by Dr. Heléna Kate | Oct 29, 2013 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
When Steve Blank appeared on the cover of Wired magazine 19 years ago, his company then, Rocket Science Games, was expected to revolutionize the videogame industry. At the time, Blank didn\’t let the skepticism of critics faze him.
\”I thought I was a genius,\” he says. Three months later, when he called his mother to let her know he was about to lose $35 million in investor funding, he wasn\’t feeling quite so genius anymore.
\”I had lots of choices, including that I could have quit,\” he says. \”Learning from that failure for me was one of the best experiences of my life.\” And learn he did. In 1996, Blank founded the startup E.piphany, which went on to earn $1 billion for each of its investors.
In the past 10 years, says Blank, the culture around entrepreneurship has become increasingly failure-friendly. Serial entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley hop from one failed business to the next and billionaire entrepreneurs like Richard Branson wax on publicly about their failures almost as much as their successes. Still, \”no one likes to fail,\” says Blank. \”We are hardwired for success.\”
But what if you could actually use failure to help you succeed? Here are five keys to start failing your way to success:
1. Call failure something else.
When was the last time anyone got hired for a senior-level position without any experience? For serial entrepreneurs, \”experience\” is simply another word for \”failure,\” says Blank. By labeling a failed effort an opportunity to expand your knowledge base, you\’re framing it in a more positive light, allowing yourself to add to your credibility as a more seasoned entrepreneur.
2. Use failure as a stepping stone.
With every failure, identify what you know you did wrong and be conscious not to repeat your mistakes. This will bring you one step closer to success, says Steve Siebold, a Palm Beach, Fla.-based consultant who works with corporations and entrepreneurs on mental toughness and critical thinking.
\”I\’ve never heard [a millionaire entrepreneur] say they hit it right the first time out,\” says Siebold, whose book How Rich People Think (London House Press, 2010) is a culmination of nearly three decades of interviews. \”The bigger they are, the more they\’ve typically failed.\”
3. Never fail alone.
Entrepreneurs like to be trailblazers. But make a mistake on your own and you might have a hard time determining what went wrong. Having a partner you trust and respect can turn every failure into an opportunity for collaboration. \”A good partner can help you determine what not to do again,\” says Karl Baehr, director of business and entrepreneurial studies at Emerson College, a private four-year college in Boston focused on communication and the arts.
4. Don\’t hide your failures.
Be proud that you were brave enough to take a risk in the first place. By being forthright about your mistakes, you open yourself up to learning from others.
Baehr\’s mentor, Walter Hailey, whose insurance company Lone Star Life Insurance went on to become a Kmart insurance company, used to take an hour-long walk at 5 a.m. every morning with a group of close friends to talk about ideas, successes and failures. \”By the time they got back to the house, they had solutions,\” says Baehr. \”They had a plan for the day.\”
5. Redefine what you want.
Revisit and refocus why you got into business in the first place. \”Look for your emotional motivators. We are emotional creatures. Logic doesn’t motivate us,\” says Siebold, who launched five consecutive unsuccessful businesses before he started his current consulting company. For Siebold, that motivator was one day becoming a millionaire, a goal he achieved at age 31. \”Most people only half-heartedly decide they want a lot of things. You have to get really clear on what you want,\” he says. \”The question is: How badly do [you] want it?\”
Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com (more…)
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Oct 26, 2013 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
It is only a failure when you give up. You have heard this, right?
Easy to remember in retrospect and more difficult to stay in touch with when we are face to face with less than stellar results. It so easy to think that our failure really is a cosmic message that we need to throw in the towel and do something less than extraordinary.
The article is to help you keep your perspective so that you can reach the heights you wish to reach.
Purpose: Take a moment and pick out three major failures in your life. Who would you be or what would be true for you if you did not have these experiences? If you have managed to fail forward, then chances are you feel that they served a purpose. If you have gotten stuck it might be a little harder.
Quantity: How many mistakes do you make in the course of the day? Did you drop something, forget something, or trip? Did you do less than a great job on an important task, go the wrong way and get lost?
Mistakes are little failures that are a part of every day. How much we beat ourselves up about these little mistakes determines how much they have a negative impact on our day. This is the same with the big stuff as well. If we can resist the urge to mentally hold onto past set back whether large or small, they cease to have the same impact.
Ambivalence: We really don’t know whether our experience counts as a mistake or failure. In fact, there is really no such thing. The only way that failure exists is as a concept not as a reality. So give up judging your experience and just learn from it and keep moving.
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by Dr. Heléna Kate | Oct 20, 2013 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
Look at the world around you. Everything alive breaths in and out. If you dig a hole in the dirt it fills with air or water or something. Everything is in a constant exchange. It is the natural way of things.
However, we seem to feel that it is somehow unsafe to let things be that way and block one or the other. We block the \”inhale\” of life which is receiving or the \”exhale\” which is giving. Sometimes we even block both.
What can we do about it?
The first thing to do is to get back in balance. If you give all the time you are likely depleted. If you receive all the time you have likely depleted those around you.
If you are depleted, start a rigorously loving self-care plan. If you have been taking all the time –just start to notice what you do and why you do it.
Second, examine what the underlying issues are. There are reasons why you are not comfortable giving or receiving. Why do you think that is? What negative experiences or social training have shaped who you are?
Third, practice doing the opposite of what you have been doing. Do you normally take up the space in a conversation? Try listening more. Do you brush off every compliment? Try taking a deep breath, smiling and saying thank you.
Wherever you are blocked with this particular dynamic, it will affect your happiness and your growth so take some time to work with it. The results will be gratifying.
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by Dr. Heléna Kate | Oct 17, 2013 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
Life pulls us in many directions. No matter the phase of development our work is in, we can get caught in the tangle of competing interest and loss of motivation.
While I think it is unlikely, and perhaps even unproductive, to always stay on track, there are tools for getting back on track faster and easier. When we develop these abilities we also develop trust in ourselves. This makes the time we spend “off track” that much easier and more productive.
One of these tools you may have heard me talk about is the Vision Statement. There are just about as many ways to define the vision statement as there are people in the world, but one thing is sure – the vision statement is a useful tool for getting back on track.
When I talk with my clients, I am continually inspired by the dedication they show in bringing their work into the world. At one point, everyone works to get clear on their vision and their mission. It is not an easy thing – sometimes, the more we care, the more difficult attaining clarity becomes.
Your vision is the heart of what you do. Putting that depth of feeling and complexity into simple yet powerful words is a big task. But when you do it, you have managed to create the very thing that will pump life-blood through your work for years to come.
This means that, when you get off track, you are able to reconnect to the heart of what you are doing just by rereading your vision statement. The benefits do not stop there. Your vision statement also helps you every time you communicate with others about what you do because you are clearer about the real reason you are doing it.
So what is your vision for your world, your community, or your business? What would you like to see be different?
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Need more ways to stay on track? A little coaching cal go a long way. Join Dr. Kate\’s Inner Circle and get access to her skillful coaching for a low monthly fee.
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by Dr. Heléna Kate | Oct 15, 2013 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
The most unforgiving voice of all is the one that lives inside our heads. It is the constant drone of self-criticism, less-than and not-good-enough that leads our memory maps, habit patterns and fixed fantasies to the darkest of places. Silencing the Inner Critic is the first step toward rediscovering and reclaiming the authentic self.
You are perfect – mind, body and spirit. You are exactly where you need to be. You have never made a bad decision, although the consequences of your decisions may not have always turned out as you might have anticipated or expected. Sounds like a bunch of New Age nonsense, right? Well, not so much.
The factors that contribute to our evolution are myriad – nature, nurture, socialization, acculturation, collective consciousness, collective unconscious, racial memory, soul memory, in utero experience, prenatal influence – the list is seemingly endless. What often shapes us most immediately and most profoundly, however, are the instructions that we are given as we develop.
There really is no good explanation for why it is that we, as a culture, maintain a propensity to hear mostly the negative, as opposed to the positive, of those instructions, but that is the undeniable, and rather unfortunate, tendency. One supposes it has something to do with the Judeo-Christian ethic of \”man-as-sinner\” that is so deeply woven into the fabric of Western culture. Regardless, those negative instructions – \”You\’re fat.\” You\’re slow. You\’re dumb.\” You\’re clumsy\” – are part of the genesis for a pesky, self-critical and masochistic voice of self-denigration that plagues our self-perception.
That voice, however, – that Inner Critic – is predicated upon a lie; actually a whole series of lies. Those lies – or, more properly, our negative core beliefs as proscribed by them – establish for us many of the fixed fantasies that we hold about ourselves. And that voice, in turn, does its level best to inform – and mostly compromise — our self-esteem.
The lies issue from the perspective of those who themselves have lost contact with their own authenticity. They have their own set of lies to believe in. Remember the old adages, \”When you point a finger, there are three pointing back at you.\” or \”We hate in others what we fear most in ourselves.\”? Well, there you go. Psychosocially, and from the standpoint of emotional intelligence, the bully is always the weakest one on the playground.
On the other side of things, self-esteem is a wholly Western construct. Indeed, the notion of self-esteem – a notion that necessitates the inclusion of a dualistic \”bad me\” to balance out the \”good me\” – is quite foreign to Eastern thinkers. This is uniquely evidenced by the well known anecdote regarding a conference on Psychology and Buddhism some years ago where it was necessary to spend an entire day explaining the concept of self-esteem to a group of quite learned Eastern teachers and contemplatives, including the Dalai Lama. It\’s not that they didn\’t understand the construct of self-esteem, but, more, it\’s that they didn\’t understand why such a construct was even necessary.
The construct is necessary because we, at the sufferance of our own socialization, cling to this notion of \”bad me\”; a notion fostered by our fixation upon those formative negative instructions. There is really no way to avoid these negative instructions because they aren\’t about us – they are about the person who issues them. We can, however, manage the experience of those instructions, and the degree to which we allow them to influence us.
If we minimize and contain our experience of those negative instructions, recognizing them for what they are, then there is no real opportunity for us to generate the notion of \”bad me\”. With no \”bad me\”, there\’s no necessity for a \”good me\” — there\’s just \”me\” This is a path back to the authentic self — no conditions, no qualifications, no limitations. In this way, we can work toward an unselfconscious iteration of ourselves, rather than version that is constantly second guessing and looking over our own shoulder.
Read more by Michael J. Formica here. (more…)
