As health professionals working in our own health businesses, we will make mistakes.
Remember, there was a time when we could not tie our own shoelaces. Remember how frustrating it was trying to learn how to do this. It was super frustrating for most of us. Yet we persisted, we got it wrong, and we finally worked it out. It’s like one day it just clicked, and we could do it.
As health professionals, one of the things, we excel at is learning. We are learning machines.
Yet, we when do something once, like launch a new thing, and it doesn’t sell out – we feel like we have failed.
We will advertise a new product or service and no one will buy…
We will create a brand-new awesome thing, that no one seems to want, having done our “marketing testing” that told us that people were interested…
We will make recruitment errors…
We will make budgeting errors…
We will make investment errors…
All too often we assume this is a competence issue. We assume we have failed.
Then we want to save face, because if we fail at selling a new service, doesn’t this mean we are failing at everything including our clinical and leadership work (hence the suggestion of did I just lie?)
Failure to launch a new service or product, to recruit the right person 100% of the time, to make the right investment decision for your business is not a clinical competence issue. It’s JUST not. Yet all too often I am addressing this issue with health professionals. There is a tremendous sense of failure, of guilt and of shame because you didn’t sell out your thing, the first time you took it to market.
Where did we learn that was supposed to happen?
What we need to recognise is that failure is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.
Sure, we might need to launch something 3 – 4 times before we get the “sold out” banner on our sales page and need a waiting list, but 3 – 4 attempts to help something new grow, isn’t a failure.
We all make “mistakes”, we all get it “wrong”, we all have this opportunity to learn.
We need these opportunities. The gift is learning quickly what to do, and what to focus on. The learning is being open to understand what the right thing is, at the right time, for right now, to get you to where you want to go.
And often, we need someone in our world who can offer this learning perspective and empower us to do the right thing at the right time, to get us where we want to go.
Can I do that for you?
