133, Fear of Failure: The Transformative Power of Learning and Growth

Sabrina 0:00

Hi, my name is Sabrina Gephardt and I'm a member of Kate Kordsmeier Is the incubator. I have loved being a part of this program and I want to share three of my favorite reasons why. So first and foremost is the community. Being surrounded by people who are going through the exact same thing has been absolutely incredible. The incubator is a group of women entrepreneurs, a lot of them are moms, some of us are in different seasons of life. And just understanding the struggles between work life balance, and balancing motherhood and balancing a career has been so wonderful. This is a community where we are able to share our wins and losses and be vulnerable and ask questions and I have loved that so much. I also love the ideas that come out of the incubator, not only ideas that come from Kate and her team, but also again, being surrounded by those like minded entrepreneurs, being surrounded by women in different industries with different levels of experience brings different ideas to the table. And that has been invaluable. And the last thing I want to share is having access to so many people who are experts in their field, tech experts, SEO experts, copywriting experts, money, mindset experts, and so many more. So a lot of masterminds or programs focused on one specific thing. And that's great and you learn that thing, but the incubator offers insight and access to information about so many different areas. And that is awesome.

Kate Kordsmeier 1:29

You're listening to the Success with Soul podcast where we believe empowering women is the key to creating a brighter future for us all. Whether you're an entrepreneur, employee or stay at home mom, this podcast is for you. I'm your host Kate Kordsmeier and ICF life and business coach who has made over 2.2 million while working less than 25 hours a week, raising two toddlers and quitting social media. I'm here to transparently share my expertise and help you create a life and business you love. Together with my diverse team of passionate women many of whom you'll hear from on this podcast. We empower 1000s With holistic strategies, personal development resources and mindset tools to find freedom, flexibility and fulfillment and business and beyond. Every week we offer life coaching for Busy Women who want to improve their relationships, self care and overall well being and business coaching for coaches, course creators and consultants who want to make money sustainably. We believe personal growth and entrepreneurship are powerful tools for creating social change. And the world is a better place When more women find their voice and create their own money, power and freedom. Expect candid conversations and insightful interviews with experts that will inspire and support you on your path to intentional whole living and Success with Soul on your terms. It's time to ditch the hustle and find inner peace. Here we go. Hey, y'all, it is Kate here with a quick solo episode today. So we've been talking a lot about failure on Team K. K and inside the incubator lately, and my team was sharing so many good quotes. One of my favorites was from Winston Churchill, it says Success is not final failure is not fatal. It is the courage to change that counts. Yeah. How does that make you feel? Here's another favorite. This one's from Mark Manson. He says improvement at anything is based on 1000s of tiny failures. And the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you failed at something. If someone is better than you at something, it's likely because she has failed at it more than you. I'm gonna say that last part again. If someone is better than you at something, it's likely because she has failed at it more than you. Yeah, that hits. So if you have a fear of failure, this episode is for you. Now, you'll know we recorded a podcast episode about how failure is really a gift a couple of years ago, you can find that it's episode 39. If you just type in Kate kordsmeier.com/ 39 Or just go to Episode 39 In your podcast player, you will find it there it is still one of our most downloaded episodes. And in that episode, I set a goal to fail 21 times and 2021. And then I did the same thing again last year and set a goal to fail 22 times in 2022. And here's what happened and it's kind of funny. So of course, I made a lot of mistakes, like a lot. Things definitely never went as planned. And I felt like a failure many, many, many times. But a funny thing happened when I tried listing out what my specific failures were for those years. And it shocked me because I actually couldn't come up with any true failures. What I saw was that I either succeeded or I learned something which is also succeeding. So failure As it turns out, aren't real. It's all just feedback, like helping me figure out what I like and what I don't, what works and what doesn't, what needs to change and what I can do differently next time. And on the other side of all these things that quote unquote, didn't work, I have grown and evolved in ways I didn't even know I needed to. And I think I'm now a better person more empathetic, more resilient, less affected by other people and what they think less fragile about making mistakes. That's a big one for me, like how many of you can relate to the feeling of just trying to avoid making mistakes rather than going for something? Yeah. And then when you make a mistake, like your whole world crumbles, that's, that's not good. I've been there. And becoming less fragile about making mistakes has been one of the best things I've done for myself, because it really does start with us. And I think the world is a better place, because I messed up. And then I learned from it, and now I can show up better for others. So I was still thinking about all these failures. And I was starting to realize something as I thought about them that I couldn't quite articulate what it was yet. So I went and I looked up the actual definition of failure. I know geek alert. So the actual definition of failure is An act or instance proving unsuccessful. Okay, so keep that in mind and act or instance proving unsuccessful. So now, let me go through some of the mistakes that I started writing down that I made that some of the fails that I had, in the last couple of years. So one of the biggest mistakes I made in 2021 was making a flippant, insensitive comment without thinking and the consequences of my mistake resulted in the end of a relationship that really meant a lot to me. And it did take me I mean, truly talk about being fragile. It took me many months to personally recover from, again, on the other side of this, I realized that I couldn't really count that as a failure, much as I am deeply apologetic for it, because I learned so much from it. Okay, so that wasn't a failure. But what about when I didn't reach my revenue goals, that definitely felt a hell of a lot like failure. Except that and this is from 2021, I still made more money than ever before. I worked with over 300 clients that year, meaning I impacted actual hundreds of women, which is my actual goal. And I saw many of them make life changing decisions and take life changing actions to realize their own power and create wealth and freedom. So did I hit my arbitrary goal of making a million dollars? No. And who the fuck cares, honestly. All right. So then I tried coming up with some more examples. Example one, an employee quit. Well, that wasn't really a failure, because I got a better employee and became a better leader. Okay, I broke down and cried in front of my kids. This happened a lot in 2021, and the beginning of 2022, I had really bad postpartum depression. And I was crying in front of my kids a lot and feeling really ashamed about it. That felt like a failure until I really looked at it. And then I thought, You know what, I was vulnerable. And I showed my kids that it's okay to be sad. And then I also felt the love and support from my family as they hugged me and said, It's okay, mommy, like, that was such a win. Oh, my gosh, is the opposite of a failure.

It's Kate here, I got another quick message for you. So last week, I was hosting a coaching call with a couple clients, and they were talking about how many courses they bought and never finish, can you relate? I know I can. Even if I quote unquote, finish the course, I didn't always have the result I wanted on the other side. For years, I thought if I just learned a little bit more just understood another marketing method a little bit better just watched how someone else did it a little bit longer, then I'd have the answer that key to success was always looking for an answer outside of myself, looking to someone else to tell me what to do and how to do it. And while that served me a little bit, ultimately, what I found was that I didn't need more strategy, more knowledge, more information. That was just a productive way of procrastinating of postponing the uncomfortable feelings of putting myself out there trying something new and taking a risk and leap of faith. It made me feel busy because I was in motion. Hey, look at me. I just bought another course I'm doing something. Get off the education train. One of my coaches used to say that, but the reality is that all of these self study courses left me with more questions and nobody to answer them, nobody to show me where I was getting in my own way, holding myself back self sabotaging or creating the exact opposite of my desired result due to my unquestioned thoughts. What I was meant Seeing as a coach, not a consultant, not someone to do the work for me, not someone else to tell me what to do, but someone to help me find those answers within myself. That's why I created the Success with Soul incubator. It's our holistic mastermind empowering female coaches and consultants to make money sustainably. And it's why I spent the past year getting certified as a life and success coach with additional certifications in modalities like NLP, hypnotherapy, Reiki, EFT, tapping and more. And it's what makes it incubator different from any other program out there. Yes, we have a massive training vault with lessons on everything from SEO and email marketing to Evergreen funnels, Facebook ads, growing a team and systematizing your business time management, feminine energy and more. But that's not what makes the incubator the best program in the world. To be honest, you can get a lot of that same information elsewhere. What you can't find anywhere else is the level of coaching community and connection inside the incubator. Holy shit, it blows me away how next level these softer, less measurable and intangible features are. It's like the difference between saying I learned how to give someone a six second hug and I felt held and supported and loved. Our culture values the heart and tangible but I think what most of us as individuals need is the opposite. We need that ineffable connection to our highest selves to God, the universe source and to other humans, we need to feel like we belong like we aren't alone, like we are worthy and loved. And that is the magic of the incubator. Honestly, you don't need another course we all know that you need real support community and coaching. So if you're ready, I highly encourage you to get on our waitlist.

About this one, I tried to sell my blog route and rebel unsuccessfully for nine months with no offers zero not a single person or business offered to buy my blog even at like a super discount price. Right? It wasn't like I was getting bad offers. I got no offers. We're talking basically crickets. And then I got three offers in one week. And I wound up selling that blog for multiple six figures. How could that be a failure? Like look how quickly things can change? Okay, another failure, I was experiencing a lot of weight gain. Well, that led me to a new endocrinologist who was able to see this symptom as a flare up of my PCOS and hypothyroidism, and more importantly, my postpartum depression. And she got me a new medication that helped to relieve dozens of other symptoms that I was struggling with postpartum. And now regardless of the weight, I feel better than I have in years. Okay, so that wasn't a failure. How about our Facebook ads, those broke after the iOS updates first came in into play, right. And that experience just showed me what I don't want, which brought what I do want clearly into focus and gave me the push that I needed to simplify my business and retire myself study courses, like the six figure blog Academy, I wanted to go all in on the Success with Soul incubator, our Business Mastermind, and this was the push that I needed to do that, if the Facebook ads were still working, and we were still bringing in 50k a month, it would have been really hard to just turn that money faucet off, right? So it was what I needed. I got what I needed. This or something better, is what I'm always telling myself. So one other idea that came up for me when I was making this list of failures was that I invested $22,000 In a mastermind to learn how to do group coaching. And I only made one sale during my first launch. So I felt like a huge failure, but that one client had major breakthroughs to move her business forward with my support. I made lifelong friends in that mastermind that I invested in, who supported me through my hardest year. And ultimately, I went on to enroll 40 Other women throughout the next year, resulting in like a ridiculous 1,000% ROI on my investment. So again, I was starting to realize something that I just couldn't quite articulate what it was. And then I remembered that definition of failure, An act or instance proving on successful. So what I realized was that it's only a failure if you stop looking immediately after the action. If I had stopped looking at root unravel and stop trying to sell it because I thought well, it's been nine months I'm a failure. It would have been a failure because I would have stopped trying I would have stopped showing up I would have walked away, but I didn't and that is why and how I went on to To sell as a multiple six figure business. Again, going back to that employee example, I've had several employees quit. And after a slew of just bad team situations, I did feel like a massive failure. You know, I wanted to give up to just accept like managing a team and having employees is just too hard. I'm not cut out for this. I'm not good enough. But I kept going. I recommitted to my business and myself, this took a lot of coaching and therapy. And I recommitted to learning and growing as a leader, I joined a coaching program for systematizing your business through delegation and leadership, and I went on to hire three new people. And guess what, I now have the most amazing, beautiful, connected, talented, supportive team I could have ever imagined. And it's even better than my original plan. So again, that this or something better is what I often tell myself now when I'm setting a new goal, because sometimes God or the universe, whatever it means to you, has a different plan for me. And it's one that I can't always quite see or understand just yet. So that woman quitting on me wasn't the end of my story. It wasn't a failure, but only because I decided it wasn't here that again, because I decided it was not a failure, and I instead chose to believe that it was just part of my journey, then I could see it from this new perspective, the journey always continues, the destination always moves the goalposts were always changing them. Because there is no end point. Something only proves unsuccessful if we just leave it at that, you know, if we don't learn from it if we stop trying, which means there is no such thing as failure, so long as we keep moving forward. So if you're still listening to this, my guess is that you're ready to write a new ending to your own story, you're ready to stop letting fear of failure keep you from moving forward, and you're ready to replace the thought. What if it doesn't work with what if it does? What if everything you've ever wanted is on the other side, just waiting for you to be willing to risk failure to get it? Building an Online Business has been one of the most powerful things I've done to keep me moving forward and my own story, it has led to some of the most rewarding moments and stories and dollars and relationships of my entire life. And I know it could do the same for you. So whether you haven't started your coaching business because you're afraid, or you've been selling an online course for a while, but you just feel like nothing is working out the way you hoped. That just means it's not the end. What if it's not over? What if it could still work out? What if you never believed that you couldn't do it? So if all of this is landing, I would love to invite you to join the waitlist for the Success with Soul incubator. This is our holistic mastermind empowering female coaches and consultants to make money sustainably. And if you join our waitlist now, you'll get early access to pre enroll in the incubator before our next launch, we only are launching twice this year. So you'll definitely want to make sure that you get in now you can go to Kate kordsmeier.com forward slash waitlist. And on that waitlist not only will you get exclusive content just for our waitlist, and early access to pre enroll, you'll also get some free time inside the incubator, some bonus calls, an extra exclusive training and a $500 discount to use towards the incubator. So go ahead and sign up at Kate kordsmeier.com forward slash waitlist and we'll see you there

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