LEARNING EVERY DAY… sometimes even though you have done your best, things don’t always work out. When you put your best foot forward and the result is not positive it doesn’t matter why it happened, it does matter how you handle it. What do you do? Do you throw your 7-iron into the woods? Yell at your team members? Take it out on your spouse? Make excuses? – there’s lots of ways to demonstrate our frustration.
Here is your ACTION STEP… obviously there’s a better way. Learning from failure is critical. The mistake comes when we make an emotional connection between our “best effort” and the lack of results. Keep the emotion out of it. We’ve already agreed that you did your best… now what?
1. Get over the loss
2. Review what you did
3. What would you do differently next time? (Sometimes nothing is the right answer)
4. Adjust your strategy for the future
5. Pat yourself on the back… you have learned from the failure…NEXT
CRITICAL POINT… do not consider the word “failure” as a negative. It doesn’t mean that you failed… it means that things didn’t work out. Move on. BONUS POINT: There is yet another lesson to be learned here. Recognize that sometimes no matter what you do, even when you do everything perfectly… you don’t get the results you expected. That is yet another part of Selling. There is really only one “sure thing”… if you keep making mistakes and improving what you do, learn from failure then you will always be ahead of the pack. It’s the individuals who dig in their heels and avoid the growth opportunities of failure who end up losing. Your job is to always keep growing. NO Excuses.