Just Keep Swimming

I have received several private emails about my post yesterday and I am very touched by the kind and supportive words. I’m so moved so many of you care enough to bother sending supportive thoughts like that. There are a lot of good people out there; in case you ever think the world is full of nasty people, remember that.

Some people wondered why I would share so much intimate stuff like that. I mean, it is showing that I’m not bulletproof and I don’t always succeed in everything I touch. Who in her right mind would put that out to the world?! Well, going beyond any of the psychoanalytical possibilities (ha!), I really thought that others could learn an important lesson from my travails.

I did it because, as a consultant (and yes, now a lawyer), I’m supposed to know the answers. People come to me for advice and when they implement that advice, they expect positive results. And they should (and usually get them). But sometimes, no matter how right you do your work, no matter how much effort you put out there, there is some factor outside of your control that can put the kybosh on it all.

And when that happens, when something fails for whatever reason, you have to learn to separate your disappointment from how you feel about yourself. The project may have failed, but you are not a failure.

That last line is really important and what drove me to write the post, because frankly I forgot that for a bit. I was so overwhelmed by the spectacular failure of this LA adventure that I internalized it and beat the hell out of myself for a bit. Crazy, really, but as I got my head out of my ass about that I decided that if I can help any of you from going there when you have something fail in your life, I’d be a happy girl.

So, I wrote because I want people to know that none of us have all the answers and none of us can control everything. This is true in life and in business. There is so much outside of our control that we can only do what we can do and, in the magnificent words of Dory the fish, just keep swimming.

I got through law school and the Bar with those three words. Every time I hit a bump, I’d tell myself: just keep swimming (in exactly the sing-song way Ellen DeGeneres said it). It was a great simple mantra to help me remember that whatever happened happened, and to go on.

I knew a photographer who, years ago, was in a sourcebook and it didn’t immediately and obviously help his business. He never did it again. I’ve known others who refuse to send mailers because they didn’t get the results they expected. Others do the same with calls or emails or refuse to take a crappy image out of their portfolios because one person one time said s/he liked it, even though it pulled the book down as a whole.  These photographers stopped swimming.

If you are in business you must be able to roll with the failures. You must keep swimming. You need to be able to look at what you did right and repeat it; to look at where you could have improved, and work on that; and, see where you had no control on the outcome and let go of that.

You must take risks, try new things, push yourself out of your comfort zone, and be able to know that if something doesn’t work, it failed, but you are not a failure. Fix what is fixable, be objective in your analysis of what that is, but most of all, just keep swimming.