How to Build Sales Confidence | #8.1 Dealing With Success & Failure Healthily - Overcoming Failure

Success means different things to different people. However, the main thing for everybody is that success has to be sustainable. I learned that the hard way and suffered burnout. Let me share a personal experience that taught me a valuable lesson. I used to be entirely consumed by pursuing success in my early career. I thought the only way to get ahead was to work myself to the bone, which seemed to be paying off.

But one day, everything came crashing down. The constant stress and pressure led to burnout, and before I knew it, I was in the hospital for weeks. It was a wake-up call that made me realise that my approach to success was not sustainable and took a serious toll on my mental and physical health.

Taking time out to recover from burnout was a frustrating experience. I felt like I was wasting precious time that could have been spent working towards my goals. But looking back, I now understand that the time spent focusing on my mental and physical health was far from wasted. Instead, it taught me the importance of self-care and balance, a lesson I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

Sustainability means that you can maintain your success rate. Each success should add a feel-good factor to your day, week, month, or year. Break down goals into smaller milestones to keep success positivity and a sense of accomplishment going.

What’s the point of being successful?

If you don’t feel good about your success, what’s the point of being successful? Again, this comes back to goal setting, visualisation, and being mindful of what success means to you.

When you are successful, don’t overlook it and miss out on the feeling of that success. Instead, enjoy the experience as you go along.

Burnout

Success must be sustainable. It’s not sustainable to overwork to achieve your goals, burn out, and then become ill due to achieving those goals. Sustainable success is when you achieve your goals and feel good mentally and physically as a result. In many cases, the things we consider to be “success” in our lives are actually the things that are making us ill and unsuccessful in other areas of our lives, and this is frequently referred to as material success. If all you focus on is acquiring material possessions, the feel-good factor will last for a much shorter period of time. Think of the young salespeople working overtime towards their first watch, car, or house. They finally get there, but the joy is short-lived, and then they need more significant material gains, and the cycle never ends. In general, questions about long-term success should include: are you healthy? Are you grateful for what you’ve got? Do you appreciate what’s around you?

Unhealthy Success

When an inflated ego gets involved, particularly in our Western world, we can become attached to material outcomes and believe they will make us feel better about ourselves. But in reality, obsession with material gain can shorten a person’s life and make it harder to feel real happiness. Of course, we should shoot for the money, but only if we have a strong foundation of health, and happiness to sustain it.

Overcoming Failure

I’ve always been overly ambitious and have set what I call ‘stretch goals’, many of which I have failed to achieve in my lifetime. One of those examples of a stretch goal was in my rowing career, and one of my primary goals was to represent Great Britain. Plenty of my peers were representing Great Britain, so it wasn’t a hugely unattainable goal, but it meant a lot to me. Unfortunately, I didn’t reach that goal, and it hurt me deeply that I couldn’t play my favourite sport for my country. In spite of this, I’ve always believed that my failure to achieve my rowing goal served as motivation for my success in other areas of my life!

There’s a positive aspect about significant failures that can drive you on in future endeavours, not least because you don’t want to repeat the experience. I’ve also had several business failures where I set out to achieve specific goals and failed because I was overly ambitious in those goals. However, my advice is that you must weather the storm and not become too

emotionally tied to your goals. Goals change, and you can pivot on your goals, but your health and well-being and your association with those goals are what matter. When I was younger, I used to get depressed if I didn’t accomplish the goals I set for myself, but I have since learned that this isn’t the way. Instead, you need to pick yourself up, brush yourself down and strive to try and hit the next goal in front of you. You can’t change the past, but can change the future.

I think there are two sides to failure, the downside and the upside. If you focus on the upside, failure can inspire you to attain new goals, push yourself in other endeavours, springboard towards the right path and help you pivot in the right direction.

James Ski is CEO & Founder of Sales Confidence, a company dedicated to the professional advancement of sales professionals, & author of the debut professional development book How to Build Sales Confidence.?        

This is an excerpt from How to Build Sales Confidence by James Ski, the full version of which you can purchase here.