All successful online entrepreneurs face setbacks. If you haven’t had one yet, it’s coming. The people who you discover once had an online business but quit after something negative happened, didn’t learn the power of perseverance.
You don’t have to be the entrepreneur with the most talent or knowledge. You just have to be someone who knows how to hang in there when setbacks hit. Being able to overcome obstacles, learn from mistakes and keep pursuing your dream is what will set you apart from those who fail.
Every Setback Can Become a Motivating Force
The problem with setbacks isn’t the situation itself. It’s how you respond to the situation. That’s why you’ll have some people who will endure many hard knocks when they start an online business and they go on to be wildly successful.
They learned to take that setback and allow it to motivate them. This goes back to the importance of a formidable mindset. If you think that a setback that occurs will stop you, then it will.
That’s because when many people have a setback, they just quit. They feel overwhelmed, don’t know what to try next or how to solve the problem. They might even feel shame or think the problem is insurmountable.
There’s no such thing as a problem that can’t be solved. It might not be solved the way you’d hoped it would, but it will reach a conclusion. But as an online entrepreneur, what you have to guard against is the fear.
As soon as a setback occurs a lot of people get scared. The fear sets in and they stop trying. Maybe they had a great idea for a product launch. So they went all in and set up the launch and were so excited when the day arrived that the product went live.
Then nothing happened. The product didn’t do well. Or, it got negative feedback. Maybe they announced their online business and were eagerly waiting for the hordes of people who would sign up for their list.
But when they checked the stats, they discovered that only one person signed up – and it was a relative or a friend. Or worse – not even family or friends signed up. That can make any entrepreneur feel like a failure.
If it happened to you, that setback can become your mountain. You suddenly don’t feel good enough. You feel like you can’t cross the street successfully, much less reach the top of this mountain that’s landed in the center of all your hopes as an entrepreneur.
There’s a reason why some roads in mountainous areas are tunneled through the mountain. It’s because there’s no way around the mountain, so the highway department went through it.
The mountain, which was the setback to travel progress, didn’t move – just the determination of the highway department did. The mountain motivated the people to find another way.
That’s how you need to look at every setback. So what if one setback happened and the idea or project didn’t work? Find another way. It’s okay if you don’t know what that way is right now.
You just need to forge ahead and concentrate on finding that other path instead of quitting. If you quit, you will never know how successful you could have been if you hadn’t.
Let the Setback Become Your Mentor
A setback never just happens. They’re not magically willed into existence and it’s not a matter of whether or not you were unlucky. There’s always a reason it occurs. As an entrepreneur, it’s up to you to find out why the setback happened.
When setbacks land in your lap and threaten to derail your progress, it’s due to an cumulative effect. For example, a project launch that flops isn’t because you launched on a Friday versus a Tuesday.
People still buy on Fridays. But if you were too busy to properly market the project then that could be the first step that headed toward a setback. Then if the designer, writer or ad manager you hired did a poor job working on or advertising the launch and it didn’t resonate well with the audience, that’s your second step.
If you throw in the towel because a setback happened, you need to take a hard look at your actions. You might feel that you did the best that you could. But did you really?
Examine the situation to see if you took shortcuts.
Did you accept that the product was good enough instead of doing your very best? Look to see if you actually knew what audience to gear the product launch toward. Setbacks aren’t your enemy.
They can become your mentor if you allow them to be. They can teach you to always have a plan B. If you’ve had a setback and it’s taught you how to be ready with another idea, another launch, another project, then the setback will have shown you that when one way doesn’t work, you adjust and move on.
When you experience a setback, it stings. It can feel awful. Setbacks can make you question your skills, your knowledge and your future as an entrepreneur. But they can also teach you that you will get through the emotions attached to a setback and be able to overcome the moment.
So the next time something goes wrong, you’ll be able to choose a path based on experience and you won’t be caught up in the emotional struggle. You’ll be able to look back and know that a setback doesn’t have to be the end.
Entrepreneurs will often associate failure with who they are personally but setbacks, when overcome, can show you how strong you are. They can test your level of determination, your motivation and your ability to think through hard things.
When you have a setback it can become a mentor that holds you accountable. They force you to look at every step to see what happened – what you shouldn’t have done as well as what you should have.
All of this helps you to be able to grow your business leadership. Setbacks help you learn to not make excuses when they happen, but to become the best leader that you can be. So allow yourself to learn from them.
Setbacks Make You a Better Entrepreneur
If you’re like most people, the thought of having to deal with a setback isn’t appealing in the least. That’s because no one likes trouble. Going through disappointment, failure and the stress it brings isn’t the number one item on anyone’s bucket list.
Once you let a setback be your mentor, a surprising thing will happen. It changes your character. You might have been someone who was always quick to hunt for reasons why a setback happened.
The reason you were searching was probably because you didn’t want to blame yourself. Avoiding the blame can allow you to have a pity party where you’re the guest of honor.
But here’s the thing about setbacks – they force you to make a decision. They make you discover what you’re made of. They disrupt your plans and shake you up. This is the fork in the road.
One way leads to giving up. The other way leads to digging in your heels, rolling up your sleeves and pushing back. You might think that this pushback is against the setback, but it’s not.
This fighting spirit that you discover during the hard situations is actually a refining process that’s building character. Every time a setback hits, you might not realize it, but you’re going through entrepreneurial growing pains.
These pains given to you by setbacks turn you into a better entrepreneur than you would have been without them. For example, an entrepreneur who’s never had to struggle with a lack of funding or income won’t know how to be as creative to get the job done as the person who has gone through that.
The entrepreneur who experienced a setback and didn’t get anyone to sign up for their list will take that failure and once they learn what went wrong, can go on to build a huge list of loyal customers who can hardly wait for the next launch.
You can’t prevent setbacks. That’s because there are no perfectly prepared entrepreneurs and there are no 100% foolproof business plans, ideas or launches. But it’s not the setback that gets in the way.
It’s your perspective on that setback. If you think that it’s the end of your online business, then it will be. The setback won’t argue with you. If, however, you have the right perspective, that setback can change the course of your business for the better.
For example, one launch flops. So you learn what went wrong, go back to the drawing board, make a new product and launch that. Because you applied the information you learned from the setback of the first launch, the second one is hugely successful.
So welcome the setbacks when they happen. Use them to improve going forward. This is often known as failing forward, in entrepreneurial circles. It’s a normal thing to fail, and nothing you should be ashamed of as long as you keep getting up to fight for your success.
Harness the Fear a Setback Brings
It’s perfectly normal for fear to develop when you have a setback. You put yourself out there and it didn’t work out the way you wanted it to. Maybe your setback hit you hard financially.
Your online business is teetering on the edge of financial rock bottom. That can be scary – especially if you’ve poured every bit of your savings into it or if you left a good paying job to become your own boss.
When you’re fearful about money, the pressure starts to mount. It’s hard to think clearly and know what to do next. You may be afraid to take a new step because you’re scared that you’ll fail with that, too.
That’s the power of fear. It can bind you securely just like someone wrapped your body in ropes. You can’t move in any direction, and you just feel stuck. When this happens to some entrepreneurs, they hang in there, but they don’t take chances that could lead to success.
So they end up preventing their business from growing just because they’re afraid. Sometimes an entrepreneur will come up with an idea and they’ll spend a lot of time and effort turning that idea into a project or a resource.
But then a problem happens, and they start to doubt that their idea was any good to begin with. The setback has made them question whether they’re on the right track. Look at setbacks like this as opportunities to improve your idea.
If you quit on your idea because of a setback, there’s a good chance that later on, you might see someone with a similar idea who ends up becoming a success. A setback can hurt your self-esteem – make you question everything about yourself.
It can make you fearful that you don’t have what it takes. Harness that fear. Every time a setback occurs, find the strength in it. There’s always a strength in a setback. The problem itself isn’t the strength.
It’s the possibility of what it can do for you that contains the strength. Throughout history, there are countless people who harnessed the power of a setback. They’re in all walks of life – from sports to business ventures to people in the entertainment industry.
They’re not any better than you are. The only difference is when a setback happened, they turned fear into opportunity and used it to their advantage. The thing about a setback creating failure is that over time, you develop a tougher skin.
A setback becomes something that you’re able to shake off and the third or tenth or fiftieth time it happens, you’ve toughened up enough that you understand it’s just part of business and you no longer fear it.
Use Your Setback in a Positive Way for Your Business
When a setback happens, the first thing nearly everyone does is to focus on the negative. It becomes this big, sometimes life-altering thing that drags their emotions through the mud and leaves them wondering what to do now.
Rather than quitting when you’re faced with a setback, figure out how you’re going to make it a positive. This might be something that’s internal, such as it helps you with personal growth or it might be something that’s external – such as helping you make your business better.
Take the lessons that you learn from the setback and hold onto those. Let go of the negative side of a setback. You know the one. That nagging little voice that loves to say, “You failed” and instead switch that to, “Here’s something else I can try.”
Whenever a setback happens, it knocks your plan down temporarily, but what you might not realize is that it could very well be the exact thing that you need to change now so that your business is successful going forward.
For example, maybe the setback came along to teach you the power of not making excuses when things go wrong because in the future, it helps you to be a better leader. You may become someone who can accept responsibility and because of that, your entire team of employees knows how to not make excuses and instead, quickly corrects mistakes.
Setbacks can teach you to be honest. They force an entrepreneur to accept self-criticism or critiques about their business and not lie to themselves about their ability, knowledge or any of their efforts.
Before a setback happened, you may have been someone who made rash decisions – or you decided moves based on how you felt about something without knowing all the facts.
For example, some entrepreneurs hire family or friends just because of that relationship, even though the person may not be helpful for the business. A setback can teach you how to not make emotional choices, but instead to make choices that are determined by facts and to weigh the responsibility of those choices, so you do what’s best for your business.
Sometimes, a setback occurs because of a lacking talent or skill with the entrepreneur. For example, if you’re someone who’s terrible at record keeping and meeting deadlines, as an entrepreneur, that shortcoming can lead to disorganization and failure to meet launch deadlines.
You’ll get a reputation among your clients or customers as someone who can’t manage the business or as someone who can’t be relied on to deliver a product to market when you say you’re going to.
The setback in a situation like that can be used to teach you to keep better records and meet deadlines or to outsource that part of the business to someone else. Whatever setbacks occur in your business, learn to hang on through them no matter how difficult they might be.
They won’t last forever and you will come out on the other side a stronger, wiser entrepreneur. If it helps, take time to read the backstory of many famous entrepreneurs. You’ll usually find a pattern where they discuss the obstacles that almost held them back, but which they persevered through to their amazing success.
