Getting Out Of The Dog House

 How To Deal With Failure

No one likes to admit defeat or failure, but let’s face it, we all screw up sometimes. Whether in our personal lives, forgetting major events like anniversaries or birthdays or in our business, creating marketing campaigns that tank, accomplishing nothing but an increase in costs.

Sure, some of you are probably saying it’s never happened to you, but you’re lying. NO ONE is exempt from failure.

And that’s okay. Screwing up is a part of life. What matters isn’t just that you get up, but how you do it.

Here are the steps you need to take when things go wrong.

Step 1: Deal with your emotions

 Becoming emotional is natural, but it isn’t constructive. Take your time to cry it out if you need to, but be ready to get back to work. Moving on without dealing with your emotions may lead you to act rashly and suppressing them can lead to other behavioural or health complications

Step 2: Acceptance

 Playing the blame game won’t help your team. If you’re the manager, then suck it up, it’s your responsibility. If you’re not the manager, don’t spend time pointing fingers, no one cares unless it’s a habit and if it is, the people who need to know, already do. It’s important that you communicate that acceptance and often an apology to your stakeholders, be it the CEO, audience, or your husband/wife.

Step 3: Reframe it positively 

Once you’re done beating yourself up about your failure, you can learn from it. Without wallowing in it, you can see what went wrong, especially when you’re using the analytics of your digital marketing. Look at the data and see what didn’t fit. Was it in the language? The landing pages? Was there a disconnect with the audience? Remember that you’re looking for the reason so you can change, not an excuse to fall back into the blame game.

 Step 4: Start again

 Armed with your new knowledge, you have the tools to start again. Don’t be afraid to try again or even fail again. Every time there is an opportunity to learn, there is no failure.

We All Fail

It may not always take diamond rings to get out of the dog house, but there is always work to be done to make amends. When you royally screw up, you need a plan to deal with your emotions and learn from the failure.

Remember the Ford Pinto? Ouch. What about the Cadillac V8-6-4? Revolutionary at the time, it was supposed to choose the valves required for operation. A failure then occurred because of a lack of computing power, not vision or persistence. Failure is all around us. We can’t be afraid to embrace campaigns because one didn’t do well.

 Thanks for reading!

Cheers, JH

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