How to Reframe Setbacks for Future Growth
As entrepreneurs, we’re always measuring ourselves by success and failures. For example, if our latest product launch was a hit, if our team made their goals, if you landed the new client, and so on. Success, in these instances, can inspire us, and no matter how many times we reach a goal, the sense of achievement that comes with a victory is always thrilling.
However, in actuality, success can be challenging to attain. There’s no guarantee that each goal you set will be achieved. For many reasons, some even out of our control, failure happens — in our personal lives and businesses. Whereas success brings us inspiration, failure can bring us burnout and frustration.
However, failure doesn’t need to be the end. In fact, failure is often a minor setback — a new beginning.
We often don’t pay enough attention to our accomplishments and dwell too much on our failures. Failure is a value judgment imposed on us by other people. In many cases, it’s our own perception of what we think other people will think of us, without them having voiced any opinion.
So, if failure is the value judgment of other people imposed on us, then there is no such thing as failure in our own mind’s eye. This makes the idea of complete failure something that we aren’t beholden to. Instead, we should reframe our failures as setbacks and see them as critical learning opportunities.
Below are three steps you can take to reframe setbacks and consider every experience we have as a learning opportunity.
1) Analyze
When you recognize a setback in your business, it’s easy to become self-critical and self-evaluate. We’ve all done this type of evaluation and embraced the “should’ve, would’ve, could’ve” mindset. It’s a way we inherently assign blame on ourselves and put rationale to a failure. However, when we self-evaluate a situation, we neglect the lessons presented to us.
Instead, view the setback from an analytical standpoint, one from which you can draw wisdom from. Start by looking at the failure holistically, asking yourself what happened and what didn’t happen in the scenario. This sets the stage for our setbacks to be analyzed, rather than evaluated.
2) Adapt
After you’ve analyzed the situation, it’s time to think about what can be changed. Maybe there wasn’t a single problem in the situation, perhaps it was a multitude of issues i.e., poor timing, insufficient follow-ups, miscommunications, etc. With this, it’s important to recognize that simply identifying these setbacks isn’t enough.
It’s important to take the time to adapt and make something from our findings, addressing the issues identified. To do this, think about what can be done differently and what can be done better for future success. Use those findings to inform the future and enhance your processes.
3) Advance
The last step is only made possible by achieving the first two — advancing beyond the setback. Often, we find ourselves lingering in failure when we see it as an end state. By analyzing the situation and coming up with actionable steps to adapt our future, setbacks become a catalyst for growth.
This is when executing the lessons that we learned from a failure comes into play. Using the failure as a reflective state, then coming up with ways to adapt, gives us a guide for future success. Once you’re ready to act on the plan that you’ve laid out, you can advance past your setback.
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