By Molly Gordon

How do you respond to failure? How do you feel when you realize you've made an error of judgment or violated your own standards?

Personally, I hate it. And nothing irritates me more than a happy-talking, self-appointed New Age pundit who's getting rich telling me that everything is perfect and failure doesn't hurt.

Bull. Failure hurts. I ought to know. I've failed at business, love, and living up to my own ethics.

I've failed as a sister, a daughter, a wife, and a coach.

And not all of these failures are in the distant past. There are some doozies from times more recent than I care to mention.

Still, I do claim there are gifts in failure.

In fact, I'm pretty passionate about this because I figure that anything that hurts as much as failure darn well better have an up-side.

A few years back I single-handedly destroyed the motherboard on a perfectly good computer by (wo)man-handling a new memory chip into a slot I couldn't quite reach.

I'd installed memory before and I knew what it should feel like.

I asked myself again and again if I shouldn't just maybe stop rather than forcing something that was designed to slip in easily.

Impatience won the day, and after spending $300 for attempted repairs, I replaced the computer.

At that time I didn't have money to burn (still don't, in fact).

Yet I'd been working on right livelihood for a long time, and I somehow realized that this time I simply could not afford to take a nose-dive into a bottomless pit of guilt.

(As the oldest of eight children, raised Catholic in a military family, my guilt pit truly is bottomless. I'll match it against yours any day.)

So I decided to reframe the "waste" of money as a lesson. Since the amount involved was sizable in my world, I further resolved that this lesson needed to be fully worth the cost.

With this in mind, I arrived at the following resolutions:

    1. From this moment forth I will stop pretending that I can't afford to have professionals maintain my equipment. After all, my do-it-yourself project had a four-figure price tag.

    2. From this moment forth I will measure the intensity of my impatience against my willingness to incur a four-figure expense. If giving into my impulse is worth four-figures, I'll go for it. Otherwise, I shall forbear.

    3. From this moment forth I will celebrate my failures and set-backs by noting the degree of resilience, humor, and humility required to go with the flow.

    4. From this moment forth I will respond to guilt by acknowledging my errors and rectifying them as simply, cleanly, and quickly as I can. From now on, I'm staying out of the pit.

This was a pivotal moment in the development of my business.

From that point forward I lived those resolutions to the best of my ability, not to push away embarrassment, guilt, or disappointment, but to use these discomforts as the fuel for growth.

Something in me stands taller, breathes deeper, speaks more clearly as a result. I may not like everything I do, but I know longer have to run away from myself.

That means I always have a place to stay, ground to stand on, and for me, that is a huge part of authenticity.

The brilliant economist and business consultant Fred Kofman teaches an exercise you can use to experience the kind of shift I described above.

I'll summarize it briefly here, but you really owe it to yourself to get Fred's tapes, Conscious Business. The set is worth a hundred times its cost.

One reader wrote me, "My wife says this is worth $4 million if it works." He ordered the tape series and reported back that I had undersold it.

Fred calls this a Victim/Player exercise.

Write your answers to the victim questions, then take some time to notice where these questions take you.

What mood do they leave you in? What attitudes or beliefs arise?

What options are you left with for moving on?

Then read and answer the player questions. Again, notice where these questions take you. How is this different from what you experienced as a victim?

Victim Questions
1. What happened to you?
2. Who wronged you? How?
3. What should they have done?
4. What should they do now to fix it?
5. What punishment do they deserve?

Player Questions
1. What challenge did you face?
2. How did you respond?
3. What did not work?
4. Could you have done something better or with more integrity?
5. Could you have prepared better (to minimize the risk or limit the impact)?
6. Can you do something now to improve the situation?
7. What lesson can you learn from the experience?

Fred is careful to point out that the feelings that show up when we are victims are real for us.

This exercise, then, is not about invalidating your experience.

It is, however, a pointed invitation to accept your feelings and then stand back from them so that you (your values, your intentions, your aspirations), and not your reactions, can steer your course.

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Fred's tapes: Conscious Business: Transforming Your Workplace (And Yourself) by Changing the Way You Think, Act, and Communicate

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© Copyright Shaboom Inc. Reprinted by permission.

Image: Thomas Edison had some very helpful perspectives on failure. When a reporter asked him about the thousands of experiments he performed to develop an electric lamp filament, Edison replied: “I have not failed, not once. I’ve discovered ten thousand ways that don’t work.”

[From article Failure and personal growth development, by Douglas Eby.]

More articles by Molly Gordon.

She is also a contributor to the book 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, edited by David Riklan of SelfGrowth.com.

Molly Gordon is president of Shaboom Inc., a "coaching and training company that delivers hope, help, and hilarity to Accidental Entrepreneurs so that they can build a business that fits just-right."

She says, "Thanks to my checkered past, I'm able to draw road maps for other accidental entrepreneurs – people who love their work enough to risk working for themselves but who aren't particularly business oriented and who have a deep commitment to personal growth.

"I love that everything I learn (and every mistake I make) serves this audience. From The Work of Byron Katie to Embodied Intelligence, ontological coaching to Process Work to integral theory and methodology, there is delicious synergy among my vocation and avocations."

Visit her site: Accidental Entrepreneur's Guide to Self-Employment Success to get her free 31-page guide, Principles of Authentic Promotion.

She explains that her business name Shaboom refers to how "business success and personal growth are intertwined. The more you grow and develop personally, the more you achieve the emotional, physical, and spiritual well being you want, the more successful you will be at building a business where the person you have always wanted to be can do work you have always wanted to do. And that's very cool, indeed."

Her programs include:

The Way of the Accidental Entrepreneur, The Practical Path to a Business that Fits Just-Right
A testimonial: "Before I bought the program, I assumed you were pretty touchy-feely, “think positive” kind of coach, not much real world application stuff. What I discovered is that you have really amazing insights into the issues that I personally have as a single-person business, and I’ve been doing this off and on for over 30 years...I’d recommend The Way of the Accidental Entrepreneur to anyone who went into business because they loved what they do. Selling yourself and your skills is exhausting, demeaning, and often sucks the passion out of what used to feed your creativity and happiness. I’m thinking about my work in a completely different way and am excited to tell people my story once again." - Dick Carlson, Columbia, SC, USA.

The Self-Employment Telesummit
Transform under-earning into the joyful creation of meaningful wealth. Hear presentations by 18 of the world’s top heart-centered teachers. "Many accidental entrepreneurs are skilled in their areas of genius, but they need to get quickly up to speed on all other areas so they can be successful at making money when they need it, which is now," explains event creator Molly Gordon. "Meeting this need is what the Self Employment Telesummit is all about."

Video: Inner and outer transformation are keys to self-employment profits - "You need both inner and outer transformation to profit when you love your work but don't much love the business part.
     Profit Alchemy is a nine-month program that provides both."

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Related sites

The Inner Entrepreneur

The Inner Entrepreneur / Facebook

This is a publication of Talent Development Resources

TalentDevelop / Facebook

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