How to be successful and confident by failing - confidence starts with with making mistakes
This is because success starts with failure and success is building your confidence. You could call it the domino effect.
But isn‘t it our biggest goal in business (and in private) to avoid failure in the first place? That’s not totally wrong. Mistakes are time consuming; one gets embarrassed and often they also cost money. Three good arguments to try to not make them. Pick your favorite.
Confidence comes from failure? How?
The only truth is that in many jobs, failures are an essential part of the job description, like:
product development
IT e.g. in programming
start-ups in general.
You know it is a lot of trial and error in these industries. They need to do it because there is no blueprint for something that hasn’t been there before. If you develop something completely new, you are entering uncharted territory. And yes, here you can only try, see how it goes and in case it is the wrong way, go back and try it again. It’s a question of “How can you regain confidence after repeated failure?”
This is the DNA of Silicon Valley and all the other great inventors of your time. And if you include potential mistakes and failures into your project planning and strategizing, you are never surprised when it happens. You might be able to see the opportunity within the problem and can ask the tough questions that will make the project or product even better and substantial in the future. Call it proof-of-concept. Take time to reflect what went wrong. Analyse the problem and try to include your learnings.
When your project or product will be launched you can say confidently: “Yes, we tested it thoroughly. We went through various scenarios and erased the biggest impediments already during development. We can say that this project is vetted.”
How to be successful after a failure?
Actually, there are some fantastic examples of inventions that started as failures but developed into live changing medicines or products. What if the scientist and engineers would‘ve given up or lost their confidence? We would have missed out on a lot. Here is a full list of 15 life-changing inventions created by a failure from Business Insider.
Penicillin, the pacemaker, microwave ovens, Post-Its and just for a good laugh – Cornflakes.
Let’s just say that mistakes are not always that bad. Why do women in specific have such a big problem with mistakes and missteps? One theory is that when boys fail, they take it in stride, there is no big deal, they get a pat on the shoulder move on. When girls make the same mistake, they are more likely to be corrected and people show disappointment. Girls just have to be perfect (little ladies). And this is manifesting in your brain, leading to perfectionism when you grow older and sadly sometimes to so much fear of doing something wrong that these girls, now grown-up businesswomen, decide it would be better to not try anything new at all.
How to be a confident business woman?
Personally, I hate to make mistakes. I just don’t like to be wrong. And I really do not like to do things again and again. I am a “one take, one try, one shot”-Katrin. Patience and optimizing are not my thing. BUT – after I started to have my first team my attitude changed. First of all, I had enough business experience to accept that failures are part of the business and that now one is without fail. And I realized that it is better to build a good failure culture instead of bothering my team with my fears of being wrong. Because I am the one who have to keep them motivated throughout difficult projects and optimization phases.
Confidence comes from success and failure alike
It helped me to help others to manage their mistakes. Now actually I am a big fan of mistakes – you might know the event series F*ck-Up-Nights? I love how ordinary people are going on stage and just talk about who they f*cked up and how they reacted … what they learned. Spoiler alert: Every time the story has a silver lining and a learning.
Build a failure culture - and learn how to become confident again after a failure
A good failure culture is so essential, and I can only encourage you to review the failure culture in your company and in your team (perhaps in your personal life, too). Are you happy with the way your management is dealing with mistakes? How your boss is reacting to a fail? If not, go out, make use of your confidence and change it for the better!