3 Things to do when you are Failing

We’ve all been there. You have a plan worked out and tried to execute the plan to the best of your ability, but then external factors seriously derailed those plans. Some of those factors are outside of your control and others are within your control, but either way it doesn’t feel very good. You are probably swamped with pressure, demands, and you just want it fixed, resolved, or gone and out of your life. All of those feelings are quite natural, but the way we handle them will determine the outcome. If you are faced with the situation, you should be doing these three things to ensure A. your success on the current project B. the problem doesn’t happen again:

Self Diagnosis
This is your best friend. It may feel difficult to do, uncomfortable, and awkward at times, but it is necessary to see where the issues are coming from.  What you need to do is ask the tough questions. Having recently consulted with a business that was having a hard time retaining customers and through asking the tough questions, it was found that they didn’t have a measure of cost of customer acquisition, nor did they have a process for keeping/following up with their current customers. It is really imperative that you ask yourself the tough questions in order to really get to solving the real issues. There was a lot of finger pointing and “I don’t know” for process oriented questions that could have been resolved with  a little self-diagnosis and tough questions.

Self-Leadership
This is single-handedly the most under utilised tool in leadership development. At its core, it is understanding yourself and knowing what to ask for from your leader. There should be “self-leadership” seminars all over the world about how to lead yourself and manage up. Often, we spend time analysing and discussing others’ leadership success and failures, and we fail to discuss the self-leadership failures on both sides.

Attack the problem
Ultimately, the last thing you want to do when you are failing or have a problem is to deal with it. Instead, you just want it to go away and leave you alone. What you should be doing is taking steps to attack it. It doesn’t matter what the task is; choose to attack it and embrace the challenge. By understanding and leading yourself and taking on the problem head on, you most effectively tackle the failure and move on to a more productive state. It’s hard to do, sure, but you will thank yourself for it in the end.