How to Fail Forward into Success | Jack Canfield

I have a question for you. When you encounter a failure or a setback in life, how do you react? Do you complain about it or succumb to frustration and anger and allow it to derail your progress? Do you see it as a sign from the universe to quit? Or do you use it as an excuse to give up on your goals? Or do you treat it like the valuable learning opportunity it is? Well, today I'd like to talk to you about how to fail forward in life and transform every failure you experience into a powerful stepping stone that takes you even closer to your dreams. You know what I know for sure after 50 years of achieving some incredible dreams and coaching hundreds of thousands of other people to do the same, is that the road to success is not a straight line. It's one with many bumps, potholes and roadblocks and mis turns and detours along the way. And almost everything that I and my company now do, well, we once did not so well. Much of what we know now, our collective wisdom and expertise was learned by making mistakes. Now, of course, you can minimize the number of mistakes you make by working with mentors and coaches and consultants and guides or my early mentor, W. Clement Stone, called opex Other people's experiences. You can learn from other people's experiences, but no matter what, you will still make mistakes along the way. I promise you. The trick is not to get discouraged, to give up, but to realize that they're all part of a process of getting to where you want to go. You know, I can remember back in the day when the way we filled our live trainings was to do a series of what we called live guest events. We would rent a hotel meeting room for an evening, we'd invite people to come to a two or three hour workshop and we give them a brief experience experience of what our longer weekend and week long trainings were like. And over time we got really good at it. But I remember the first one we did in Los Angeles where we made two huge mistakes. One, we screwed up the design and the printing of our invitational brochure such that the post office wouldn't even take them and send them out. And second, we scheduled it on the Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving, not realizing that everyone would either be traveling home to spend Thanksgiving with their families or preparing to receive those people as their guests. Plus, the traffic on the freeways would be really bad. No one wanted to go out that night. Now the result is that only 15 people showed up. Now normally we get 100 or 200. Yeah, that was really disappointing. But we learned from it, and we never made those two mistakes again. What we didn't do was say to ourselves, well, I guess God doesn't want us to do this work or it's too hard. We should figure out another way to make money. What we did do was implement what we learned and eventually opened up offices in five cities across the United States. You know, I'm also remembering one of our Chicken Soup for the Soul books that didn't do real well. We had become used to most of our books becoming New York Times bestsellers. Well, Chicken Soup for the Country Soul didn't do that, not even close. But what we learned was a ton of things from that experience. We had chosen to work with a co author who claimed to have a lot of contacts in Nashville, but he really didn't. In fact, most of the people he did know didn't even like him that much. We hadn't properly vetted him. And when we began to realize something was wrong, we didn't have the courage at the time to confront the situation or him fast enough. And the result was that we didn't end up with the quality of stories that we usually had in a chicken suit book. And because our co author had also alienated a lot of people in Nashville, we ended up not having a lot of allies in the country music field to support the book when it came out. Now, we also made another mistake in not titling the book correctly what it should have been, Chicken Soup for the Country Music Soul. Some people thought the book was a book for farmers, and we hadn't made it clear who the book was really for. And a lot of people who lived in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, but loved people like Garth brooks and Reba McEntire and other country music artists never picked up the book. But we learned from that. And we made a lot of changes in how we worked with future co authors and including learning to trust our intuition more, as well as do more research on who we chose to partner with. And so we avoided those mistakes in the future, which led to many more New York Times bestsellers, 42 of them to be exact. You see, this is the thing about so called failures. All of our lives we've been told that they're bad and something to avoid or to be ashamed of or to hide. The idea of failure has been built up to be so catastrophically terrible that most people choose to avoid taking risks, risks that would grow their business or improve the quality of their life, because they don't want to risk experiencing a Failure. And the truth is, you cannot grow professionally and you can't grow as a person if you're not willing to risk having the experience of not succeeding. You see, growth is the result of awareness plus risk taking, which means that growth requires you to venture into unknown territory and, and try something new and different. And that's how you learn the new skills and the new knowledge you need to take your life to the next level. You see, winning, whether it's in business, sports, or life in general, requires you to take a risk. If you want something different, you have to do something different. And the truth is that what you're currently doing will only get you what you're currently getting. And if you want more, you have to do more. And if you're so afraid of failure that you refuse to risk doing something where there's no, often no guarantees of success, then you'll always remain right where you are now. This is one of the main differences between highly successful people and those who never achieve their dreams. Successful people realize that failure is actually an important and unavoidable part of learning. Learning the things you need to know. Failure is part of how we learn by trial and error. And I call this instructive failure. Failing forward. Simply get started. Make the inevitable mistakes you're going to make, listen to the feedback, make the necessary corrections based on that, and then keep moving forward toward your goal. And what you'll discover is that every experience will yield more useful information you can apply the next time and the next time. And that's why I always encourage my seminar participants and my coaching clients to view failure simply as a delay in results, an opportunity to learn and try again, more informed. No doubt by now you've heard the famous story of Thomas Edison, who is an inventor, made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts to invent the light bulb. And when a reporter asked him, how did it feel a thousand times to fail? Edison replied, I didn't fail a thousand times. The light bulb was an invention with a thousand steps. Think about it. It was just a thousand step process. So please don't let failure stop you from taking the risks that you need to take to achieve your goals. Because it's only by taking risks, making mistakes, missing the mark, and learning from your failures that you'll ever reach any measure of success. Now, to make it easier for you, here are some tips on how to learn from your setbacks and transform your failures into experiences that actually accelerate your progress toward your goals. Every time you experience a setback or failure, I want you to ask yourself the following questions first off, how did this happen? Take the time to carefully review what the outcome was that you wanted and what prevented you from actually achieving that outcome? Was it something you did or something you failed to do? Look at what unexpected complications arose along the way, in what ways were you unprepared to deal with them, and how can you better prepare for them the next time? And take a hard look at what role you played in creating the outcome you got. Avoid the temptation to blame circumstances or some other person for your failure. Ask yourself what skills, knowledge, or resources do you need to acquire to make sure it doesn't happen again? And explore who you can ask to help you acquire that knowledge and those skills and resources. And also who can you ask for feedback on how to do it better next time? And who can you ask to support you in your next efforts? And do you need adding one to your team and in order to get better results? Also ask yourself what went right during the experience? What did you do right? Which of your efforts actually produce good results? And how can you replicate and expand those efforts to get even better results next time? And once you've answered those questions to your satisfaction, make sure you write down everything you learned from the experience and then come up with a plan for what you're going to do better to produce better results next time. And above all, remember that failure is not a dead end. It's merely a temporary delay. That means it may take you a bit longer to get where you want to go than you anticipated, but that will ultimately equip you with the knowledge, the new skills, and new resources you need to reach your final destination. That may feel like a frustrating delay, but really it's just a necessary pit stop that will empower you to get much better results in the future. In fact, the lessons you learn from your failures might actually end up accelerating your progress by empowering you to easily overcome even bigger obstacles that might appear on your path in the future. So I want to encourage you to take some time this week to evaluate a recent failure you might have experienced and ask yourself the questions I just shared with you. You may also want to watch this video again. Pause it when you get to the questions that I just asked and write them down so you always have them for future introspection. What prevented you from achieving the outcome you wanted? What happened that you didn't expect? What role did your actions or your unexamined assumptions play in creating the situation? What skills or knowledge would have helped you to avoid that situation? And if you find yourself in that situation again, what would you choose to do differently? Who could have helped you avoid that failure or recover and learn from it faster? And finally, what will you do differently going forward? And by embracing your failures and learning the valuable lessons they can teach you, you will accelerate your own personal growth and become the capable and successful person you most desire to be. Now, if you found this video helpful, please make sure you like it, share it with a friend who may need it, and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this one, and for additional success strategies and resources to help you reach your goals faster. Visit my website@jackcampfield.com and be sure to check out the links in the description below. Let me know what you think in the comments, and thanks again for watching.