More Success = More Failure
One of my absolute favorite coaches, Stacey Boehman, recently released a podcast episode about the money mistakes she’s made in her business.
And in that episode, she said something that stopped me in my tracks:
The years that I've had my biggest money mistakes have also been the years I make more than I ever have.
The years that she had the most unhappy clients, the most refund requests, and the biggest losses and breakdowns in her business…
…were also the years that she made the most revenue and brought in the most clients.
In a much smaller way, I’m experiencing the same thing this year in my own business.
I’ve never signed as many clients as quickly as I’m currently signing them…
…AND I’ve never had so many people say Yes to starting a coaching package and then disappear, ghost, or change their mind before starting.
This had never happened to me before, and then it suddenly happened several times in a row.
(This is NOT a dig at any of those folks, by the way! Life happens, things come up, and you change your mind or find a better way forward. I’ve been there too, and I would never hold it against someone else :)
How do you make sense of both of these things happening at once?
Of bigger-than-ever success coinciding with bigger-than-ever failure?
Let me tell you how my brain WANTS to make sense of it, both when I see it happening to others and when it happens to me.
The first interpretation my brain comes up with is:
🚨 Fraud fraud fraud!!! 🚨
Bigger-than-ever failure cannot coincide with bigger-than-ever success (or so says my brain). It just doesn’t compute.
So if all these failures are happening…it must mean that the success is not really valid.
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” — there’s hollowness and fakeness and illegitimacy at the heart of what you’re doing, and it’s only a matter of time before the truth is revealed, and all your ill-earned success comes tumbling down.
This line of thinking expects “real success” to be neat, clean, and pristine.
More and more gold stars 🌟 coinciding with fewer and fewer black marks ◼️
And when YOUR success doesn’t look like that, you shrink back and abandon the path.
Because obviously, you’re doing it wrong.
Let me give you another way of thinking about it.
With more success comes more volatility. 📈
“Real success” does NOT look like this:
It is NOT that the tough times have tiny successes and huge failures…
…while the good times have huge successes and tiny failures.
Real success looks like THIS:
As you get better and gain more success, the volatility increases in BOTH directions.
The early days have smaller successes AND smaller failures.
The later days have bigger successes AND bigger failures.
When you’re not as good at something yet, and you haven’t achieved that much success yet…
…you literally don’t have the capacity for big failures.
You can’t have 20 clients demand a refund…when you only have 5 clients.
You can’t make a $3.5M money mistake when your revenue is $100,000.
But as you become better at something and you gain success, you have more people in your orbit and more moving pieces in the machine that grows and maintains your results.
Which means you have to expect that more things will go wrong, because there are simply more potential points of failure in the system.
As your audience grows bigger and bigger, the probability that someone will hate you and try to cancel you goes up.
As you lead larger and larger teams, the probability that someone is unhappy and quits because of your leadership goes up.
Nothing is going wrong when this happens.
These kinds of downswings are NOT a sign that you’ve failed or are a fraud or have no idea what you’re doing.
It’s a sign that you’ve succeeded. The big downswing is only possible in the realm where big upswings are also happening.
This is a marker of your success. You wouldn’t be seeing this problem if you weren’t succeeding.
It’s a sign that you’re legitimate. You’ve unlocked the next-level problem that’s only available at this level of success.
You’re like a musician worrying about making a great second album — that’s a “next-level problem” that you can only unlock after you’ve made a great first album.
It’s a sign that you’re sharpening your skills and discernment. As you work through how to handle this downswing, you are downloading massive insights and intuitions that are only available to the people who actually go through these things.
And I know that it’s not necessarily fun or enjoyable to gain these insights and hone your intuition in this way. When it’s happening, you might wish for nothing more than for it to be over.
AND these are the exact insights and experiences that will power you in the future to even further levels of success beyond this.
This is your secret sauce — simmering, brewing, and getting even more potent — right here in the moment.
I don’t want your success to make you more brittle.
I don’t want you to accidentally box yourself in, thinking each new achievement reduces your scope for failures, mistakes, and downswings after this.
The reality is that if you aspire to greatness…
You can relax, drop your shoulders, and increase your allowance for great mistakes.
They are the necessary other side of the coin of great success.
You can’t have one without the other.
So allow yourself to fill out both sides of your story.
Wherever I have managed to do this in my own life…
I have done it with other people’s help.
I am NOT a zen monk on a mountaintop, figuring all this out in my head and effortlessly implementing it in my life.
My ups and downs are as messy and ugly and repetitive and seemingly purposeless as anyone else’s.
The only reason I have gotten through them is because I leaned on others.
Coaches, teachers, friends, family, books written by people who died long ago, and kind words from acquaintances I haven’t heard from in years.
Everyone who gets there, gets there with a support team at their back.
Nobody does this by themselves.
A coach is a fabulous addition to that support team (and a non-negotiable part of my own support team).
A coach gives you the warmth and empathy of a friend.
The support and belief of a genuine FAN.
And the objective analysis and pattern recognition of neutral expert.
All rolled into one, with the sole mandate of keeping you on track and accountable while you do the work of building the life you want.
There are two ways to work with me.
You can be one of my private one-on-one clients.
Book a free consult to come talk to me about how we can work together.
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What my clients have to say…
“It's honestly fun. You're working on the most important thing in your life – your goals and your aspirations.
And you're doing it in a manner that is not harsh or strict. In fact, it's quite fun. It's like a video game, and you get to gently make progress towards the things that matter.”
—Client | Solutions Engineer at Fintech Company
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