Learn From Your Mistakes

Episode 29 – Looking for the Lesson

 

Starting off with a little side note today! Have you found a book that you absolutely love lately? I found mine, it’s called A Happy Pocket Full of Money! Let me be clear, I have a pile of books on my nightstand that I should be reading, but it takes me a long time to read, and this book is just speaking to me, so I am suggesting it to you! Go check it out!

One more quick side note before we get into our topic, finding the sunshine on the rainy days. This side note is another fun on! I want to let you all know that I am going to be teaching a live virtual class! The class is called Theresa Cantley’s Business Growth Formula. You can register for it at https://theresacantley.com/restaurantgrowth. I am so excited, it’s a whole class jam-packed with everything I have learned in my 20-years of experience, both personal experience and from my experience working with restaurant owners. You’ll get my seven strategies; which are based around the seven most common mistakes made in a restaurant. These seven strategies will help you get out of the kitchen and create the vision you were meant to make. The class will run every other week for just one hour, no matter if you are a brick and mortar business or an online business, you will benefit from this!

Also If you are listening to this and thinking “man I have been missing out” make sure to subscribe to my podcast so you don’t miss any other episodes! There is an episode released every Wednesday and we have some great things coming your way! So, don’t miss out!

Okay, now that the housekeeping is out of the way lets dive in! Let’s clear the air right now, NOTHING goes perfect for everyone all of the time. It’s just impossible. I learned this the hard way many years ago. At the time I was working in corporate America, as well as a side business, and I was having some health issues. Compact that with self-limiting beliefs that came from my childhood and a poor outlook. Man–everything was happening to me, struggle, hardships, things falling through, my health. Everything was going wrong and I couldn’t see the silver lining–as they say.

This took me years! Really it wasn’t until the last five years that this lesson really sank in for me. It really started when my husband was diagnosed with cancer, for the first time, that’s when I realized that things don’t happen to us… they happen FOR us. Here is the thing guys, things are going to be bad and ugly at times; but, you need to focus on what you are learning from the situation. What skills can you take with you from that experience, and how have you grown?

I talk about this idea with all my clients because just like life, your business won’t always go according to plan. There will be roadblocks and shortfalls and things that go terribly wrong. There is no way around it–but there is something to be learned from it. Remember things happen for us, not to us. Most of the time, the bad thing is happening for a reason, one of three reasons to be specific. First, it could be moving us in the direction that we need to go to achieve the thing that we want to achieve, or it’s giving us a lesson that we need to learn so that we can move in the right direction, but number three, and this is the harder thing for people to understand, it might be moving us. It might be detouring us towards something better, towards something different.

So like I said before, I lived this, My husband was diagnosed with cancer (technically twice) and it was at the same time my business partner was diagnosed with cancer and I was trying to hold our business up, and I wasn’t sleeping much and I just kept thinking, “Why me? What did I do? Why is this happening to me?” One of those sleepless nights I remember looking at my phone and seeing a quote, something along the lines of “the only person that is responsible for your success is you” and it was this lightbulb moment. If I hadn’t been in the mental state I was because of the terrible things happening in my life, I may have just scrolled right past that quote without a second thought.

Instead, I thought to myself, “All right. Things happen to either give us the lesson that we need to get to the result. To move us in the forward and the direction to get to the result, or to send us on a detour to get us to the result because we’re obviously going down a wrong path.” This was that moment, I thought, “All right. There’s something here that I’m supposed to be learning and I’m not learning.”

At that time, number one, really my vision was for my business. Number two, it was to also show me how strong I really am and what I can figure anything out and that I needed to just focus on what was important and stay focused on that, those vital few things that were important, and let everything else go instead of worrying about all this small stuff.

Recently I had a client who was going through a really rough time. People were quitting, things weren’t going right… she was blaming herself and playing the same why-game I had played five years ago. I took a deep breath and told her to do the same. The first step, always, take a deep breath, second, remember anything can be figured out–so don’t stress, and third, think about the lesson. What is life trying to teach you?

Now, my client looked at me like I had four heads, and dove back into the self-deprecating–”What did I do wrong? Why me?” and so on. So I stopped her again and asked what life was trying to teach her from this situation, what can be learned? EVERYONE out there has gone through some kind of struggle, there is no way around it, the difference is what you learn from it versus other people.

As humans we want to give meaning to everything, this can be a good thing but this can also lead us down a negative path or spiral. Instead of focusing on the meaning–like my client originally was, look at the lesson or the direction life is pushing you. It turns out that my client had fallen into a rut and was complacent with the level of success she had already achieved. Instead of bettering herself and her business she was latching onto these bad things and not focusing on the larger message of — GO TRY SOMETHING NEW!

Things are always going to happen–but they aren’t happening to you. Your life has an infinite number of possibilities, but we are responsible for the choices we make and how we react to situations. If we stop and look for the lesson in a tough situation we are more likely to move in that direction we were meant to go. You can only grow through change, not all change will be easy but in the long run, it will be worth it.

So I hope this helped you. Like I said, out of our biggest struggles and our biggest frustrations can come the biggest and greatest lessons and the greatest opportunities if we are open to receiving them and looking for them. So I hope this episode helped you, and until next time, have a great rest of your week,and don’t forget, look for the lessons that happen in things that happen every day, every week, because that is where you will find the greatest opportunities. All right. Bye for now

If you enjoyed this episode and in some way it inspired you to start taking action, I’d love to hear about it and know your biggest takeaway. Send me a DM on Instagram @theresacantley and let me know what your favorite part was.

I would also love if you subscribed to the podcast and left a review at https://theresacantley.com/itunes

If there is a topic you would love me to talk about or a question you may have send it to us at theresa@theresacantley.com and we’ll feature it on one of our future episodes.

LINKS:

Episode 28 – An Easy Way to Build Momentum in Your Business

Episode 27 – How to Attract and Hire Your Dream Team with 3 Simple Steps

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