Many aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners have suffered a setback or two. And many more have made failed attempts at entrepreneurship altogether. Some go on to try again while others feel defeated. Many of you have heard that old saying, “That which does not kill you, only makes you stronger.” There’s definitely some truth to that - even when it comes to business.

Barry Moltz, Entrepreneur, Author and Motivational Speaker, is our featured guest in this Episode of The Small Business Trends Radio. Barry explains how to thrive through the cycle of success and failure and he’ll show you how to gain the skill of true business confidence that determines which of us succeed in the long run.

Here’s a sampling from the show:

• When a failure takes place — you may be temporarily paralyzed - but you have to “bounce” back. Taking action, moving in a different direction and making money is one way to do that. The more actions taken to get to a new place, the more success you’ll have overcoming it. Allow yourself an ample amount of time to recover from the setback, then make a conscious decision to pull yourself out of it and begin to take action.

• Take control of your thoughts — and develop skills to take charge of how you’re feeling by being action oriented and using mentors and friends to lean on and encourage you.

• Downsize your dreams — and strive for achievement by learning to focus on one task at a time. Multi-tasking doesn’t grant much productivity and setting interim goals will help you achieve your “grand vision” faster and define the path to reach it more clearly - one step at a time.

As humans, we all make mistakes and failures. Steve, our show’s co-host, gave a good example of that during the show when he pointed out that even as infants, we all fail at our first footsteps before finally getting it right.

So are you ready to begin to successfully overcome a failure and/or prepare yourself for the next one? You can find a review of Barry’s new book “Bounce” here and listen to his full interview by clicking the red and yellow player below.

Brought to you by our sponsor:

Infusionsoft.com

 

 How Failure and Resiliency Can Build Business Confidence [27:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Posted by Staci Wood | | Permalink

1. “Downsize your dreams”. We have a term for that in Programming - TopDown Approach.

   A top-down approach is essentially breaking down a system to gain insight into its compositional sub-systems. In a top-down approach an overview of the system is first formulated, specifying but not detailing any first-level subsystems. Each subsystem is then refined in yet greater detail, sometimes in many additional subsystem levels, until the entire specification is reduced to base elements.

   Same goes with our dreams. If it’s too big or broad enough, we can’t just jump directly to it and achieve it. We have to broke it into smaller parts and achieve them slowly. Well, it should be slowly but surely!

   Comment by Bianca Aquino — 8/21/2008 @ 9:33 pm

2. I like Barry’s point that failure is never final and it’s never permanent. You have the ability to jump back up and dust yourself off. Sometimes we let failures ruin our outlook and keep us from trying again. I think failure only makes us grow stronger and smarter as business owners.

   Comment by Paula — 8/22/2008 @ 11:04 am

3. “That which does not kill you, only makes you stronger.” - Friedrich Nietzsche.

   I will listen to this show in the near future. I have been involved in a so-called start-up “failure”, but I see it as one fall forward and one step closer to success!

   Comment by Martin Lindeskog — 8/24/2008 @ 10:24 pm

4. Great words of wisdom, Martin.

   Well, Friedrich’s idea is correct. Failure doesn’t kill us anyway and even will make us stronger IF we knew how to handle that failure. Thus we have treat it as an opportunity to learn and grow stronger from it.

   Comment by Arthur Bland — 8/24/2008 @ 11:11 pm

5. This is a great post. Thank you very much.

   Comment by Alan — 8/25/2008 @ 7:46 am

6. I have to agree here. “That which does not kill you only makes you stronger.”

   It’s a hard pill to swallow but as human’s we learn only through experience it seems. Good ones and bad ones. To truly learn the lesson, one has to allow the experience.

   You can always look back on something bad and find that something good has actually come out of it.

   Comment by Chris — 8/28/2008 @ 1:27 pm

7. Arthur Bland: Thanks for your kind words.

   Comment by Martin Lindeskog — 9/5/2008 @ 8:16 am