Be Deaf to Negativity and All Ears to Failure: Prove Yourself Right
One of the hardest challenges faced by the entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed, as well as a challenge I face daily, is the emotional burden that comes with the constant and inevitable disappointment, distrust, disbelief, and lack of support entrepreneurs receive from family, friends, colleagues, and clients. Entrepreneurs are always too shy to discuss the emotional pain they feel as they go out on their own to create something others may not understand, value, or support.
This is not a tragedy. In fact, with the right personal development, we can channel that energy to become more motivated, credible, and creative. Instead of bearing the emotional burden of disappointment and failure on our own, for fear of stigma from the rest of the industry, we can channel the lack of support and trust we receive into a practice where we use that frustration and pain into fuelling our purpose with a newly improved approach.
It’s about giving up on defending our ideas and ourselves and protecting ourselves with self care rituals that allow us to tap into the only validation, approval and support we need: our own
Don’t defend yourself. Prove them and yourself wrong.
Start with Being Vulnerable:
Being vulnerable in this industry has its consequences: prospects and clients may question your suitability and authority, investors may criticize your ability to make sound decisions as you process and manage feelings of self-doubt and failure, as well as your audience now knowing that you’re not the picture of success 24/7 as you are portrayed online. Thankfully, Be and Become (BB) consulting, is creating a community for entrepreneurs to feel safe, supported, and secure in sharing both their wins and their losses and not just their wins. This ensures that entrepreneurs have a clear non-toxic account of what being an entrepreneur is really like and that they are not alone.
Failure is an Essential Part of the Journey
The truth is: our work comes with failure whether we like it or not. As much as we work hard to avoid failure, failure is our greatest teacher and our best friend when it comes to growth, scaling, and upping our game personally and professionally. According to Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb and many other inventions we take for granted today, had this to say about failure:
When asked "how did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn't fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." "Great success is built on failure, frustration, even catastrophe."
When we fail, we’re not to give in to the lack of support and understanding of our personal relationships. Since our work is full self-directed and we have unlimited liability, we are the only people on our ship steering it in the direction we need to go. Because of this, hitting bumps and hurdles on the wrong side helps us navigate away from what is not serving us and our mission and put us back on the right path towards our goals.
Be Deaf to Negativity and Keen on Feedback
A famous fable tells the story about a group of frogs who decided to compete with each other in running up a tree. The one who reached the highest point wins. All but one of the frogs kept failing to reach the highest point they could because they were hearing discouraging comments about how going so high on the tree was impossible or too difficult by the frogs on the ground. The winner, who managed to reach the very top of the tree, was a deaf frog who persevered not knowing or hearing all the negativity from below.
Let perseverance and relentless hope be your running legs and let failure be the teacher who can teach you when you’ve gone too far, too high, or too low.
Push Back: Don’t Tell - Show
Often, entrepreneurs love to talk about their ideas, plans, goals, and aspirations. We get excited by our ideas and the promise they hold in helping us make an impact and legacy unto this world. But in doing so, we are granting ourselves the satisfaction of approval (if that is the result) without doing the work, or we are opening ourselves us to criticism that can weigh us down even before we even start which takes the winds out our sails and sends us down to the rabbit hole of self-doubt, feelings of worthlessness, discouragement, and insecurity.
We must hear the feedback “you’re not qualified for this” “people don’t know who you are so why would they listen to you” and instead of talking our talk and defending ourselves, desperately searching for new feedback or approval, we must heed the feedback and use it as another teacher teaching us the objections we need to surpass and overcome.
Being told there’s no market for your product? Good. Ask the market yourself their opinions.
Being told you’re not qualified? Good. Get certified and write more trust-building content
Being told your service is not original? Good. Do a brainstorm and establish your uniqueness.
Being told it’s too hard? Good! Do it and prove them wrong.
The best way to recover from disappointment, discouragement, disbelief and lack of trust from your internal circles and outer circles of relationships is to feel the emotional burden and harness that energy as a means of pushing ourselves further, harder, smarter, and stronger.
As Missy Elliot would say: “And for those who hated. You only made us more creative.”