Don't be paralyzed by fear of failure

The vast majority of people in life play defense against failure. We become defensive, trying to avoid “the mistake.” You never win consistently or accomplish great objectives in life by playing defensive or being fearful. Fear, when connected with a potential negative outcome, saps the willingness to try in most people. The fear takes over the six inches between our left and right ears. If we focus on it, then it consumes our thoughts. When it consumes our thoughts, it controls our actions. When fear of failure takes hold, it leads to other challenges.

Get your ego out of the way

Most successful people have a healthy ego. There is a fine line between an over-developed ego and self-confidence. You have to be confident in yourself and be a cheerleader for yourself. To be successful, we also need to remain balanced in our evaluation of our strengths, weaknesses, errors, and mistakes. But if we take it too far, when our ego is outsized, we try to find fault in others, in our work, and in our personal life. For example, we look to place the blame of a failed relationship on our spouse or significant other if our ego is unable to be objective. And everyone knows that in all failed relationships, there is more than one person responsible. The out-of-touch ego wants to protect itself from the real truth.

Because I have been in sales for more than 30 years, I see salespeople with high egos blame “the leads” or prospects for low sales numbers. It’s a personal defense mechanism to not have to look at the more common problems that are staring back at us in the mirror. These problems include lack of sales calls and contacts as well as poor quality of presentation. In short, what matters is what salespeople say when talking to a prospect and how many calls or conversations they have consistently. Having an inflated ego removes one of the most powerful motivators for change and protection from future repeated failure: disgust.

You might be thinking that disgust is a negative emotion, and that is true, but it can be used well to create behavioral change. Negative emotions like disgust can drive us to make changes that will allow for greater success.

You might feel disgust when you look in the mirror and see an extra 20 pounds of fat that you know shouldn't be there if not for your poor diet and fitness habits. You can turn that disgust into “I am going to do whatever it takes to change this body, and I'm starting right now.”

Saying “I’ve had it” is a powerful moment that guides you to success. When you have that moment of disgust, it moves your ego out of the way. You can have this experience in any area of life: health, wealth, career, relationships. It breaks through the fake reality we might be fooling ourselves with. It can be a life-changing moment when we say, “Enough is enough!”

Think of failure as merely an event

Failure is really a moment in time. It’s a snapshot of what happened at one time. It’s not a marker of what will happen in the future. Because we experienced failure, it’s not fatal or final. Countless people have lost it all financially and rebuilt from zero to astounding wealth. We all make errors and mistakes. What happens in life happens to all of us. We have to treat our setbacks as such.

Victor Frankel, Nazi concentration camp survivor and author of the landmark book, Man’s Search for Meaning, said, “It’s not what happens to me that matters, but what happens in me.” He experienced firsthand one of the most horrifying events in modern history. But he understood that his inner thoughts could not be controlled by the Nazis. His exterior circumstances were an event of the present rather than his future. He could not control the events in his life, but he would control his reaction. He could control his mind and his thoughts. Don’t let failure or a negative event in your life control your mind. Don’t let it control how you think about yourself, your opportunities.

Facing discouragement in life

We are faced with a lot of opposite extremes in life. We all understand the opposites of light and darkness, success and failure, joy and sorrow. We wouldn’t know how good joy feels without the opposite emotion of sorrow. There wouldn't be winning if there also wasn’t losing. We will all encounter discouraging situations in our careers, our relationships, our parenting, and our finances. But these are obstacles we must all overcome.

We also could not feel the encouragement that comes from being persistent without experiencing discouragement at times. We often feel discouraged when we miss an opportunity. We look back and say, “If only,” and that feeling is part of any life. “If only I had paid more attention to my kids when they were younger,” we state. “If only we had bought investment real estate between 2009 and 2012.” If we are honest with ourselves, we can all look back and feel discouraged at the decisions we should have made.

The key is to use discouragement to motivate change. Take responsibility for the missed opportunity and resolve to not miss it the next time it comes around. It’s the next opportunity that now matters, not the one you just missed.

Connecting patience with success

We want it all yesterday. I can include myself in that group as well. If patience is a virtue, I am not very virtuous. I am certainly more patient as I have aged, but not by much. Success is progressing to your stated objectives, not just arriving at the finish line of those objectives. We need to give ourselves time for the achievement part of success to grow and blossom. Ultimately, there are no unrealistic goals but merely unrealistic timelines that need patience to come to fruition.

We are all dealing with multiple learning curves in our lives and in the pursuit of success. You can see what I mean by a learning curve in Figure 6-1. In observation and evaluation, we have to ask ourselves this question: “Where am I on the learning curve now?” Sometimes pinpointing an exact location is tricky for most of us. If we knew exactly where we are, then it becomes easier to be patient and persevere the upward climb. I know that evaluating where I am on the learning curve has developed more patience in me.

We need to guard against having too many learning curves going at once. That can lead to overcommitting and overexposure to the steepest part of the curve in multiple pursuits, and then you'll be faced with frustration, discouragement, and a lack of patience. It’s easier to have patience when you are confident of the outcome. That’s why patience connects to self-confidence and self-esteem.

The primary rule of the learning curve is “Everything is hard before it becomes easy.”

The amount of effort we must put forth to climb the learning curve is substantial. When my daughter, Annabelle, was 13 months old, she was trying to walk, and the effort she was putting out was impressive. Her return had been limited to bonks on the head, plops on her rear end, and a few shuffles with her feet by hanging onto anything she could get her hands on to maintain her balance. That's when she was at the steepest part of the learning curve, and I could see the frustration in her face. The lack of success in walking like her 4-year-old brother, Wesley, affected her attitude once in a while. She was committed to overcoming this challenge of life. In a few short months, she was over the steepest part of the curve where the effort dropped and the return was constant and had improved. It just took her time, like for all of us.

When we are not patient in our approach to success, when we lose sight of where we are in the learning curve, we can leap prematurely to another strategy that we feel holds better promise. We don’t work through the learning curve long enough to fully understand and test our progress and results. We leap to someone’s better mousetrap or the latest and greatest strategy for success, wealth, happiness, and prosperity. Because of the advent of social media, our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts are inundated with new, latest, greatest ways to lose weight and get rich quick. It’s easy to get sucked in because we are climbing to success straight up the face of the learning curve. It feels like no progress is being made, but it is.

I personally filter the pursuit of success through traditional, historic strategies and principles. Whether that’s my age, era, or because I have seen too many late-night infomercials, the success principles that have stood the test of time for thousands of years of recorded history appeal to me. King Solomon is arguably the wisest and wealthiest man to ever walk the earth. According to MarketWatch, King Solomon’s wealth would be more than 2.2 trillion in today’s dollars. Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new'? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”

Solomon knew that success principles can’t be created or exclaimed as new. The right strategies and principles will be standard bearers throughout history. I am creating a different combination of words, phrases, and thoughts to convey them to you in this book. I hope I have done it well so that success is more understandable and readily implementable. My desire is that your results fulfill the goals you have set for your life. That’s the greatest reward of life. The foundations of what I write about have not changed from Biblical times. They will work for you today, as they did for Solomon, even in today’s technology enabled world.

Knowing the ratios to any successful endeavor

We need to expect setbacks and changes to come in life. When we attempt the grand adventures of developing new skills and new strategies, the only thing that is constant in life is change (and the love of a dog), and that's true whether you decide on the change cogently through research and reflection, or a change is thrust upon you suddenly by outside forces. In either case, preparation and resiliency are required. And you also need to know how to quickly evaluate the success ratios.

Let me give you an illustration. My father, at 65 years of age, knew something was not right with him. He was reasonably healthy, playing golf and tennis a few times a week. He just didn’t feel right. After months of prodding from my mother, he had tests for his heart. They found he had four heavily blocked coronary arteries. He was faced with a big decision about the odds or ratios of success. He could do angioplasty procedures on the four arteries and avoid the open-heart surgery that was a far more difficult and invasive procedure with a long recovery time. The angioplasty could work well, but he might need further procedures to keep the arteries fully open. It would require monitoring and review.

The open-heart bypass surgery would be riskier and longer, and it would require a more painful recovery. Done well, in a few months, he could resume his normal activities. And with diet change and cholesterol-lowering medicine, he would be better than before. Each had ratios of success and failure. Each had an influence on present and future lifestyle. Because he is a “do it once so you don’t have to do it again or worry about it in the future” type of guy, he chose to have the open-heart bypass procedure. The recovery was challenging and painstaking, as he expected. More than 20 years later, he is still going strong at age 87. He has lived 20-plus years with the benefits of making the right decision. He also stuck to a healthy diet and increased exercise to drive his odds of health success even higher.

Being able to evaluate the ratios to create success is an ability one needs to acquire. You might ask yourself a few key questions:

• What are the odds, on a scale of 1–10, of this goal or objective being achieved?
• What can I do specifically to increase the odds?

The leverage points to know the ratios of success are knowledge, skill, attitude, activities, people to help, capital, and increased time.

When you want to increase the success ratios, the changes required to increase the odds will come from the first four about 90 percent of the time. It will come from acquiring new knowledge that you are lacking, learning new specific skills, changing your attitude to be more positive, or increasing your volume or consistency of activities.

In my experience as an observer in my life and having a front-row seat in coaching tens of thousands of people over 20 years, changing and improving consistency in our activities is the leading way to alter the ratios of success in our favor. If you want to lose weight, it’s the activity of eating less and moving your body more. In creating wealth, it’s the activity of putting a portion of your earnings aside. If it’s relationships, it’s the activity of spending more time doing what the other people want to do that speaks love to them.

In your business, it’s still activities in making more sales calls or increasing the frequency of your marketing and lead generation. This is especially true in economic or marketplace changes. Because a slower economy creates its own new success ratios, lowering the odds, it requires more activity inputs to create even the same output of sales and revenue as before.

Maintaining your optimism

Being positive and optimistic at its core is a decision, and it’s one that you make each day when you wake up. The difference in your success that day, as well as for your whole life, will be dramatically different due to that one decision each day. If you have a specific aim or series of goals you are trying to achieve, it becomes easier to hold onto an optimistic view. You have likely been able to check off a few of those goals as accomplished. The checking off of your goal, or creating a dramatic completion moment, engrains it into your mind, setting it apart and creating memorability and easy recall when needed.

I remember being in financial difficulty in my early 20s. I hadn’t found a good career, so I was working low-paying jobs. I borrowed money from a local household finance company at an exorbitant interest rate. It was a few thousand dollars, but after a while, I realized the interest rate, at almost 25 percent, was killing me. I resolved to pay that thing off in the next 8 months. I still remember the exact amount I owed: $1,367.34. When I finally had the money to pay off the loan, I brought it to them in one-dollar bills. I could have done it in pennies, but counting it out would have taken forever. I thought about it for a moment: I wanted the drama that counting out $1,367 and 34 cents in single dollars would create. I wanted this event etched in my mind forever for a couple reasons. First, I never wanted to be back in that position. Second, I wanted evidence that I can do anything that I set my mind to. That achievement fueled my optimism that I can tackle anything life throws at me.

Using positive affirmations

There is so much negative in the world. All you have to do is open up social media, watch cable news, or read the newspaper. The world has an abundance of negative events. Our brains are bombarded with negative. We all consciously need to counteract the negative stimuli we receive.

Using positive affirmations help in that waging battle. Affirmations are positive statements vocalized about positive present and future events. To be most effective, they need to be vocalized out load so that your ears pick them up and transfer them to your brain. By saying the affirmations aloud, they become more than just thoughts that can be easily dismissed. Your auditory receptors transfer them into your subconscious mind as truth. Your subconscious mind, because it believes them as truth, goes to work on creating the solutions and circumstances that are consistent with what you have said to it.

Here are some examples of affirmations:

• I’m a great problem solver.
• I am intelligent, and I learn more each day.
• My value to my company is large, and my pay soon will be.

Some affirmations are said to support your current level of success, skills, and attitude. Some affirmations are future-based to promote your goals:

• I’m worth one million dollars.
• I will weigh 125 pounds in six months.
• I will receive a raise in less than three months.
• I will earn an A this semester in Algebra.

Craft some affirmations centered around your goals and desires in life. Say them aloud as you are preparing yourself for work this week. Look at yourself in the mirror as you say them. Be authoritative, powerful, and confident in your body language when you say them. Your subconscious mind will help you to create in your life what you affirmed with your voice.

Holding onto your faith

Faith is an important part of moving through setbacks and adversity. A spiritual faith keeps you grounded personally and also gives you a sense of connection to a higher power or God. If you are in an organized community of faith, you are surrounded by people who share your burdens and experience. That community of faith can be an integral part of navigating life challenges.

I receive great comfort knowing that God is walking with me through adversity. I know that I am not alone, and this fact reduces my anxiety during adversity. I can seek His wisdom through prayer and reading the Bible, and that has provided solutions to my challenges in life. It still amazes me that I discover new meaning in chapters and verses of the Bible that I have previously read numerous times. These discoveries are revealed to me in the right moment when I need them most. I have faith because this has happened thousands of times in my lifetime of Christian faith.

Being in a community of faith enables you to connect with people who have experienced similar challenges. You gain practical insight from these people who have walked down the road further than yourself and have experienced similar family, business, health, and financial challenges. Because of the common connection of faith, you see what God is doing in their lives as well.

The intercessionary prayer of the community of faith is powerful and comforting when you are experiencing adversity. God makes a clear promise of that power in the Bible: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20)

I am comforted by that verse knowing that God is among those who pray together. I believe that God will answer our prayers when we gather to pray together, and that deepens my faith. That deepened faith reduces any apprehension I might have when dealing with negative circumstances and setbacks.