Ep. 109: Failure is an Option - Letting Go of Perfection, Facing Your Fears, and Learning From Your Mistakes (Solo Episode)

Albert Einstein said, "A person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new."  When you become an entrepreneur, you must embrace failure and learn from it.  Perfection is for Mary Poppins, not entrepreneurs.  If you want to be your own boss, things are going to get messy. Get ready to suck it up and face your fears.  The more you fall down and dust yourself off, the higher your chances for success.

Ready to try something new? What about TikTok? Listen in to find out about the newest challenge.

SHOW NOTES:
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Ep. 108: Get Radical With Your Numbers (Five Steps to Increase Profits - BONUS SERIES)
Ep. 107: Clean Up Your Financials - From Hot Mess to Organized (Five Steps to Increase Profits - BONUS SERIES)
Ep. 106: Be Authentic to Attract the Right Clients (Five Steps to Increase Profits - BONUS SERIES)

For more info, see complete show notes:  https://www.getthebalanceright.net/blog/episode109

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Transcript

INTRO
Albert Einstein said a person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new.  When you become an entrepreneur, Failure is something that you have to embrace and learn from. If you don't oh my God, you are going to be miserable. 

Hey, we're not Mary Poppins here. We're not perfectly perfect in every way. As an entrepreneur. Yes, you're going to fail. And the sooner you realize that the better, you're going to do a lot of falling down. And You're just going to have to dust yourself off and face a new day. 

 On today's show. We are talking about. Learning from your failures and facing your fears.  

SHOW: 
Hello, and welcome to Get the Balance Right podcast. I am your host, Heather Zeitzwolfe last week I was planning on releasing five bonus episodes. And if you go back and look at last week, well, I released three. Well, they did try. But sometimes trying leads to failing and I had all good intentions of putting out. 

Five episodes last week. But I think I was setting myself up for failure because. I went out of town last week to fin con I was staying in Orlando. And didn't even think about the fact that I may not have really good wifi. To upload my episodes. 

Needless to say, my ambitious plan of releasing five episodes last week didn't happen.  . I do have two more that are part of those bonus segments. And you'll notice that I didn't release them this week. Why not. Well, part of it was a failure. Again, I went back and I listened to what I had recorded for episode four and episode five for that week. And I really didn't like him. I was like, you know, I'm out of town. I don't have the right microphone to be doing this. I had been also suffering from a sickness wasn't COVID according to my test . I may still have a little bit of sickness left in my voice, but if you go back and listen to last week's episodes. 

I definitely sound like I was on the ill side I'm going to release them later on when I can redo them because, I just thought they weren't good enough. And One thing to put something out. That's not a hundred percent. I understand that. I mean, we can't have perfection as an entrepreneur. But it's another thing to have some quality control and be like, you know what. It's okay. I'm going to release these later on when I have time to really work on them and make sure that they're really great for the audience. 

So today we're talking about failure because it's something that I think we all need to embrace. And also it's part of facing our fears.  At FinCon there were quite a few people that talked about Tik Tok 

Tik Tok is something that I've been sort of interested in have sort of dabbled a little bit in But dabbling is not what you need to do when you want to become a viral sensation on Tik TOK. This whole dabbling thing, if I really want to do Tik Tok, I'm going to have to step through my fear and just start. 

Doing this, like every day.  if you are a longtime listener, you may remember during season two that I did 45 days of Instagram live. So I went live for 45 days in a row to get over my fear of going live. 

I am declaring, 51 days in a row. I'm going to record at least. , 51 videos. On Tik TOK. , I started this on Sunday today. I'm recording this on Monday. So, so far I've put out two videos. 

And I'm going to be doing this every single day and we're going to see what happens. , my plan is to also go live on Instagram each week. And talk about. Some of my success and failures of doing this Tik Tok adventure. 

And if you are someone who has been dabbling or very interested in TikTok or you've been. Really doing well on Tik Tok, I would love to go live with you as well. We can talk about our failures and our successes. So, what are you doing as an entrepreneur to allow yourself to fail? And allow yourself to step through, into your fears. 

Now when you do step into your fears. You may miraculously do something incredible right off the bat. Or you might end up doing things kind of sloppy, scrappy.  . In the beginning, we're not going to be good at things   Be supportive of yourself to be able to fail. Dust yourself off. Get back up there and try again.

I don't know if you've ever seen the movie million dollar baby with Hilary Swank. Well in that movie, it's a really good movie. I'm not really into boxing. I'm not into sports, but it's a really good movie. in the film, She wants to be a boxer and she's not very good. I mean, she was pretty good to begin with, but not that great. And she's got a terrible technique and all of that kind of stuff, but she persists and she keeps trying and in the beginning she's failed quite a bit, but then she becomes like the world champion of girls boxing or something like that. Anyways. , she proves that she can do it. And she started from. Not being that great in the beginning, it was just something that she really wanted to do.  In the beginning, we're not going to be good at things. We just have to be able to tough it out. 

And be like, okay, you know what? I know I'm going to suck at the beginning. But I got to just do this. I got to start. Everyone starts from somewhere.  

 Last month I started a beta membership program. And I'm doing a scrappy, I'm doing it, but beta version, I'm having people give me feedback on what they want. I'm going to make tweaks to it. And so far, I think it's actually been going pretty well, but I'm sure that I'm failing in some areas. 

And as long as I get feedback from everyone, I can fix it when the real one rolls out, which I know that everyone is going to love. Please join. It's going to be great. We can all learn from each other as well.  I'm not perfect. Mary Poppins, maybe. Perfect. She's the only one I know. That's perfectly perfect, even the people that you think that are perfect. Are not perfect. 

I can tell you that the people with the fancy cars and the fancy homes. They might be suffering with all kinds of debt. They might be on the verge of bankruptcy or on the verge of divorce or all these things. We have no idea what's going on in people's lives. 

so Don't worry about being perfect. No one needs that. What we want is the real you and real, you will show up when you have the opportunity to fail. And step into your fears. So there's lots and lots of quotes online around failure. 

Besides the one from Albert Einstein, which I'll repeat is, "a person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new." So that's about stepping into your fears.  And being okay with failure.  Here's some other quotes

 I got from online sources. So I can't for sure. Say if these are actually accurate or not.  I could be failing in my attempt. To do this little bit of research, here's one from Michael Jackson that I really liked. It's better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. 

I love that because I'm all about being authentic. don't be a copycat just because you think that that's going to be. Either a quicker way to success. Or a way to skirt the trial and  error of doing something, be yourself and really embrace that.  

And here's one by Henry Ford. "The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing." Oh, yeah, we have to learn from our mistakes. Right. So when we do fail, we should reflect on it and not be embarrassed by it, but reflect on what went wrong and how we can improve it.. 

Failure is the fabric of being an entrepreneur because if we are breaking new ground or trying to do new things for our clients, We are going to fail because it's not always going to work out. We may put out a group program, or we may put out a course or we may design a coaching program, or we may design a piece of art or start a new business or whatever it is. But it may fail. We may find that nobody wants this thing, or maybe it doesn't really solve the problem. Right. Or maybe this maybe that, or maybe. It's not all bad. Maybe it just needs a few tweaks and we just need to test it. So testing and tweaking. And failing. 

And trying again and testing and tweaking. And it's just this. Circle that goes around and around and we just have to embrace it. 

 I hope that you will. Find me on Tik Tok. I'm @Zeitzwolfe which is my last name. You might also be able to find me if you look for Profit Protector,  Also have a moniker on there, the vegan CPA, but I'm trying things out testing. I'm tweaking.  So here's some other quotes around failure...

Here's one from Zig Ziglar, "It's not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts."

 Ooh, I like that one a lot. So that's about being resilient. I love that. Okay.

 Here's one from Coco Chanel, "Success is most often achieved. By those who don't know that failure is inevitable." 

That's a really good one for entrepreneurs. 

 Here's one from Thomas Edison, "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

 Ooh, ouch.  I mean, that could be. Even me when I'm doing TikTok, right. If I just keep at it for long enough, maybe I shouldn't give up at 51 days. Maybe it's that 52nd day that something will finally go viral. 

I will know, unless I try. Hmm. If you did listen to the three bonus episodes that I put out last week, the first one  I talked about going to fin con and stepping into my authenticity. And being this alter ego, the profit protector. I brought my costume with me and I declared . You can listen to go back and listen to it, that I was going to wear that costume. I did not know how I was going to be received. I've never been to fin con before. I didn't know if people dress in suits. Or if they were casual or if they had a sense of humor or what? I had no idea. But I really wanted to wear this costume of this alter ego, the Profit protector, I mentioned it briefly to someone on the first day and they kind of looked at me funny, like you're going to wear a costume. 

  It puts that fear in me like, oh my God, maybe I shouldn't do this. Maybe everyone's just going to like, think that I'm a nut But again, if they thought I was a nut job, they're not going to be in my same camp,  the people that are going to vibe with me are going to think like she wore a costume. That's pretty cool. 

So I'm in my hotel room, putting on my costume I made some changes to the costume. I didn't wear the original costume than I had worn in my house because. Frankly this time, it wasn't just from the waist up. That was going to be shown in the picture was going to be in my whole body. 

I  tweaked my costume , I thought I looked pretty good. And there are pictures online of me at fin con. at first, When I walked into the conference, people were looking at me really strangely. And I thought, oh my God, what am I doing?  And I did feel a little weird. But then I ran into some people that I knew and they were like, oh my God, look at you. You're so funny. And I started to feel relieved, like, okay. Well, at least the people that know me think that it's pretty cool. Then I was like, I'm going to walk around. 

When I got a lot of strange looks, people are like, what the hell is this? But then.  There was the main shebang for the day where they have keynote speakers and stuff.  I sat in the front row, which I always do. Nerd!  Nerd alert! The camera guy there walked up to me. This was before the whole thing was going to start. And I thought he was just going to ask me to like move out of the chair to like somewhere else. And he was like, Hey, would you mind flying around the room? And I'll follow you with the camera. 

And was like, okay. there's giant hotel room with all of these chairs, hundreds and hundreds of chairs. He has me run around all of them with my cape out and kind of acted like in like I'm flying and twisting and turning and all of this kind of stuff. 

I have no idea what they're going to do with that footage. But at one point a dog lunged I'm kind of freaked out. I don't know, and that I'm starting to get out of breath and then I kind of tripped over myself and I don't know how much of this video they're going to use, or if they're going to use it. 

But at least I was memorable besides the fact that I had blue hair. Wearing that Cape did make me stand out. And, you know, when you go to a conference.  People can be pretty forgetful. You got to do something that's going to make you stand out from the pack. Wearing that cape. wearing my whole outfit as the Profit Protector...

Some people may think I'm crazy Other people I think got a kick out of it. And also it made for a good time because I was able to take some pictures with people and meet other people.  And it

But anyways, I stepped into my fears. It could have failed miserably. But I think it was okay.  You can find video online pictures. And I ended up going up to my hotel room. I'm like making some other videos on my own. Just because I was like. I might as well. 

Get as much traction from this thing, as I possibly can. Cause, I don't know the next time I'm putting this costume on. . When you feel fearful about trying something new, I want you to think about me. At this conference, putting on this costume, not knowing what the hell. , how people were going to react to this thing And I went down there to the conference room. Which was a really long walk. So if I felt really embarrassed, it would have been like, oh, like walk a shame going all the way back. I put it on.  I got some weird looks, but I kept going. Whatever you do is not going to land for everybody. So. 

Just suck it up for that and know that it's not always going to work for everybody. But in the end, certain things that you try are going to work for the right audience. And if they don't quite work. You test it and tweak it and make it right. All right. Go out there. Be scrappy, do your thing. Don't be afraid to take risks. 

That's what you have to do. If you want to be an entrepreneur. And give yourself the grace to fail. And fail and fail and fail. But always learn from your failures. Dust yourself off. And try again. 

Please find me on Tik TOK and I will follow you back and we can support each other on that app.  Awesome.