Top 3 Ways to Use Failure as a Springboard Towards Success & How LinkedIn Can Help
If you choose the path of resilience, here are three ways you can use failure as a springboard towards success.
Failure is an inevitable part of life and can act as a stepping stone towards success. However, perceiving yourself as a failure certainly does not.
Your perception of failure will either sting a bit but not knock you out entirely, causing you to get back up and try again, or it will take you down completely.
The question is, are you going to let past failures or the fear of failure keep you from building your dreams and reaching your goals, or are you going to put one foot in front of the other and keep climbing that hill so that you enjoy the journey.
As the saying goes, “It’s better to try and fail than never to try at all.”
I recently saw a clip of Morgan Freeman being interviewed by a TV “news” commentator where he told Mr. Freeman that his message generally pushes the idea that anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but realistically, that's just not the case for everyone.
Mr. Friedman looked this gentleman directly in the eye and called BS (literally) and I tend to agree wholeheartedly with him.
If you choose the path of resilience, here are three ways you can use failure as a springboard towards success.
1. Acknowledge & Evaluate: The first step is to acknowledge that your attempt failed and then find which part of your plan wasn’t successful.
Remember, failure is inevitable, but it isn’t forever.
Please don’t feel so ashamed that you failed, that you can’t talk about your mistakes or move past them. Instead, look through your process and find where things started to go awry. This will help you re-evaluate where you should go next.
Don’t forget to also note-take what worked well.
2. Learn & Discover: After acknowledging your mishaps and evaluating where things went wrong, you can get to work on learning from your mistakes.
Do your research and learn how you can improve.
What has worked well for someone you respect or has already achieved the results you are looking for?
Could you benefit from a marketing expert or a business consultant?
Look at your process and take further steps to achieve more desirable results with new lenses. Some of the most significant victories come from those you had to fight tooth and nail to win.
3. Explore the Lesson: Every moment can be a lesson if you allow it.
After experiencing failure, search for the lessons that you learned along the way.
How did it teach you humility? How did your character grow?
Do you now have a new sense of empathy for others?
Take these lessons of character with you in everything that you do.
You will have a new appreciation for the world around you, and these moments will enable you to connect with people more authentically.
How can you use LinkedIn to help you on your failure to success journey?
The magical thing about LinkedIn is that it is a platform built by professionals for professionals. Compared to other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, the members whom you interact and connect with on LinkedIn are a targeted professional community. This opens you up to so many opportunities from networking, to thought leadership creation, to lead generation, recruiting, and team building.
When utilized correctly, LinkedIn can significantly improve your professional image.
LinkedIn has become the go-to network for professionals globally, with a visitor to lead conversion rate of 277% higher than other social media platforms, which means that you have a better chance of seeing success through LinkedIn.
My personal experience involves getting active on LinkedIn in order to get my bearings and establish a new direction after a business failure. What resulted was the building of a large and Powerful Network that springboarded me into a completely different direction and career. One that I am MUCH happier in and EXTREMELY grateful for.
How is this done?
1. Establish a Solid Foundation: If you want to start your failure to success journey off on the right foot, begin with your LinkedIn profile. This is your foundation.
If you or a future employer or customer were to Google you, your LinkedIn Profile would come up in one of the first three links, so it is vital to use this to your advantage.
The LinkedIn platform offers its members a complete Profile (profile photo, cover photo, header, summary, job history, endorsements, etc.). Still, it’s not enough to simply fill these sections in.
If you want to be successful, you need to represent yourself (or your business) well by creating a well-written and intriguing summary, using catchy yet professional photos, incorporating industry-specific buzzwords, and more.
This is a Linkability specialty. If you’re not sure where to begin or don’t have the time or knowledge to do this effectively, contact us today, and we can get you started on a Profile Uplevel plan. We are happy to help.
2. Network & Build Quality Relationships: When you use LinkedIn to network, you’re opening yourself up to new potential professional relationships, business partners, and more. With 810 million members, LinkedIn offers both local and global connection opportunities.
By building your LinkedIn network, you allow yourself to learn and grow by watching and speaking with other industry professionals.
Tip: Once you grow your network, interact with your connections by commenting and interacting on their posts. Once you start building a relationship, you can ask them questions to help you grow and learn.
3. Create & Share Value: You want your audience to trust you. This means that you should be sharing content that proves to your audience that the service that you offer creates value and that you are the go-to person when their need or desire arises.
To do this, you can:
Share your statistics and customer testimonials.
Create and share thoughtful articles, newsletters, video, and content that informs, educates or entertains your market niche. (don’t forget to add graphics!).
Create polls that will engage your audience and provide you with valuable feedback that you can potentially use to tailor your content or product and write engaging and thought-provoking feed posts.
By doing these things, you show your audience that you are educated, experienced, and a field expert. It also helps you maintain a solid online presence (with spillover to Google search), essential in today’s digital age.
With effort, through valuable connections, and a little bit of resilience, you can turn your failure into a teachable moment. Remember, even when you’re at your lowest point and feel like you’ve hit rock bottom, there is always tomorrow.
If successful entrepreneurs such as Walt Disney, Richard Branson, or Steve Jobs had given up the first time their endeavors went south, our world would look a lot different. No matter if you fall a thousand times or just a couple, choose to keep climbing. The destination is worth it.
You never know; one day, your story of resilience may inspire others to find the strength to keep going.
The Moving Forward Newsletter is a bi-weekly advice column by Kim Peterson Stone, the CEO of Linkability.us where we give you a peek behind the curtains into what it takes to put together campaigns that help you grow your business and career on LinkedIn and in Real Life.
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