. That can also be a mistake, because you may not have failed because you messed up everything. You might have just messed up a couple things. It’s not time to throw the nuclear missile. I’m just saying, “Well, let’s just start over again.” That’s tough. One of the most painful things that I go through in business coaching is seeing people having to start over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, and over. Then those are the ones that are like, “Well, this XYZ industry, or this XYZ thing doesn’t work. I’ve tried so many of them.” That’s something like-

This is the thing.

“Well, there you go.”

Sometimes it’s those little things were like, “Oh, I’ve tried everything,” but you haven’t, right? If you had tried everything, you would be successful in this.

You’d be successful.

Let’s move on to our next point. This is a really important point, for those of you who maybe are feeling a little bit down in certain things that they’ve done their business.

I love this one. I think that probably a year and probably the best to talk about this one. This one is really giving yourself some grace. Why don’t you talk about that?

It is a really hard thing for us because I think we are our own worst critics, right? You’ve heard that before. But allowing yourself to have some sadness about some of the failures and learning experiences that you’ve had, and really look at it. If you are relabeling it, and you are saying, “Okay, it’s been a learning experience.” You, giving yourself some grace with what you’ve just learned, is probably one of your biggest assets to moving on. We’re going to talk a little bit more about this in the next point. For you to Know that it’s okay to have this learning experience after 10 months of putting in the work. It’s okay to have this learning experience after starting your first day of your new business. There is no right or wrong way to build your business. Everyone starts at a different point. Even though when you build your business, most of you, you’re starting at the same ground level, but we all come into our businesses with different background.

Yeah, I mean, take a look at any author, any successful person I think on the plane. A lot of what you’re probably missing is all of their failures, right? For every successful book, there’s probably 100 books that didn’t work out. There’s 20 books that didn’t work out. There’s so many things that you don’t know about. I think that the best thing and we could have almost made this the first point, was just stop. I don’t know how to say this. Stop feeling sorry for yourself for failing, and thinking you’re the only one on the planet that’s ever failed, right?

Someone has gone through exactly like so. If you’re sitting in a shame spiral right now, someone else on this planet has done what you’ve done and failed like you failed and they’re still here.

The shame spiral, what’s that?

It’s a cycle. I think a lot of the times we get into this negative space, where we do a lot of self loathing. We are not giving ourselves some grace. We think that we’re the only one who’s ever experienced this. Our inner critic is coming out to play. Maybe the imposter syndrome is coming out to play. We can do a lot more episodes on those things because I think it’s a really important thing when you’re building your business to learn what those are and get them in check. Let’s move on to the next point.

The next point is basically don’t allow yourself so wallow too long.

This one-

What’s wallowing? Show me a wallow like.

It’s not wallowing, wallow.

Oh, I thought it was wallowing.

No, no. Wallow. When you’re wallowing your sadness, you’re like Eeyore. You’re like, “Oh, today sucks.”

Eeyore.

“I just suck at everything.”

That’s true. I do a good impression, should I do?

You did Tiger.

I did Tiger and you’re Eeyore. I’m on stage. I’m like, “Hey guys, what’s up? Miguel here. I’m Tiger. I’m bouncing around the stage. What’s going on? What’s happening?” A lot of times, I’ll talk like that on stage. One, because I actually love the stage and I get really excited. Imagine if you met someone like that, right? You’re automatically attracted to their power, their vibe. They’re just like, they light of the room. Then someone else walks in, they’re like, “Hello. Today’s a gloomy day.” “Oh, no, it’s actually nice so.” “I know, but yesterday was nicer.” “Oh, but it’s not even raining.” “But it’s going to rain later.” Who wants a beer on that?

It’s like Debbie Downer. Anything, that’s an SNL skit.

That was pretty good.

One of the examples that I give a lot of our clients is that you can choose for your learning experience to be either a chasm or canyon. A chasm is a very sharp dip. It goes up and down really, really deep. Then it comes back up. Usually, they’re found in the ocean. You can choose for your learning experience to be a chasm, which is you have the learning experience. You feel down. You realize you need to give yourself some grace. You relabel your failure into a learning experience. Then you learn from all those steps that got you to where you were, and then you bounce back up.

I love that. I’ve been to the Grand Canyon. That thing is massive. I want all my failure to be a Grand Canyon. I’ll tell that much, right?

The canyons are really long and drawn out, and deep place. That if you do not give yourself some grace, if you do not label your failure, if you do not recognize the steps that you took in order to get you where you are, you’re going to stay in this canyon.

I love the rocky quote right in that movie. The new rocky movie that came out. Well, it’s not new anymore, I guess but 10 years old, but I’m dating myself here but that’s cool.

Yeah, you are.

I look young that’s why I grew facial hair. I stopped getting ID. That’s working, working, turning 40, midlife crisis coming up. Oh, that car shave. I’m sorry. I’m like a squirrel. You know that yet?

Let’s focus. Focus. The quote, my dear. The quote

Rocky’s talking to his son. Basically he tells him, it doesn’t matter how hard you get hit, right? What matters in life is … It doesn’t matter how hard you get hit. The secret is, how much can you take? How much can you take, and keep moving forward? He says that’s how winning is done, right? It’s not about all those Rocky movies, if you look at it, he gets knocked down so many times, but he gets back up. He gets back up. I’ll tell you a secret in success I believe is, the faster you learn to get up and go through these steps that we’re talking about. It’s not just about getting up and getting knocked back down again. That would be really painful. It’s about getting back up, taking ownership of your mistakes, realizing their stuff to learn, writing the things down, giving yourself some grace. It’s okay. Then saying, “You know what? I’ve learned more. I am a better version than I was before this failure. Bring it.” I feel like going for a run now.

It’s really funny because I thought you were going to use a different Rocky quote.

Oh, sorry, Rocky. It looks like [crosstalk 00:14:17].

I’m probably going to not say it properly. If you are a Rocky fan, please don’t send me hate mail. I always thought you were going to talk about the one where he’s staring. He puts him in front of the mirror and he’s like, “That’s your toughest opponent.”

Oh, the mirror one. Go for it.

Because this is so true is that you are going to be the hardest on yourself. You are your toughest opponent. Your brain is going to say all of those things, those limiting beliefs that you tell yourself or maybe you’ve you thought you’ve got over and then all of a sudden you have a failure. All of a sudden, these things come flooding back. Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I’m not meant to do this. Maybe, this is meant for other people. All of these things that we tell ourselves that will stop us from taking action in getting us over this depth that we feel, right, this dip.

All right. For the Rocky people out there, I want to say the quote properly now because otherwise, we will get haters.

Oh, yeah. You love haters, though.

I’ll try to do the Rocky voice.

Okay, do it.

But I’m a Spanish guy living in Canada doing a Rocky voice.

He’s given us all prerequisites in case it doesn’t sound good.

In case, I fail.

All right.

It’s not good. I will accept my defeat. It goes, “See this guy right there? That’s the toughest opponent you ever going to have.” Why are you making me laugh? You make me screw out. That’s over that.

Do it again.

See this guy right here? That’s the toughest opponent you’re ever going to face. I believe that’s true in the ring, and true in life, by Rocky Balboa.

I really think that you should do that with his accent again.

I will do that on a live, on a private The Science Of Building Your Online Empire.

You never thought you would tune into this podcast, and here’s some Rocky quotes and impersonations, right?

We love Rocky. He’s the man.

He is the man.

What’s up?

Let’s talk about one of the last ones we’re going to really talk about what to do when you learn spectacularly is, how are you going to succeed in this business if you don’t have any failures, right? The best way to succeed is to try again. Try again.

Try again, try again. Just keep trying. Keep trying. Any great thing in life, the iPhone wasn’t perfect day one. In fact, it was actually not even that great. It was great. It was so much better than anything else. There was so many lessons to be taken from that. I mean, there’s so many things in this world that wouldn’t exist. Probably everything that you’re using right now would not exist if whoever created it didn’t keep trying, didn’t fail spectacularly, didn’t give themselves grace. All these rules that we told you, these are the rules of the successful. I want to understand. These aren’t things that we’re just creating, and inventing. Just spewing out just because we have to do it podcast episode.

These are things that we’ve learned over the years that have helped us grow these incredible businesses, through incredible books. One of the things that I love to do is I’ll read four, or five, six different books. Sometimes I’ll listen to them on Audible, which is an awesome site. What I like to do actually is I like to find. I don’t know if you do this. I like to find the commonalities between the books. I’ll see like, “Well, okay, every single book talks about this one specific thing. That must be important, right? That must be a thing. They’re all talking about that same thing, then that must be an important thing. Bring them back to topic, I really think that the best way for you to succeed is realize that you can just keep trying over and over again.

There’s infinite possibilities. This isn’t building a business. It’s not like a Mario game where you’ve only got three lives, and then game over. Start again from the beginning. Especially if you’re using an old game that can’t save, right? You can just try again. No one is going to care. I think a lot of times as well, people think that everyone’s going to remember your failures. Everyone’s going to hold all your failures against you. That’s simply not true. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Most people do not remember the times that you fail. They only remember your successes. I bet you nobody knows listening, that I had a podcast before this podcast.

You did?

I bet you nobody knows that you had a podcast before this podcast. You probably even forgot, right? There’s all these things that lead to success. But you have to be okay with failing or you’ll never start.

This is something that you’ve brought up in some of our conferences that we’ve done is Muhammad Ali.

Muhammad Ali.

When he got knocked out.

When he got knocked out.

How many you guys remember that?

I remember that.

Yeah, but you remember. What do you remember? You remember float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. You remember all of his quotes. You remember?

Rumble, young man. Rumble. Oh, yeah. I’m getting fired up.

We’re on the boxing train today.

It’s funny because I just took Abby. I was just in the UK, so I just took Abby to get ice cream. I picked her up early from my parents. Then I took her for ice cream. On the wall of this place is called Skinners. Listen, if you ever come to Winnipeg, okay, you drive out to a city called Lockport. There’s this place called Skinners. There’s two of them. You go to the one by the dam, okay? The one by the dam is really, really cool. There’s photos of all these hockey players and really cool stuff. I don’t know if you know this, but Skinners is from the guy, Skinner, that used to be a hockey player, right? There’s all these hocks all over the place.

Abby is talking to me. She thinks we’re on a date, and she’s holding my hand. It’s all super cute. She start asking me about all these pictures. “Well, who’s that?” “Gordie Howe.” “Well. Who’s that? “Timmy salami.” “Oh, well, who’s that?” She’s asking all these things. One of them was Muhammad Ali.

Oh, really?

It’s so funny. He’s on the wall there, because these are just photos from this guy, the things he loved in sports, right?

Right, cool.

I totally lost track, but what were you talking about Muhammad Ali?

Most people don’t remember the times that he got knocked down.

How many fights did the guy lose? Don’t know, he was the greatest ever.

That’s the thing, right?

He lost a lot. Not a lot, but he lost.

His personality, and this is the thing you. When you create your brand, is your personality, right? I think that when you create a successful brand, because it is who you are, people are going to fall in love with you. They’re going to root for you. They’re going to want you to succeed. If you fail, they’re going to love you for it anyways.

I think that’s a huge one. I want you to understand. I want to recap, and then we’ll go to the challenge with Erin and I, give you guys a challenge.

Sure.

What I really want you to get out of this is I want you to understand right now, this moment, this second, if you’re not driving, I want you to do this exercise. If you are driving, then when you get home, do this exercise. I want you to close your eyes right now. While your eyes are closed, I want to take a deep breath in, and a deep breath out. What I want you to understand is that everyone in the history of the world has failed. Number one. Number two, I want you to realize that you have already failed many, many times over in this world. Number three, I want you to realize that you’re still here. You’re still alive. You’re still standing. Nothing happened to you. You’re not dead.

You know what? You powered through. The faster that you can implement these five tips, the faster you’re going to succeed, I really think that we should all try and almost fail as fast as we possibly can, so that we learn as fast as we possibly can. So that as we learn as fast as we possibly can, we will succeed. This podcast is good. Maybe even some people have said it’s great, but it’s not the greatest, right? We know, though that two years down the road, we’re probably going to go back and listen to these podcast episodes.

Be like, “Wow, man. It sucked.”

Wow, that was terrible. That so bad. That’s okay because we’re never going to get to where you want to go if we never start. I pray for you guys, that you just realize that you just got to start. You just got to go. You got to find that fire in your belly and just make it happen. Just as Muhammad Ali would always say, rumble young man, rumble. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. I am the greatest. I knew it was the greatest before they said I was the greatest. All right, I got way more. I almost stop there.

Wow.

We’re going to the challenge. What’s the challenge for them?

We’ll start with challenge. My challenge for you guys today is to take one of your failures that you’re labeling as a failure in your life. It can be anything in your life, but I want you to take one of those failures. I need you to turn it into a learning activity. Maybe right now, there are some of you who are living in the canyon. You are living in the canyon of your failure. It is not serving anyone. You have this special light inside of you, and you are not serving anybody by playing small. You’re not serving anybody by living in that failure. What I want you to do is to relabel that that failure is a learning activity and really take a look at the steps that enabled you to get there. I just want you to change one of those things. Just change one of those things, and make a post about it on social media and tag us, because we want to know how you are implementing the strategies that we’re giving you in order to get out of the canyon, right?

I want you guys to use your learning experience. Even if you take a dip into the chasm, but we want you to spring shot out of there. We want you to succeed more in your own life and in your own business. The only way you’re going to do that is if you really take a look at your failures and relabel them as learning experiences.

I love it. At the end of the day, what we want you to do is to ditch the employee mindset.

And start living the boss life.

We’ll see you guys in the next episode.

Bye, guys.

Are you ready to start living the boss life but you don’t know where to start?

Or maybe you already have a business but you’re not getting the results you want.

Head over to thebosslife.com/start to join our group, The Science Of Building Your Online Empire.

Where we walk you through the daily process of rocking your online business.

Surround yourself with aspiring entrepreneurs.

And bosses that are already crushing it in their business.

Hey, also make sure you head over to iTunes and hit the subscribe button if you love this episode, and leave a comment. We love reading your comments. Every single comment means so much to us.

We hope you have an incredible day.