f at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
When I’m coaching freelancers and business owners, I often see them try something once, not get much response and conclude that the strategy isn’t working and they should give up.
But any kind of change takes time, especially if we’re talking about social media.
I remember seeing a post from a former client saying that she’d just got her first client through social media, rather than through word of mouth (because she’s great at what she does). This was two months after we’d finished working together.
Imagine if she’d just given up?
Banging your head against a brick wall?
That said, it’s not about banging your head against a brick wall or keeping on doing something that obviously isn’t working.
We often hear the quote attributed to Thomas Edison: ‘I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that did not work.’
The point isn’t that he kept doing the same thing 10,000 times, but that he tried different approaches, constantly learning from what did or didn’t work and refining what he was doing.
This is sometimes referred to as having a strategic mindset, and I think it’s probably the number one quality to develop as an entrepreneur. But it’s also really helpful for all of us.
With anything we want to achieve, whether that’s learning to market ourselves online, becoming better teachers or learning a language, success comes through seeing progress as a series of small experiments.
A series of small experiments
Let’s say that you’re an English speaker who goes to live in Poland and is trying to learn Polish.
One day, you go to the market and attempt to buy some fruit. The seller misunderstands what you want and gives you the wrong thing, or the wrong amount.
You could conclude that, as our Polish teacher once said to me and my colleagues many years ago, ‘You will never learn this language,’ and give up.
Or you could decide that in future you’ll always get someone else to go to the market for you.
Alternatively, you could try to work out where the miscommunication happened.
Maybe you pronounced something wrongly, or got the wrong case ending? If you can find out where the problem was, you can go back and try again, and hopefully succeed this time.
So far, this probably sounds pretty obvious.
But very often, we’re so shaken by the ‘failure’ of a strategy that we don’t want to explore what happened, or do anything about it.
Instead of seeing it as an experiment in which we learnt something useful, we see it as something negative about ourselves. We feel embarrassed or humiliated and vow to avoid the situation in future.
That’s our Inner Troll learning entirely the wrong lesson from what happened.
And exactly the same thing can happen in our businesses.
You put together an offer and nobody buys it. Or you start posting regularly on LinkedIn and don’t get much engagement. Or you launch a workshop and only three people sign up.
It’s easy to conclude that the whole thing was a failure, and perhaps even that you’re no good at running a business.
But what if you treated it as an experiment instead?
Perhaps the offer was fine, but you hadn’t communicated its value clearly enough. Maybe your LinkedIn posts weren’t reaching the right people. Or perhaps the workshop was a good idea, but you hadn’t given yourself enough time to promote it.
You won’t necessarily know the answers straight away, but you can start asking better questions, looking at what happened and deciding what to try differently next time.
Not a loss, but an experiment
As Nelson Mandela is often quoted as saying, ‘I never lose. I either win or I learn.’
For me, having a strategic mindset means approaching what we do as a kind of ongoing A/B testing.
We try something, see what happens, learn from the results and then decide what to do next.
Sometimes that means sticking with something for longer, because we haven’t really given it a fair chance to work. Sometimes it means changing our approach. And occasionally it means recognising that something genuinely isn’t working and deciding to do something else entirely.
The important thing is that we’re making those decisions based on what we’ve learnt, rather than simply reacting to how disappointed, embarrassed or frustrated we feel.
The more you can do this, and the less personally you take the outcome, the faster progress you’re likely to make.
And that goes for life as well as business.
So, next time something doesn’t work out as you’d hoped, try asking yourself what you can learn from it and what you might do differently.
Your Inner Troll may have plenty to say about it, but you don’t necessarily have to listen!
Want to feel more confident running your business?
If you sometimes find yourself second-guessing your decisions, taking setbacks personally or worrying that you’re not cut out for running a business, you might find my Feel more confident running my business Resource Centre useful.
I’ve brought together articles and videos to help freelance language professionals deal with self-doubt, develop more helpful ways of thinking and make decisions with greater confidence.
Explore the Mindset and Confidence resources