Succeeding and failing helps you to learn more about yourself and your strengths and surprisingly, both can have a really positive effect on your self-esteem.
The entrepreneurial journey isn’t easy and your self-esteem will take many knocks along the way as you grow personally and professionally.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways that success and failure can impact upon your self esteem, along with some tips on how you can build your entrepreneurial resilience.
Business success
Virtually everyone excels in at least one area and business is no exception. When you achieve business successes, it helps you to learn where your best skills lie and to do more activities that enable you to take advantage of these advanced skills more often.
When you do something well, you feel a sense of accomplishment and pride. Your confidence is boosted because you were able to achieve something that either helped yourself and/or helped other people. You’ve done that ‘thing’ exceptionally well – you were the best person for the task and because of your skill set and experience, and you were more easily able to achieve it than anyone else. Others give you praise and positive feedback, and that feels really good!
Reviewing goals
It’s important to look back upon your successes and realize that you have the capability of doing great things and succeeding at whatever you are doing.
Many entrepreneurs have a habit of wanting to keep moving forward, which is great, but it’s also really important to look back so you can see all the amazing things you’ve achieved. By reviewing your goals on a regular basis, you’ll be able to set new challenging and inspiring goals, celebrate your previous successes and feel proud of all the things you’ve learnt and done.
Make reviewing goals one of your must-do success habits and you’ll notice a lovely self-esteem boost every time.
Curve balls
Sometimes, life throws you a curve ball and something happens which you weren’t expecting. This makes you feel wobbly and vulnerable which often impacts your self-confidence and ability to perform well at work.
Everyone faces challenges in life; no one has it easy all the time, which means there will be things in your life that will not go as planned. At times, it will seem that the whole world is against you. You know those kind of weeks where everything seems to go against you and nothing turns out as planned?
Times like these are bound to have a negative impact on your self-esteem and make you question whether you are able to achieve your goals. You may even start to worry about whether you’re really cut out for running a business. When you feel this way, reflect back upon past successes and failures and recognize that you have gone through challenging periods before and have the capability and skills needed to go through them again – and come out stronger than ever before.
Although it can be tempting to shrink away when life gets difficult, it’s important to remember that even during these difficult times, you have the capability to adapt and succeed. Recall those times when you had successes, especially those things that you really excel at. Whether it was a coaching client that required your specific expertise, a branding project you were really proud of, or just the fact that you helped someone out with a social media ad campaign, you were able to succeed where others might not have done.
By reflecting on your past difficulties and realizing you have the capability to adapt and do so many things well, you’ll realize that whatever present challenge you’re facing can be overcome as well. You just have to focus on the task at hand, utilize the lessons you’ve learned from having past successes, and put the work in to overcome the present challenge.
Business failure
Remember, fail is ‘First Attempt In Learning’.
Learning from failures can boost your self-esteem because you realize that you can bounce back from tough challenges. Resilience is an incredibly valuable quality to have when you’re an entrepreneur; many successful entrepreneurs talk of the need to have ‘grit’ to get you through failures and difficulties. When you fail, you learn valuable skills that can aid you in overcoming future tough challenges more easily.
The fact is, you learnt from your past failures and haven’t make the same mistakes since. When you make a mistake, it’s not the end of the world; on the contrary, you have an amazing opportunity to learn what went wrong, then learn how to deal with things better if the same or similar situation arises again.
It’s inevitable that when you look back at your failures, you’ll discover a weakness in your skill set, or realise that things could have been handled differently, but don’t worry! You have the ability to keep learning and growing; you can strengthen those skills through experience and gaining insight into what you can do better in future.
And by learning what you can do better, you can feel more confident in handling the same or similar situations in the future = self-esteem level 10.
Building resilience
Failure and challenges are all part of building resilience. They will happen whether you like it or not; the important thing to keep in mind is that you have control over how you react to them.
Here are some tips on building resilience:
- Keep positive. It’s easier said than done but a positive outlook can help you sail through the most challenging times. Practice daily gratitude and spend time with people who make you smile.
- Choose how you respond. Don’t let worry get the better of you. You get to choose how you react to challenges. Choose wisely.
- Look after yourself. A healthy mind and body means you’ll better equipped to deal with what life throws at you. Make time for self-care, exercise and eat healthily.
- Look how far you’ve come. Reflection is key to growth. Make sure you allocate time to review your personal and professional accomplishments.
- Find support. Chances are, if you’re going through failure or challenges, someone else has been there, done that, bought the T-shirt! Seek those people out. Be a sponge and soak up their wisdom, experience and support.
- Acceptance. Some things in life are inevitable and you may have to just accept that this is the way things are for a while. Remember, ‘this too shall pass’.
In summary, both success AND failure can actually have a positive effect on your self-esteem, providing you can look use them as a learning exercise and remember that you’re building your entrepreneurial grit day by day.
Have you experienced failure before and what effect did it have on your self-esteem? We’d be interested to know if this article has given you a new perspective, comment below.
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