Inside A Failure

We need to talk about failure. We need to normalise it, to take away that paralysing fear of it. We live in a world where gurus leap at any chance to talk about sold out launches and six figure businesses, where the most visible people and products are the traditionally “successful” ones, and where success is publicly ranked by numbers next to a username and underneath a photograph. So over-saturated is success-gram that we have become unhealthily fearful of failure. It’s natural to feel trepidatious when starting something new, but I’ve had conversations with clients who agonise over the communications of their e-courses in case it looks like they’ve failed if they don’t sell it out. I’m not immune either – over the last couple of weeks I’ve had days of despair over the fact that my courses and programmes just aren’t selling out.But you know what? I failed. And I survived.

Today, I want to share with you the blood and guts of my ‘failure’ to demystify and redefine our concept of what success and failure is, and how we can all develop a healthier relationship with our businesses, moving away from the all or nothing model we have found ourselves in.

So let’s talk about my failure.

In September, I launched three offerings – Make It Real, a group programme I was passionate about, Campfire my existing blogging course, and Smoke Signals, a new course all about increasing the visibility of your brand. I was confident about the launch and the products, they’d been a long time in the making and I really believed that they would sell themselves. Especially for Make It Real, which had a limit of twenty participants, I planned out contingencies for if it sold out too quickly, and what thresholds I’d need to run two groups simultaneously. I genuinely thought that each programme would sell out and that I’d therefore make £30,000 in the last quarter of the year.But then it didn’t sell. And it continued to not sell.

In the first few weeks of September I ricocheted emotionally between shock, despair, futility and wanting to burn it all to the ground. Initially I couldn’t quite believe that my expectations weren’t meeting reality, but that soon turned to a deep disappointment – not bitter, just sadness that I’d got it so wrong, and that others weren’t as excited as I was.I have a dramatic memory of standing in the shower, the water streaming over my face, my hands against the cool wall thinking ‘what the hell am I going to do?’. I couldn’t imagine a way I could possibly run this programme without selling it out; I couldn’t imagine a way I could continue with my coaching work without selling out – who would I be to advise people when I can’t even sell my own stuff? What I realise with hindsight was that I had a very all or nothing perception of success, and was pinning all my worth and value on getting twenty people to sign up. At the time the one or two people who had joined the programme weren’t enough – I wanted twenty. Well actually, I wanted forty. I wanted to be oversubscribed because boy wouldn’t that be a story.

I should also mention that above and beyond the immediacies of this particular launch, I am basing the future of my business on these offerings. I’ve realised that focusing on one-to-one coaching is pretty exhausting for me, so from next year I’m reducing the number of coaching spots I have to 24 for the whole year, with the plan being to help more people through courses and group programmes. So another worry going around in the back of my head in this period of ‘failure’ was that ‘this is my plan to move my business forward and people don’t want it – what am I going to do?’ This is where the ‘burn it all down’ feelings came in big time.The more it didn’t sell, the more I clammed up. I overthought every email, every Instagram caption, even every Story. I so badly didn’t want to look desperate or salesy that I didn’t talk about the programme at all. In fact I didn’t really talk about anything; I got a real block around content and posting that meant that the focused scheme of content I had put out for Campfire’s launch in April didn’t happen in the slightest.The turning point came, however, when I posted this on Instagram. The caption had about seven revisions, sending the copy backwards and forwards to my friend Jess as I’d lost all confidence and perspective in my ability to speak by this point. But soon comments started to come in that people loved the programme, just now wasn’t the right time. At first I found this marginally frustrating, with the plan having been to, obviously, get a shit load of sign ups off the back of this post.

But as more comments came in, I began to take comfort in them, and for the first time since launching the programme, believe in myself again. Because people weren’t saying they hated it, or that it wasn’t for them. They loved the idea, it just wasn’t possible for them right now. Given that my fear had been that everyone hated it and the future of my business was in the toilet, it was a release to know that the idea was good, and just the timing was off.

From then onwards, I managed to rebuild my perception of the situation, and move away from the binary view of failure/success. A conversation with a friend helped me realise that actually running the programme for the first time with a smaller group than I’d intended was probably a good thing. I remembered that I was playing the long game with my business and that this launch was just one of many to come – it was unrealistic to expect so much of it right now. I remembered (and continue to remember) that change is messy; my business model shift won’t happen overnight and I have to sit in this mess and work through it for now. I gave myself a talking to, asking ‘who the hell do you think you are to measure success by the number of people you’ve signed up rather than the impact you can have on the ones who have?’.Mostly I learned that what we fear when we fear failure is the perception of others, but that they don’t care. No one knows my sales figures for this launch period – not because I’m keeping them secret but because no one’s asked! Nobody cares about how many places on your e-course sell, and nobody knows either.

Some actionable takeaways:

Here a couple of actionable things that I’m going to use in launches going forward to prevent me from falling into the fear of failure trap.

Find a new way to sell

I’ve realised that selling via ‘launch periods’ isn’t working for me. The pressure of the timeline is too intense, I worry about being too salesy and ultimately clam up and do nothing. So I’m going to look at other ways to sell my time-specific products in future. This might look like having the courses and programmes always on sale like my coaching offerings, and perhaps in the future shifting to more of a membership model. I’m not sure right now, but what I do know is the launch model ain’t working so I’ve gotta fix it.

Get evidence from outside of yourself

What got me out of my failure stranglehold was hearing from people that they wanted to do Make It Real, just not yet. That was really transformative to get that perspective and information from the horse’s mouth – not from supportive friends (who have to be positive) or from my own head (which tends to be negative). When you feel like you’re failing, for me at least, every impulse is to close up and not tell the world, but the more connected you can stay with your people, the more grounded you will be.

Selling out isn’t the only success

If I think about it, Make It Real wouldn't have been a success if I’d sold twenty places but to people who weren’t engaged or committed. I’m trying to measure success by the impact what I do has on the people who commit, rather than the numbers of passive participants. This is always going to be a learning process as from marks on our tests to likes on a photo we’ve been trained to see our worth in numbers – but they are not the only measure, and certainly not the most meaningful.