How to Turn Your Failure Into Success

Being the goal-driven woman that I am, failure has rarely been an option for me. In so many areas of my life, from deciding on where to go to college to obtaining scholarships to pay for college to determining what I wanted to do for a living and where I wanted to live, achieving my vision and accomplishing my goals has largely been a process of deciding to do it and then actually doing it. My friends, on occasion, lovingly refer to me as a control-freak and a workaholic because of my driven determination to meet my goals at all costs.

It wasn't until I heard author Susan Ford Collins speak at the 2003 eWomenNetwork Conference in Dallas that I began to redefine my notions of success and failure. She told a story of a great failure in her life, and how she now thought of that event as one of her life's successes because of the lessons she learned along the way.

The reframing of this notion of failure and success caused me to rethink an event in my life, my divorce in 1999, in an entirely new light. For the first 3 years post-divorce, I constantly beat myself up because the marriage didn't succeed. After all, I didn't get married with the intent of getting divorced--this thing was supposed to last forever. And, when I realized about 5 years into the marriage that it wasn't working for me, it took another 4 years to find the courage to admit defeat and ask for the divorce.

What I came to realize now in my post-divorce wisdom was that had I not removed myself from the marriage, my life as I now know it would be vastly different. More than likely I would still be trying to please my now ex-spouse and staying in a job that I hated to make him happy and be living in a part of the country I no longer wanted to live in. Instead, I am now living in a place I love, have created a business doing what I love and doing it on my terms, and having much more fun than I've had in a long while. However, despite this self-realization, I had never connected the dots in terms of thinking of my failed marriage as a successful life event for me. It was only through this failure that I was able to create the success that I now enjoy. Wow, what an eye-opening affirmation this was!How can you turn business failures into successes? In 2003 I chose to take on a major project as an add-on to my business, and things just simply never jelled. Later than year, my intuition switched into overdrive, valiantly trying to convince me to dump this project, and I fought tooth and nail to ignore it. My insistence at ignoring the message again had to do with my definition of failure--I had worked hard at this project, given it my best shot, and the results I was seeking weren't happening, but I didn't want to admit defeat and just walk away--I just needed to work harder! However, the reality that this project was eating up all of my time and energy and causing the rest of my business to suffer was a wake-up call. Despite this realization, I continued to beat myself up about my lack of success, until I finally just recognized that it wasn't a good match for me, and that no matter how hard I tried, it was never going to be a good match, and that I needed to just dump it and walk away.

As usual, I beat myself up about this failure, until my business coach asked me a key question. She wanted to know if I would have worked this hard in my own business to create the contacts I created for this project. I told her that I could have, but the truth was that I probably wouldn't have worked this hard for myself. She coached me to think of the successes I had created with this project and how I could parlay this success in forwarding my own business. With that piece in place, I was ready to let go of the project. And, amazingly, I did.

What can you say "no" to, or stop doing, or seemingly "fail" at, that will propel you to the next level of success? Your wise self knows the answer to this question--it's just a matter of you choosing to listen, and being able to see the success in a seeming failure. Remember, there is some truth to the old adage, "When one door closes, another opens."