How to Overcome the Fear of Failure as a Network Marketer

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

Speaker 1:
Even in the most dire, the worst things that could possibly happen, you can identify at least three things, at least three. And one of those three things is I did it.

Speaker 2:
Today. We’re going to be talking about conquering one of the biggest obstacles that’s going to keep you stuck in your network marketing business, the fear of failure. And in this video we are going to give you some of our tools, strategies, tips, and tricks to help you overcome the fear of failure. If you haven’t hit subscribe yet, go ahead and hit the subscribe button right now so you don’t miss any of our future episodes. Let us know in the comments if you’re letting the fear of failure hold you back. Where do you think that fear of failure comes from? For so many of us, it comes from things that have happened in our childhood, things that happened in our past. Let’s talk about that fear of failure, where it comes from.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think that, I know that for me, fear of failure, it actually was like I had a fear of failure. I had a fear of success. I pretty much had all the fears when I was first getting started. But for fear of failure specifically, it was something that happened in my childhood. So I had worked and worked and worked. I was a runner. I used to do cross country running. I got started when I was in the third grade running with my dad, and that turned into competitive running. And I remember it was one of the biggest races of the year. So we had regionals nationals, we had traveled to another state to go and compete with my team. And as a team, we all had to place in a certain part in order for us to do well. And I remember it was my first time running with this team and I started going out and I remember starting the race.

Speaker 1:
When I started the race, I got a stitch in my side where you feel like you can’t breathe. And I had my own rhythm of where ways that I could get rid of it. And this stitch would just not go away and it wouldn’t go away and it wouldn’t go away. And I remember people that I had run in races previously were passing me and I was like, I can’t breathe. I am like, oh my gosh, I’m ruining it for everyone. And I ended up doing okay, not as good as I wanted to, but to me, I felt like I had let my whole team down. And now you fast forward to starting the business, that fear of failure, even though I had been successful in other things since then, I had gone on to run competitively. That fear of failure had been ingrained of what if you fail? What if you fail? What if you fail? Especially if it involves other people and it involved other people. It wasn’t necessarily me. The first thing I thought was let my team down. I let my team down because they were counting on me getting a certain position in that race to qualify to go to the next thing. So for me,

Speaker 3:
The fear of failure when it came up in network marketing was I’d been pretty successful at everything that I had done. So telling people I was going out of what I had known, I was a cosmetologist for 25 years. I had a successful salon, I had a clientele to die for. I was making really great money. And then you venture out on this thing and your people are looking at you, what are you doing? So it was this judgment of there’s no way this is ever going to work for you and all that. And then all of that comes into your mind and you start believing that stuff. And then you think, what if I freaking fail at this? And they were right, right? That’s the other piece of it that comes up. And

Speaker 1:
I love that you, sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt you. I love that you brought that up because so many times these fears that we have, fear of judgment go hand in hand with fear of failure, wondering, well, what are people around me thinking? What does my mom think? What does my dog think? What does husband think? We start questioning and we start to make things up in our head of what other people are thinking when chances, nine times out of tent, those people aren’t even thinking about you. They’re not thinking about you, they’re thinking about themselves.

Speaker 4:
So let’s talk about what you did to overcome this fear of failure. That’s a really good question. It has a million dollar question. The million dollar questions. Get ready. Don’t stop giving you some tips and strategies to help you. I’m going to drop the bomb. Just like,

Speaker 1:
Don’t drop the bomb. Come on, drop, drop it, bring it

Speaker 4:
So you’ll have a fear of failure if you thinking that failure is the bad thing. So I had a huge aha moment when I was told that you are not going to be able to succeed unless you fail Many, many, many times. It’s like, oh, I literally had to give myself permission to fail. And it wasn’t easy, right? Because to me, when fear of failure was associated with embarrassment, I didn’t want to feel embarrassed again. And all those people, oh, I told you so like, oh, you’re not rich yet. I told you. So to me, it was like, I can’t feel that again. So when I literally started rewiring my mind and look at failures, what can I learn from that experience? I had a lot of failure in network marketing. I can tell you guys that story. So when I was 19 years old, I just joined my first company and there was big event about to happen in Moscow, and we were supposed to buy a thousand dollars worth of product in order to get ticket to that conference.

Speaker 4:
And you know how you’re upline, you got to go. If you don’t go to the event, you’re never going to be successful. 19 years old, I was in second year of college. At that time, I wasn’t working full-time students. So I went to my parents and I really want it, mom and dad. I really, really want it. Pretty pleased. I’m going to return it all. And just going to let you guys compare what thousand dollars and 1998 could buy you back then in Russia, two cars. Wow. That’s how much money it was. And it’s not like something you have in your bank account. You have to go to five relatives and ask 200, 200, 200 or the mafiaa. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
So story for another day. I

Speaker 4:
Convinced my parents, what is your story? To go and borrow money from their friends and family so I could go to this event. So it was six cases of product, a lot of product. I’m like, oh my gosh, finally. So I went to the convention. It was awesome. So we came back, I traveled to another city to prospect. We slept on the balcony of someone’s grandma’s house for a month. We couldn’t afford any hotel on the balcony. I mean, it was like enclosed, enclosed, enclosed, okay,

Speaker 5:
Hardcore. But

Speaker 4:
That’s what we did because well, I committed, right? I’m going to go above and beyond to make it happen. And I remember even the date, it was August 18th, 1998 or nine. So we wake up and we open the news and it’s like the economy crashed. The whole market collapsed. They call default or whatever. So let’s say ruble, $1 was six rubles and it became 24 overnight. And people couldn’t afford to buy a $60 bottle of vitamins because that’s how much they made. Now in the entire month, they need this money to survive. Survive. So I had six cases of product and a thousand dollars because I borrowed dollars, now I have to return four times more. I was crushed. I knew I was in a big trouble, big trouble. So that was my first and biggest failure of network marketing. You

Speaker 1:
Go deeper into it in your book where you’re like the mafiaa starts getting involved.

Speaker 4:
It was a lot of money literally overnight. It became even four times more, a

Speaker 5:
Lot more money.

Speaker 4:
I told myself, I’ll never do it again. I was so done with, I was ashamed of network marketing. That’s how much fear I had when I was like network marketing. Hell no, I had

Speaker 1:
The mafiaa on my ass for years,

Speaker 4:
Never again. But later on, when you see the bigger pictures, it was actually blessing in disguise because if I didn’t have the debt sitting on my ass, I would never come to the States because I was pushed to do something drastically different. How can I find the money? And that was my motivation to come here all alone. Would you let your kid go alone in a different country? No. Across the punt with $200?

Speaker 1:
No,

Speaker 4:
No. But I couldn’t stay there.

Speaker 6:
That’s like Russian gang staff.

Speaker 4:
So talking about fear of failure. So when I decided that I’m doing a network marketing again, I was like, I’m just going to go for it. Yeah, it is going to be scary and I might fail again, but I’m just going to make something out of it.

Speaker 2:
So I love that. So failure is not actually, it’s part of the journey.

Speaker 4:
It’s part of the journey. So

Speaker 2:
Embracing failure as, okay, this is going to come and it’s part of the journey, and I’m not going to treat failure as failure, but as a stepping stone to success. That’s how I like to look.

Speaker 1:
When you think about a baby learning how to walk, they’re going to get up and they’re going to fall how many times before they finally take that first step. They step don’t just sit there and they don’t just sit there and never stand up again. It’s the constant failure. And learning from that failure that finally gets your baby to stand for that first time and then learn how to walk. First time you rode a bike, it took several times of getting on that bike and falling and crashing and getting scraped and bruised before you finally figured out your balance to be able to ride your back. I

Speaker 3:
Think it’s important to note that fear itself means future events appearing real. So it’s the story that you create in your mind, and it’s like this tornado that just keeps going in your mind. And you can either feed that or you can shut that down by taking action. And I think that’s really how you get past the fear is you’ve actually got to do something. If you’re just sitting there like wallowing in the hole, what if that, and you’re looking for certainty and you’re looking for all these things. There isn’t any. There’s people that go to dental school and totally fail. There’s people that go be a cosmetologist and they kick them out. It happens in every industry. It’s just having to learn and get better and move forward.

Speaker 6:
And people have said, oh, from being successful and how we did it right? It’s like, oh, well it you guys. It’s pretty or whatever. You’re good looking in front of the camera and things like that. And first of all, I’m super insulted because you don’t even know what I’ve been through to get to this.

Speaker 1:
You were just lucky, right? That’s another one.

Speaker 6:
You were lucky

Speaker 1:
Or

Speaker 6:
You’re better looking. And so you have a leg up on everybody. And really what it was is we failed so much faster. And when you fail, you actually can identify and learn and see what’s working and what’s not working. And the same goes with I was a high performance athlete. I succeeded a lot. I had a lot of accolades. I won a national championship in volleyball. We finished on a perfect season. And I mean, that’s not a good thing, but when you fail throughout those things, you’re able to see what your weaknesses are, your vulnerabilities, what areas of the game do we need to work on? It’s the same in your business. So we failed faster. We identified gaps

Speaker 1:
Quicker

Speaker 6:
And got back up and continued moving forward. And it wasn’t like, and so I guess what I want to say is you want to fail. You want to be prepared for that because if you can just skate through and you just go and

Speaker 1:
Top, it’s the thing. Fail fast, fail

Speaker 6:
Forward. And people are going to say, well, what did you do? Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what I did. I just showed up and I’m pretty right. And you can’t duplicate that. You can’t show people the path that you took. And it’s like same thing as with other aspects in our business, if we have a student comes in, or if we came in and we launched an ad or whatever and we just went to the top, you’re never going to know what about that ad worked and then turn around and then teach it and help someone else.

Speaker 1:
So I think about even with beach bust, we’ve grown really fast. We’ve grown really fast over the last few years, but people don’t see or know about some of the that happened. Where were we? I remember our Black Friday offer, it would’ve been 20, 21, 1, 20 21. It was 2021. And we spent hours and hours creating this offer, getting ready, putting the funnels in place, all the things. And we launched it. I was the one that did the webinar. And so I get to the very end and I’m like, here we go. We’re bringing all these people into this program. Get ready for the flood

Speaker 6:
And zero zero. And we had three people

Speaker 1:
At the end of the email sequence, not from the pitch. So I’m sitting there and I’m like, oh my gosh, I screwed it up for all of us. It was, and here we are with the team again, right? Yeah. I screwed it up for the whole team. It’s that fear of failure. So it’s like, but we took that, I mean, it was a really hustle bustle time throughout all of December to even keep beach bus afloat at that point. But what we got from that, we’ve never repeated the mistakes that we made had we had not failed. We might not be here. We might not be here.

Speaker 2:
So that brings me on to how might people overcome that fear of failure? What resources or what might they do? What might they put in place to help them figure out? So you’ve got a great process.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, I was about to say, we all have a process that we use, and it’s the process of evaluation. I think it’s a seven, eight, $9 billion skillset. Because as you continue to evaluate, you continue to improve, and the more you fail, evaluate, improve faster. That’s kind of what happens.

Speaker 6:
What makes it so just transformational for your business? And as the entrepreneur, the evaluation that we use is it takes the motion out of it. Yes.

Speaker 1:
So basically what you’re going to do, it’s a three-step process where you first identify what three things worked. Even when you’re saying this failed this bomb, nothing

Speaker 6:
Worked, everything about business, it’s

Speaker 1:
Actually not true. Even in the most dire, the worst things that could possibly happen, you can identify at least three things, at least three. And one of those three things is I did it. If you’re saying nothing’s working, that means you are not working and there’s a problem there. So it’s identifying what three things worked. Then you move on to what are the two major things that didn’t work. You’re not going to go and you’re going to list a million things. It’s identify what were the two major things that didn’t work in whatever I just did. And then from there, you ask yourself, what’s one thing I might change or do differently based on the two things that didn’t work so that I get closer to my result? Next time? Keeping emotion out of it, keeping emotion out of it.

Speaker 6:
And you have three wins to your two things that suck, right?

Speaker 3:
And one that you’re going to do different.

Speaker 2:
Don’t have a list of 20 things. All the things that set,

Speaker 1:
It’s

Speaker 4:
Intentionally. That’s right. The positive. We pick three, the negative, we pick two, and then we

Speaker 1:
Change one, change one of the two,

Speaker 6:
One solution. And by identifying those, that’s externally verifiable data. It’s not just on a whim or I felt this,

Speaker 1:
Well, I feel like this. Well, no, what did the actual

Speaker 3:
Numbers, we’ve actually had that happen in stuff that we’ve done. If we do something and I’m like, well, I feel like that was a crapshoot. And then we actually look at the actual, oh my gosh, that was amazing. Or the feedback or whatever. And it’s not really a crapshoot. Maybe it was just the way I was feeling at the time, whatever.

Speaker 6:
There’s times where we were like, man, I totally botched that training or something. But then our students are in the chat. That was amazing. That was amazing, right? Because we know that it wasn’t what we it to be. And on

Speaker 1:
The flip side to

Speaker 6:
Our expectations, on the flip side, they don’t.

Speaker 1:
On the flip side, there’s been times where we’re like, that was awesome. The most amazing thing we’ve

Speaker 3:
Done. And then

Speaker 6:
Totally.

Speaker 1:
And the result that we get doesn’t come.

Speaker 4:
So the key is to take emotion out your decisionmaking process, right? Because usually that’s what kills network marketers and makes us fail is that emotion, because we’re drowning. Oh my gosh, that was a huge failure and it’s huge failure to us. But literally no one else might’ve noticed that that was a failure. Your parents will forgive you

Speaker 3:
Eventually.

Speaker 4:
Your neighbor doesn’t care, right? The only person who care and judges you, fear of judgment is you. Yeah.

Speaker 6:
But if you don’t take that emotion out, sorry. No, you’re good. You don’t take that emotion out. A reason why a lot of people either get stuck in, they’re stuck where they’re at because of the failure, or they check out and they’re like, I’m putting my business on the shelf for a couple months. And what stuck is because they react emotionally with their failure, and then they start spiraling, and that failure starts bringing in all these lag. Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I’ll never succeed. Maybe I can’t even do this business. And spiral, spiral, spiral, spiral, spiral. And then who wants to get up after that? They can’t get themselves out because they’ve spiraled so low. It’s a failure spiral. And then it’s either like, I’m going to quit, or like I said, I’m just going to check out for a couple months and then here we go, I’m going to relaunch my business. But then it’s like, what if starting over what all this stuff happens again? Fear comes back in again. So it’s like a

Speaker 4:
Loop. Yes.

Speaker 3:
Well, and with network marketing, I don’t think anybody actually fails. You just have a bunch of people that quit. If you stay with it long enough, if you learn the skill sets and you practice, and maybe for instance, I can say for me, when I started to build online, I started to get some results. About a year in 10, 11 months,

Speaker 4:
You failed into your success.

Speaker 3:
Yeah. Kat, for instance, it took a little bit longer. Carrie did it even faster than I did. And it all depends on how fast you’re willing to fail and how quickly you’re willing to learn new skill sets and implement that and evaluate as you go, right? That’s really the bottom

Speaker 1:
Line. And you have to take the judgment and the emotion out of it. In order to do that, as hard as it is, you have to take a step back. And even if you’re feeling like awful about whatever just happened, what are those three things, those three, even if they’re teeny, what micro,

Speaker 3:
I actually did it. That could be like you said, number one, and

Speaker 6:
You can use that evaluation on a daily. You could evaluate your business over the week and do that. You could do it after a certain activity, like an action step. Maybe you did a live or something. Maybe you’ve done the webinar. Maybe you’re running a challenge in your group, so you’re always using it. You can evaluate your business over the month. So it’s a really great tool, and it’s not just something you do one time. It’s something that you’re constantly doing over and over, right?

Speaker 2:
Yeah. So by reframing your fear of failure and surrounding yourself by people who can help you shift your mindset and go through processes like we’ve just discussed, you can embrace that fear of failure, overcome it, and actually start seeing results in your network marketing business. So if you’re ready to overcome that fear of failure and start attracting high quality prospects to your network marketing business, you’re going to want to grab the social influencer formula. It’s going to be in the link below. And make sure to tune into our next episode where we’re going to be diving deeper into other aspects of building your business.