What is your worst fear? Failure? If so, join the club. Most people are afraid of failing – at school, in their careers, in their relationships, in business and in life. Albert Einstein once said, “Failure is success in progress,” and boy was he right.

The great genius cracked the success code. When we experience failure, it humbles us. It makes us stronger and prompts us to make the necessary changes so we can eventually succeed in our businesses and in life. After all, that’s how most of us learn: by doing, falling over and getting back up again.

Every business owner experiences failure to some degree, for failure is how the seeds of growth and success are planted, nurtured and harvested. However, the objective should always be to minimize failure, but that’s not always easy to do when you’re alone in your business. Working with a coach can help you through the issues that surface in everyday business, helping you through them before it gets to the point of failure. A coach can also help you recognize the red flags, preventing problems before they arise.

Here are five benefits of failure:

1. Failure can push us beyond our limits.

Charles R. Swindoll once said, “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” It’s the same with failure. You can let it drag you down a dark path of despair, or you can treat it as motivation, as a springboard to development, growth and success. So, if you fail, how are you going to react to it? What comes from failure is entirely up to you, the person who “failed” at a given task or endeavor.

It’s too easy to let ourselves become unmotivated and downtrodden when our plans fail. Instead of giving up and losing sight of our goals, we should view the failure as a learning experience. Take the failure, learn from it, and use what you learned to adjust your perspective. You may need to make a mental change, pivot and adjust your course. Or, you may need to change direction. Either way, lesson learned!

Small business owners must realize that failure is a necessary evil. Things rarely, if ever, go exactly as planned in business – it’s fluid and you can only control so much. That’s why failure is excellent at shaking things up and keeping business exciting. With failure comes growth, quantum leaps and the “sweet taste of success.”

There’s little room for growth when you stay in your comfort zone. This is where a business coach comes in. A coach can help navigate you through the uncertain waters of business by educating you on the “unknowns,” in effect making you more comfortable with the uncomfortable, reducing the risk, and improving your chances of success. 

 2. Failure makes you stronger.

Small business owners fail a lot. They tend to learn as they go – that’s the nature of entrepreneurship, isn’t it? Inexperienced business owners can make all sorts of mistakes – hiring mistakes, funding mistakes, accounting mistakes, customer mistakes, etc. But all of these mistakes create a tough skin and they make the small business owner stronger and less accident-prone. With failure comes knowledge, understanding, experience and ultimately wisdom, which have to be earned through real-life experience; wisdom isn’t gained from a book or taught in a class.

3. Failure controls the ego.

Being successful while remaining down to earth can be a challenge for business owners. When a business scales quickly and without hiccups, it can be easy for the ego to grow unchecked. When some people experience constant success, their priorities can get mixed up. Without realizing it, they can become slaves to success and they’ll do almost anything to stay on top. This can mean ignoring family, burning bridges, ruining partnerships, and destroying friendships. It’s as if everything important is contracting, except maybe the entrepreneur’s bank account.

Failure is humbling and there is something to benefit from that. It helps us practice gratitude. It helps us appreciate what we have and it helps keep our egos in check.

4. Failure leads to solutions.

None of us have all the answers. Sometimes, we have to try something and if it doesn’t work, it’s back to the drawing board. Many things in life and in business are like science experiments. When we try something and it doesn’t work out, we gain a new perspective. We realize, “Well, that doesn’t work so I’ll try this instead.” It’s like something fails and suddenly it just clicks and the answer comes out of nowhere.

In reality though, the solution didn’t come out of “nowhere.” As we discover that certain methods or actions do not work, our minds are forced to expand and consider new possibilities. This expansion can catapult us into a creative state, one where things become clearer and where the real solutions become more concrete than ever.

5. Failure is the catalyst for success.

Failure prepares entrepreneurs for the future. Just about every day, small business owners run across something they didn’t realize they needed to know or they should have known. Failure leads entrepreneurs directly to this knowledge because of unforeseen problems and circumstances. Thankfully, once the knowledge is obtained, future mishaps are prevented because the entrepreneur is a little wiser now. How else do you learn what you didn’t know you needed to know?

The savvy business owner strives to fail better and fail less. One way to accomplish these goals is to enlist the support of an experienced business coach. At AdviCoach, it’s our job to shorten the learning curve for business owners, making less room for preventable mistakes, and less room for unforeseen problems. If you’d like to get the help you and your business need, reach out to us to see how we can better prepare you for success.