{"id":15410,"date":"2017-02-21T18:55:44","date_gmt":"2017-02-21T07:55:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/margiev2.websitereboot.com.au\/?p=15410"},"modified":"2017-02-21T18:55:44","modified_gmt":"2017-02-21T07:55:44","slug":"bravery-doesnt-pay-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/margiewarrell.com\/bravery-doesnt-pay-off\/","title":{"rendered":"When Bravery Doesn\u2019t Pay Off"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, \u201cFortune favors the bold.” But that doesn’t mean every risk we take will be immediately rewarded. Sometimes when we take a deep dive out of our comfort zone into the water below, we land flat on our face. The question is, what to do when your best and bravest efforts fail to produce the results you’d hoped for?<\/em><\/p>\n

My friend Tash runs a women\u2019s financial advice company called\u00a0Women With Cents<\/a>. She\u2019s done a few TV segments on financial literacy and budgeting which have shown women in the traditional female roles at home, wiping the kitchen benches, sitting at the dining table, and \u2018keeping house\u2019. She wanted to ask if they\u2019d take footage of women outside the house but initially was too afraid to rock the boat. When they started arranging another segment, she mustered up the courage to see if they could film a woman outside the home setting. Just to mix it up\u00a0and\u00a0avoid the gender stereotyping which\u00a0is\u00a0so detrimental to women.<\/p>\n

To her dismay, her request didn\u2019t go down so well. In fact, the producer acted very defensively and brushed her off. It wasn\u2019t a big thing of course, but as Tash shared with me afterwards, she felt a kick in the guts that she\u2019d put herself out there, been brave, and that her courage hadn\u2019t been rewarded.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s face it; courage doesn\u2019t always pay off.<\/p>\n

Another friend of mine spent years trying to build a retail stationery business, going out on a financial limb to open retail stores in \u2018hot spots\u2019 and build a bespoke brand. Yet for various reasons, some well outside her control, it didn\u2019t pay off and she lost her entire investment.<\/p>\n

Of course, I have plenty of my own stories to tell of when being brave didn\u2019t pay off. Many of which I’ve shared in previous articles so I won’t repeat them here.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve learned along the way is that when we take a risk which doesn\u2019t produce the dividends we\u2019d hoped for we can react in three core ways:<\/p>\n

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  1. OVER PERSONALIZE: Decide we were a total idiot for making such a foolish decision in the first place and declare never to venture out on a limb or stick our neck out ever, ever, again.<\/li>\n
  2. UNDER PERSONALIZE: Blame the entire thing on someone else \u2013 their lousy advice, dishonesty or bad call and take no responsibility ourselves.<\/li>\n
  3. OWN IT AND LEARN FROM IT: Look for the learning we got from it \u2013 take responsibility for what we did or didn\u2019t do so well but don\u2019t over-personalize it or beat ourselves up for being such an idiot (what does that serve?) and then take that learning and apply it to pursuing new goals and challenges. As I have written before about failure<\/a>, we learn a lot more from our failures than we ever do from our success.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n