We have become more and more career oriented as a society. The idea of beating the odds to become an entrepreneur and strive for success is a prevalent message across all media. We are bombarded with encouraging videos, quotes, podcasts, and blogs, telling us to believe in ourselves and to shoot for the stars.

We all have the aspiration to do something meaningful and memorable, and give our best to achieve it, most of the time. I bolded most of the time because there come times and events which side-track us from our goals.

We may get discouraged by the initial failures we experienced, pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zone. At times we may have experienced personal problems causing us to become overwhelmed by the brain-wrenching hard work it takes to push through them.

There are thousands of factors and emotions that can de-track us from our goals. After wasting months or even years, we may find ourselves realizing that we are not going in the right direction. So how do you go about getting back on track?

Importance of Mantras

Mantras are one of the best tools to help us deal with distractions derailing us from achieving professional success.

Mantras are a series of words or phrases that can be universal or personalized to keep us motivated and focused on our goals. Yes, there are mantras that work universally, but the ones created according to specified needs can actually create successful outcomes that feel like magic.

To be successful at anything, focus is a requisite and mandatory. If you lose it, you will lose your ability to achieve your goals.

“Motivations and inspirations are the deciding factors that impact your ability to be successful.”

Unfortunately, motivations and inspirations fade with time and so does your ability to focus on your path to success. Personalized mantras are designed affirmations to keep your motivations alive, and to be your best self. The purpose of these repetitive phrases is to provide encouragement when you need to focus all your abilities toward your goals.

“Mantras are the easiest way to instigate your maximum potential.”

Mantras can help you retain self-confidence. They are the pat on your back when you lose hope, that keep you pushing forward. They can help you to regain reliance on your abilities when life deals you hard blows.

In short, mantras can eliminate almost all psychological barriers ,halting your way to success. They awake your highest self and help your consciousness make the best decisions and actions. They assist you in developing effective communication to inspire others about your goals.

“Your mantras depict your philosophy of life and can be your personal slogan. They are the words and principles you wish to live by.”

Whenever you are stressed, failed, exhausted, overwhelmed, tired, demotivated, and feeling like you are ready to quit, consider creating a mantra that can work to bring you out of such a devastating state of mind.

Such negative feelings emerge out of personal beliefs that have been created by dark experiences that you have either had yourself, or significant others around you. 

Mantras are proven neuroscience technology that will over-ride and transform negative beliefs in 90 days, if you practice them daily.

How to Create an Effective Mantra

If you need a mantra that can help you in your career, recall all the professional achievements that make you feel proud or more successful. List all of them in order from best-to-good. Pick a few top achievements that you want to manifest and recreate in your professional life.

At this point, connect with your inner self. Focus on all your abilities that can come to play to translate this goal into reality. Focus on the contradicting beliefs that discourage you by saying “you can’t do this” or “it is impossible”.

Gather the positivity of the previous achievement and confront these contradicting thoughts and beliefs with a strong phrase. You don’t need to imperatively create this phrase, just let it come to mind.

The confidence you got from previous experiences will be enough to bring such a phrase to your mind. Still, if you struggle to come up with a mantra, think about what your good friend would say about your abilities. They may say “You did it, and you can do it even better”. Make this your mantra.

“Mantras for professional success are basically the reaffirmations of your ability to achieve success and the resonance of the power of Universe with your consciousness.”

There are few things you must keep in mind when you create a personalized mantra. First, try to keep it simple and easy to remember. If you need to look at it every time you want to repeat it, it is less likely to become a good habit in your life.

Second, create something that resonates with your spiritual, social, and personal beliefs. If a mantra contradicts your spiritual beliefs, it would be almost impossible for it to change your life. Rather, you will soon consider replacing it.

Last, your mantra should bring you comfort and peace.

If you follow the above instructions to craft a mantra for yourself, you will soon have a strong and effective one. Repeat it whenever you need to. 

These mantras have changed life for many and have the power to change yours. They can boost your abilities and help you perform best to achieve your goal.

For entrepreneurs, the only constants in business are hurdles, challenges, pivots, and often more failures than successes. They face obstacles all day long. From convincing investors to give them money, to struggling to meet payroll.

Dealing with failed expensive investments, maneuvering unexpected complications, or launching a new product in the market during the least favorable time, sooner or later many come to the realization that not all entrepreneurs are cut out for the journey.

Those who make it, learn how to turn the hurdles into paving their way to success. They seem to know how to turn the unending stream of difficulties into advantages and emerge even stronger and more successful.

Unlike those who lose their head when subjected to such obstacles, taking advantage of bad times and converting failures and obstacles into opportunities is the key to the long life of any business. This fact is well explained by Andy Grove, as particularly apt during our Covid-19 pandemic.

“Bad companies are destroyed by crises; good companies survive them; great companies are improved by them.” — Andy Grove

See Failures as Opportunities

Thinking of growth amidst failure, sounds counter-intuitive, but it is the best thing you can do to fight sadness, and devastation in your life. It can turn failure upside down and change a cursed fate into a blessed one.

“Doubling down during challenges isn’t cliché, it’s what separates the winner from the whiners.”

First of all, you need to experience failures to learn and grow, as featured in my last blog. If instead of learning from failures, you feel devastated and quit, the results can be dangerous.

For instance, let’s say you invest in a stock that immediately doesn’t meet your expectations, and you lose some of your money, you have two ways to go:

  1) is to learn that perhaps “it was not the right time to invest”, or you should have invested in a dividend growth company, and then put this experience to work while planning the next investment.

  2) you feel angry and devastated by the loss and quit investing.

The first option is more desirable and beneficial, where you turn your failures into a guide for your journey towards success.

Obstacles or crises in business are actually the opportunity to grow, but only for people with courage to do so. During time of crises, while most become afraid of losses in the future, a rational and savvy entrepreneur takes advantage of things like the dropped costs of production, real estate, and raw materials. They take advantage of the lower costs of goods and turn a crisis into a competitive advantage.

Look out for opportunities inside failures, obstacles, or difficulty. It helps to build a positive and growth mindset.

“A positive mindset will look at everything as an opportunity. With a positive approach to a crisis, leaders can make better decisions with confidence.”

This mindset also helps to develop an encouraging work environment for everyone in the company based on gratitude, instead of fear. A learned leader with a passionate team translates into an unstoppable business that has one success after the other.

Turning Failures into Opportunities

What are the best strategies to convert a failure into an opportunity? The prerequisite is to think differently. Don’t let your perception of events cloud your judgment with “it can’t be done” thinking.

Insist that obstacles are malleable, not concrete. Have faith in your ability to make something happen that seems to be impossible for others. This approach of thinking differently has given birth to giants like Microsoft and LinkedIn amidst economic crises.

Another popular technique to emerge from a failure as a winner is to anticipate the hurdles before they show up. This technique is popular with successful leaders at Fortune 500 companies.

The key is to rehearse in your mind and on paper what could go wrong, and to which extent, and devise a plan to deal with it. Using this technique, you can avoid crises and surpass competitors who didn’t plan as well as you.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that your job isn’t to avoid failure or obstacles, they are guaranteed to happen. Every successful entrepreneur will tell you that failures happen, challenges happen, it’s not how often you get knocked down, it’s how often and how fast you get back up.

There is a reason why many successful entrepreneurs were also very active in sports when younger. You have to “be an athlete in mindset” to succeed in business and in life.

“Learn to see failures as successfully proven methods of what doesn’t work, and through the process of elimination get to the method that does.”

To get the best out of obstacles, you need to see them as an opportunity to learn from them. If anything disastrous happens to you, own the failure.

Analyze each step of your plan of action, your team members’ role, and use of resources. Identify and pinpoint the cause of failure and restart the task on the basis of what you have learned from it.

Let your previous hurdles serve as a lighthouse to sail through the ocean of difficulties. Convert the problems and challenges you face, into learning how to get to your ultimate destination of success.

The meaning of learning has changed enormously over recent decades. In the modern world, with every source of knowledge available for everyone, learning can be categorized as acquiring knowledge or discovery and exploration.

Discovery and exploration being more valuable and practical in our life. No institution can teach you what you can learn from your own experience. Good experiences add less to your knowledge. On the other hand, failures that leave us devastated, are an excellent stepping stone to achieving greatness.

“Life’s hardest moments teach us to step out of our comfort zone and step into growth by learning and discovering our most inner selves.”

Importance of Failures

Morgan McCall, Professor Emeritus of Management and Organization at USC Marshall School of Business, made the “the 70:20:10 rule” famous. The 70:20:10 rule shifts our focus on the importance of trial and failure to get knowledge, wisdom, and develop success.

The rule suggests that 70% of learning takes place through “experience in a role”. Whereas coaching sessions and training programs contribute to the remaining 20% and 10%, respectively. The rule is widely accepted among executives and leaders, and is now a reckoned leadership development practice.

Young people try to learn from others’ experiences while starting their careers. Given that every person’s responsibilities vary, as we all grow, we realize that the case studies about the achievements of others are far less relevant to our own context.

“Your own experiences are unique and the richest source of learning in your life.”

Moreover, if you are only focused on earning from others’ experiences, you will only come across the things that everybody else knows. Only your own experiences, either gained by a failed or successful experiment, can lead you to the discovery of unique truths that no one knows yet.

New experiences, especially those that turned out to be failures, provide perfect learning opportunities. With every failed attempt the learner gets a chance to think about the scenarios, the actors, plan of action, and overall process that was the cause of failure.

A failed person knows the factor that halted their success. The number of failed attempts add to the number of barriers you continue to identify and remove from your way towards achieving success. As you remove all the barriers, you can then race without them towards your success.

“The fear of failure is actually the fear of learning to remove the barriers towards your success.”

While success is obviously sweeter than failure, failure is the greatest teacher you’ll ever encounter in your life. Vinit Desai, Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Colorado Denver Business School, shows that organizations that fail spectacularly often bounce back with greater potential for even greater success.

“The knowledge gained by success is far less impactful and fades away fast, but what failure teaches us sticks with us for years.”

How to Learn from Failures

Failures can add much to your value if you learn from them. There are hundreds of examples you can find of people who got successful from the ashes of their failures. There are certain behaviors that enables you to get knowledge and growth from your failed experiences.

First, you need to own your failure. You can never learn from them until you admit that you’ve made them. Don’t be a victim pointing fingers at the market, or people, or external circumstances. All those circumstances were things you didn’t properly plan for. You can do better next time around. Own the outcomes in your life.

“Blaming external forces for your failures is a sure way to avoid learning and growing, and that is the greatest of all failures in life.”

The initial shock of failing may cause some negativity around you. People will judge you. Your job is not to be defined by other people’s views and opinions. Your job is to reframe your failures as opportunities to learn.

It is important to have an expansive and growth-oriented mindset that is always ready to accept challenges, rather than having a fixed mindset that keeps you locked into your ego.

Once you have owned your failures, have absorbed the shock and admitted it as an opportunity to grow, sit back and think about what you could do better next time. You need to identify the knowledge, resources, plan, or tools that can keep you from repeating the errors which led to the failure.

You need to re-evaluate your planning and the execution. Failure can come from a bad plan or poor execution, or a good plan that wasn’t executed well. At times, large scale failures could have been easily prevented by detecting and solving minor mistakes at the root. Sit with yourself reflecting to identify the mistake, then plan to resolve it.

By evaluating all the factors, you will be able to rule out any plan of action, experience, a team member, or a resource that translated into failure. Learning from failures is very important, but putting the learnings into practice is more important.

Failures are the least desired thing on the earth; however, this is an erroneous way to see failures. Imagine if science was afraid to fail, we would never discover cures to disease. We would also never make any progress in containing pandemics. The success equation of science includes more failures than success.

Once you have identified a mistake, never allow the circumstances to repeat, rather see the value failures can add to your growth. No failure will ever be considered a setback when you see it as nothing more than a successfully proven wrong outcome.

Fail often and fail upwards till you remove every barrier to achieve your ultimate success in life.

We all face times in our lives when we feel overwhelmed or unable to cope due to unmanageable pressures. Our body’s response to shattering situations is what we call stress.

This is one of the rapidly growing concerns today. The Covid-19 pandemic is having a major stressful impact on the entire world. The speed in which it has changed our lives emotionally, financially, and physically, is monumental.

Stress is not something to take lightly, because it puts our wellbeing at risk. We must manage stress and work on ourselves to come out of this situation we are trapped in at this time.

There are a lot more people who are finding their way out of stress by indulging in alcohol, drugs, or other compulsive coping behaviors.

All these escapes seem relaxing at the moment we indulge in them, but cause havoc to our health. The gravity of their damage is even higher than the stress itself.

We all have to opt for some healthier ways to cope with stress.

Why Healthy Stress Management Is Necessary

Stress is potentially devastating to our emotional equilibrium, as well as our physical health. It wreaks havoc on our ability to think clearly, decide wisely, function effectively, and live happily.

When you are under stress, it can feel like your life will be uncontrollable forever. However, you always have more control over situations you encounter, even when you think you don’t.

All you need to do is apply healthy stress management principles that are more effective and sustainable. Effective stress management is the key to taking control of your life. If you succeed to do it properly you can be happier, healthier, and more productive.

Stress can cause you to believe that things are never going to get better. Your personal or professional responsibilities can feel like they will never be met productively and in a balanced way. It often feels like you just don’t have enough hours in the day.

This erroneous belief can cause you to think you are good for nothing. You can even find yourself stopping any efforts into making things better. In this time of stress when everything looks unmanageable, the only thing to manage is stress.

If you manage it properly, your hours in a day actually increase. Instead of the time and energy you were wasting discouraging yourself and worrying about things, you can convert them into being productive.

How to Manage Stress in a Healthier Way

Stress management starts by identifying the reasons for stress in our lives. It seems simple to pinpoint the source of stress, but actually, it is not.

We are inclined to overlook the role of our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that contribute to our stress levels.

For instance, you may constantly worry about work deadlines. However, it could be your tendency to procrastinate and wait for the last minute to do things, that is actually causing the stress. Hence, diagnosing the real source of your stress is essential to cure it.

“Until you take responsibility for the role you are playing in creating the stress you are experiencing, your stress level will remain out of your control.”

A stress journal can help to identify the stressors in your life.

Stress mostly arises from overwhelming work amid short deadlines. Often those deadlines become shorter due to personal procrastination.

The best way to avoid stress is to manage time. One of the ways to effectively manage time is to never over-commit yourself.

Prioritize your tasks and commit to completing things in a more linear way. Multi-tasking is counterproductive — it’s not the way to manage tasks in such a way that you start and finish something.

When it comes to tasks, if something is causing pressure, break them into smaller steps, and fix a time on your calendar for each step you will need to complete the task.

Delegating responsibilities is another time-management tool. You never have to do all the tasks yourself. If others can take care of a task, let them.

“Stress is mostly predictable; it comes down to effectively managing our time which really means to be managing our stress.”

Stress is mostly predictable. For example, you can be sure that the meeting with your boss, a family gathering or just commuting to work causes stress for you. Handling these predictable stressors is easy.

You can either avoid, alter, adapt or accept.

You can avoid stressful situations. You can alter the scenario by adding something more favorable into the mix. You can adapt by changing the way you behave in those situations. You can accept things as they are if you can’t change them.

Another effective and healthier way to manage stress is to embrace relaxation techniques. Commit to exercise, meditation, yoga, or tai-chi.

These techniques have been used for centuries to add calmness to life. In addition to that, set aside a personal leisure hour on a daily basis and do something you enjoy the most.

“Busy schedules have excluded our hobbies from our routine, robbing us of joy and adding avoidable stress to our life. It’s time to make time for fun in our lives.”

Finally, learn to relieve and release the stress at that very moment it grabs you. If you are frazzled by a meeting at work, or fired up from an argument with your spouse, you need to release this stress right now.

The fastest way to respond to stress, is to take a few deep breaths and use your senses to embrace something soothing. Stress may fade off by having a look at your favorite photo, smelling a specific scent, or listening to music you love. Furthermore, having your favorite snack, hugging your pet, or walking in nature and admiring its’ beauty, can all alter a stressful state to become a peaceful one.

Do activities that spark appreciation for your life on a regular basis because this will awaken more gratitude in your life.

“Gratitude is the ultimate anti-stress, and you develop gratitude by being present and appreciating the simple and uncomplicated things in your life.”

Stress is inevitable, so is the effort to manage it. There are positive and negative ways to get rid of overwhelming moments, but the best practice is to pick the ones that not only release your stress, but also help your life by adding positivity to it.