Moving Forward From Failure
Almost 9 Years ago on December 5th of 2012 I opened what was then called Greensboro Community Yoga. I was still working my corporate job. So I’d teach yoga classes before work, after work, and on the weekends. Then I’d run the newsletter and things like payroll for the other teachers on lunch breaks during my full-time job.
It was exhausting, and I burnt myself out. The studio didn’t pan out the way I hoped it would. The goal was to make enough with the studio that I could leave my corporate job, but in the end after almost 5 years, I had to sell the studio. It felt like the biggest failure of my life. That ventor was my first attempt at big, messy, inspired action. To this day it still feels like one of the most painful little failures I’ve ever encountered. I share more about the experience in my book “Little Failures: Learning to build our resilience through our everyday setbacks, challenges, and obstacles” which is being published by New Degree Press in May, 2022.
In light of the anniversary of opening that yoga studio, I wanted to share the 4 step process that I used to move forward after failure, and I’ll be elaborating on it in the book. For now I hope this will be useful if you’re recovering from and trying to move forward after a failure or setback.
In yoga, we often talk about how “the obstacle is the path”. It’s like that with failure too. Often failure is the best path forward, the perfect teacher. When you’re willing to take messy inspired action, failure is always going to be a part of the equation.
Ironically, and painfully it’s typically the fastest way to the learning and growth we most want! So first, it’s important to keep that in mind. Then when you encounter failure (which you will if you’re moving towards the life you most want) these 4 steps will help you tremendously!
1st: allow yourself to feel all of the feelings, grieve and accept what happened. Don’t push the feelings away, you’ve got to feel them or they will come back up.
2nd: Gather and engage your community. Community helps us feel less alone, they can hold space for us, help us process, and find the right perspective on what transpired.
3rd: do what I call “The Failure Post-Mortem”. Write out a SWOT analysis of what happened. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. What were those in what just took place? Should you try again and if so what can you do differently this time?
4th: Take recovering actions. Get back up on the horse, whatever just failed might not deserve another try or a repeat, but is there another action you can take to put yourself out there again? I promise any creative action is a great “recovering action”! When you systematically go through these steps you’ll be reminded that failure has so much good to teach you and everything you want is on the other side of the failure you’ve just experienced and learned from.
For me walking away from that studio felt like a very painful failure. Yet, ultimately it taught me how to run a business, it taught me what I liked about entrepreneurship and what I didn’t. It taught me that I was very capable of making things happen and it gave me the foundation to do the work I’m doing now.
Without that first business I would not get to be doing the work I’m doing today. That failure paved the road for where I am and I’m ultimately very grateful for it and the lessons it provided for me.
If you’re hungry for more stories and ideas for moving forward from failure then pre-order my book, “Little Failures” below!