Embrace the Suck

What’s “the Suck?”

The suck is losing the big contract that you had your heart set on. The suck is being in quarantine with a limited lifestyle for over a year and counting. The suck is the lost friendship, broken marriage and devastating loss of trust. The suck is working on a project for four months, putting your heart and soul into it and seeing it fall completely flat before your very eyes! The suck comes in various forms and knocks us off kilter in different ways. We all experience it from time to time. Often it hits us over and over again and in business it can leave us feeling lonely and frustrated.

Why it hurts so much!

When we feel like failures and setbacks are coming at us from all sides, it can feel like our world is closing in on us. It hurts when we have finances on the line. It hurts when we show up, give our best and we get rejected. We question our competence and our resilience. I recently went through a massive failure that devastated me and so I wanted to share how I’ve learned from the most successful trailblazers on how to bounce back more quickly!

What the most successful people do!

They reflect!

The most successful role models in my life never waste a failure. They think through what went wrong, what role did they play and what would they do differently the next time. They often journal and write out what the lessons were and they are open and humble to learning from it.

They adapt!

There’s no point in staying stuck and it won’t change the outcome, so the high performers face reality and adapt. That may mean pivoting a business completely. It may mean putting a pause on the special project. It may mean starting all over again with a coach or mentor who has been successful in the area they are pursuing. Regardless of their course of action, they don’t stand still!

They restart!

They go at it again and again. They stretch that courage muscle and continue to be resilient. When others doubt them, they keep their chin up and their nose to the grindstone! They set a new plan and they work their plan.

They remember their why!

Remind yourself why it matters so damn much and then write that down and put it up somewhere to remind you to keep showing up! For some, your why will be your family. For others, especially entrepreneurs during this pandemic, their why is to keep their team employed. Your why is critically important and may require some deep digging to uncover but it’s worth the effort. With clarity on your WHY, any HOW becomes manageable!

They renew!

This is so important. When you’re coming off a failure, it feels raw. Maybe you can relate right now in this moment and you’re thinking I don’t have the energy to put a new plan together. Then it’s critical that you take time to renew. Let me assure you that sometimes you just “need a minute.” For me, that’s a 24-hour allowance where I can be miserable, sulk and cry. When that time is up, I pull up my bootstraps and move on!

Surround yourself with someone in your circle who is a cheerleader and who believes in you. Feed your mind with motivational podcasts or videos. For me, the fastest way to renew is a mental health day, a massage and diving into a great book about other entrepreneurs who have overcome adversity. Coming off of my most recent failure, I cracked the spine of “Believe it” written by Jamie Kern Lima (buy it!). I sat on the sofa, bawled my eyes out and then felt inspired to keep going and took action!

What are your hacks for embracing the suck and persevering?

PS. When the dust settles and we embrace the grit & grime and humble ourselves to the lesson, transformation begins. A clear path breaks through, we adapt and forge on towards what we were destined to do!