PopUP! Series 🔥 Part 2/2: Rethinking Failure: How to turn every failure into an opportunity

In this episode we're diving into a simple, three step process you can use in your business to understand the results you got, create strategic actions plans, and make meaningful progress towards your goals.

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Link to Music Credits
Track: Positive Motivation
Author: AShamaluevMusic (ASM)
Publisher: CD Baby (IPI 700570289)

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Transcript

Ilonka Ras (00:00.162)
Welcome back to this episode in this series. I talked about failure in the previous episode and how telling yourself that you failed at something is really a decision. You have other options that are more helpful as you build, grow and scale your business. In this episode, I want to give you a practical tool, something I use in my own business every day and with all of my clients, a simple evaluation process you can use at any time.

Anytime something goes well and also doesn't go as you expected, the tool that will help you find new insights and opportunities in every success and failure. go. Welcome to the Effortless CEO podcast. The only show that teaches South African business owners how to improve their operations and design a business that can run without them.

If you're interested in leading your team more effectively, creating more operational efficiency, delivering with excellence while getting some of your life back, then you're in the right place. Here's your host, Strategic Intervention Coach and Operations Specialist, Ilonka Ras.

Most of us don't actually stop to question the things that don't go as well as we want it to. We question it, but very unintentionally and from a place of spiraling in confusion and blame and frustration. And this is because looking at what went wrong often feels very heavy. It feels like we're overthinking it and just sort of sitting in the muck of it, or it brings up a lot of shame and guilt.

But when we skip this step, we're actually missing an opportunity to find very interesting insights that can actually help us to grow faster and move forward faster. We miss the insight that will remove the drama and help us to make smarter, more informed decisions going forward in our business. Now, before I walk you through the steps, I just want to say that evaluating is one of the most

Ilonka Ras (02:14.382)
powerful things that you can do as a business owner. When things don't go well, we either beat ourselves up and we spiral, or we just move on and keep pushing without really looking at what happened and why it happened. When you slow down and evaluate from a place of curiosity, everything can change. You will start seeing patterns. You will learn how you work. You will understand how you create the results that you're seeing inside of your business.

You will stop feeling like things are happening to you and you will start trusting yourself more, feel more confident, make bolder decisions and also know exactly what you need to do next. You become the kind of business owner who can handle anything when you're willing to implement this process in your business because you're paying attention to everything and growing with every move.

And that's why I love this process so much. It's so simple. It's very strategic and it's completely shame free. It's something that you can do at any point for different things inside of your business, whether that is launching a new service, if there is a team situation that isn't going as you want it to go, when you feel like you don't have any energy throughout your day, you can use this to evaluate your schedule and what you're spending your time on.

when a client says no to a proposal, or when something did go well, but you aren't really sure why, and it feels like a little bit of a fluke or luck, then this is something you can use to gain insight on why you got the results that you got. So here is the process. It's a simple three-step process. And the first step that you wanna take is you want to ask yourself what worked. So your brain is going to want to skip this part.

It's going to want to skip ahead to step two and not spend a lot of time here. I highly recommend that you bring yourself back to step one and do this first and spend a little bit more time than you think is necessary to really dig into what worked. And here's why. It's not just about being positive or feeling better. There's actually neuroscience behind this. And this is because your brain is wired

Ilonka Ras (04:37.058)
with a negativity bias. It's designed to scan for everything that went wrong, felt dangerous, needs fixing. And that is because its primary job is to keep us alive. So when something doesn't go the way that you expect it to, your brain immediately wants to protect you by focusing on everything that didn't go well, everything that went wrong. And that's when we start spiraling into self-doubt, self-blame, and almost shutting down in a sense. But when you stop and ask yourself,

what worked, you're activating your prefrontal cortex. That's the part of your brain responsible for logical thinking, creative problem solving, and long-term vision. It actually pulls you out of reaction and helps you to reflect, grow, and learn, and getting you in a space where you can actually think logically about the thing that happened or the thing that didn't go as planned versus being emotional and in the mind drama of it.

So the first question that you want to ask yourself is what worked? Some different examples of this is what did go well? What would I absolutely repeat again? And the thing is there's always something that worked, right? So we want to start here and you'll notice the more you look for what worked, the more you will find. The second step is to ask yourself what didn't work.

And this is really an invitation for yourself to get honest without blaming yourself or shaming yourself. It's not about judging yourself yet. It's really a tool for awareness and noticing what didn't go as well as you would have liked it to. So you can ask yourself what didn't work and what are my three theories for why it didn't go as well as black or why it didn't work.

Now we're not looking to punish ourselves. We just want to get clear. So make a list of everything that didn't go as planned and why you think that happened. Then step number three is to ask yourself, what will I do differently next time? And this is really where you're taking back control, but also mining for your own wisdom and creating your own plan of action. So you can ask yourself, what do I think would make a difference? What would have made a difference?

Ilonka Ras (06:53.73)
What would I like to do differently next time? So every time you come up with a list in this section, you can use everything that you've come up with as your next course of action. And this is how we stop reacting and just stop life and business happening to us and where we can actually start leading. Now, evaluating allows you to understand how you got here to learn what worked, what didn't.

and to take empowered action from that place. So here's a recap. Pick one thing from the last 30 days that didn't go the way you hoped, something that you would classify as a failure, and walk yourself through these three steps. Ask yourself, what worked? What didn't work? What will I do differently next time? I look at any goal I set for myself in my business as an experiment.

I'm crafting my best guess plan based on my skills and experience. And then I get to work to implement that plan. Then I evaluate my experiment. I evaluate the actions that I took, the results that I created, and I use it as a means to determine where my plan was off, where I underestimated the amount of effort it required. And I mine for my own wisdom to adjust and tweak my experiment so that I can take what I have learned and move.

forward towards my desires, my goals with more confidence. That is where the goal is. And now you have a tool to help you do the same. Remember, you're not a failure. You're a scientist. Thank you so much for tuning into this week's series. I will see you again next week.