Failure Tolerance - Are you Institutionalised?

byPaulWatson

3.7K followers

5 years ago

Hey guys, today I want to share a story that I think is critical to success in this space we call affiliate marketing. Why? Because we all know that affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick process and that there are so many times that we can just not feel like we are getting anywhere. There is SEO, keyword research, post word counts, website speed and so on to be constantly checking and rechecking and when things don't work, there are many of us that certainly consider whether it is all worth it.

The trouble is that we can do all of this, and then our post doesn't rank anywhere near where we think it should, or it does rank but we don't make sales. We feel like we have failed and either give up, or more commonly (and as I did) make excuses.

What if I told you that failure however is something to learn from and work through and not to be ashamed of? If it doesn't work, then try again, if that doesn't work, try again... and so on. What if you set yourself a goal to make a sale in the first 3 months and you get none... what then?

Institutional behaviour

At the start of my Wealthy Affiliate journey, I was petrified of failing. I was impatient, I was afraid to admit to anybody that my site wasn't working as I wanted it to, I was afraid to fail. This also carried over into the traditional businesses that my wife and I run. There were some financial issues that arose from something I had missed and whilst not terminal, I didn't ask for help or admit that I had failed.

Why did I do that? Because I was institutionalized. And by this I mean that before we started the businesses and I started my affiliate marketing journey, I worked in banking and Government for close on 25 years. Institutions do not accept failure - they say they do, but they don't. You are expected to succeed at everything you do, and if you don't - i.e. fail - you are forced to face a board to explain why you should keep your job.

What does institutionalization do?

Institutionalization makes us fear failure - I was petrified of it - failure was bad - you don't learn from failure, you take your punishment and avoid doing anything that might lead to it again - and you especially don't take risks. I was so far down this road that even once I left the government, these behaviours followed me.

It wasn't until I finally sat down and admitted to my wife that I had messed up some stuff with the business (I used much more colourful words) that my behaviours started to make sense. All she did was hand me her phone, told me to put the headphones in and press play. It was a podcast by Brooke Castillo about failure tolerance... The trigger for this story (I knew I would get to that eventually. haha).

What is failure tolerance?

In short, the level of failure that you will accept, are comfortable with, or will not have you in the fetal position under the bed, is called your failure tolerance. Ms Castillo talked about how she works with her mastermind students about lifting their failure tolerance so high, and so far out of their comfort zone that they can take anything that is thrown at them.

Recently I have been listening to some podcasts where some of Australia's most successful sportspersons are interviewed (I do this most mornings when I walk to the beach to clear my head before I start work for the day - picture below taken yesterday)

Without exception, the main theme of their stories is failure - how they didn't get picked, make rep sides, win medals, score goals, make runs, score tries or anything else that they are supposed to do. And again without exception, they all did two things:

1. They set higher goals - uncomfortable goals - often publically.
2. They learned from failure - if they didn't reach a goal, they asked why? They learned and tried again, and again, and again.

Brooke Castillo's group are asked to set themselves a monthly goal that they know that they will not reach. And then refer to it every day. The idea is that they will work and work towards something that they will never achieve, but by doing so, will achieve way more than they thought they could - simply because they are not afraid of failure.

And when they don't reach it, they learn from what they didn't do and without exception, by the end of the second month, they had reached that goal.

How does this affect us here at WA?

There are so many things here that can be effected by our level of failure tolerance - and I see so many different levels of it here every day. I see it when people blame Google, Amazon, WA or themselves when things go wrong.

Failure tolerance is about accepting that things go wrong, picking yourself up in these situations and learning, adapting and moving forward. It is about setting high goals, working towards them and learning from them when things don't work out the way you had planned.

Now to be clear - cutting back because you have to get a traditional job to keep food on the table is not a measure of failure tolerance, nor is getting frustrated or disappointed when your site doesn't rank, or Amazon gives you the boot. It is about accepting that failure is normal, natural and something to be embraced.

What is your failure tolerance?

In terms of where I was in Government, failure tolerance was a dot to me... Now? well let's just say that I am certainly getting there... I am uncomfortable a lot... but I am achieving way more than I ever have.

Think about your goals, and your reactions to failure... Do you accept it as a constant in life, or run and hide from it? Trust me, as much as it hurts and as uncomfortable as it is, if you can work on your failure tolerance, success is not a matter of if, but when...

Agree? Disagree?

I would love to hear your thoughts below.

Until next time

Have fun

Paul