Failure as fuel

What if your worst business moments could be alchemised into your greatest competitive advantage?

My biggest and most successful clients have one thing in common: they’ve normalised failure and learned how to use setbacks as rocket fuel to power their next audacious move.

In this episode, I share my catalogue of business failures, a cancelled California retreat, a mid-air hijacking on the way to a teaching gig in Kuala Lumpur, $30,000 in face-to-face bookings wiped out in a single week in March 2020, and a life-altering misadventure overseas at age 21.

You’ll hear:

• Why I love when prospective clients share stories of struggle on sales calls and why this hints at their being a coachable client
• The crucial difference between business owners who use failure as fuel and those who let everyday setbacks spiral into identity crises
• The danger of circumstances that are too comfortable (and how comfort kills motivation)
• Why reliving your wins somatically is more important than intellectually acknowledging them
• Dolly Parton’s immortal words on keeping yourself in the game.

Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camargo people here in Sydney, Australia. In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.

Like some kind of freak, I like hearing stories of failure on sales calls with prospective new clients. It thrills me to hear people say things like, “I really need this to work.” I like hearing stories about debt and debt management and what business owners are doing to make lemons into lemonade. Because make no mistake, one thing that my biggest, most successful clients have in common is that they’ve acclimatised themselves to failure. They are used to managing debt. Some are on payment plans with the Australian Taxation Office, which is very normal. They have normalised losing their biggest clients. They are used to losing employees, including employees that they love and wanted to have sticking around forever. They are adept at having stressful family situations unfolding whilst also juggling the 24/7 mini-emergencies that make up a day as a business owner.

In other words, they’ve used failure to build their capacity, and they’ve reduced things that could be seen by other business owners as failures into mere hiccups that don’t take much of an effect on their day-to-day emotions. They don’t let setbacks turn into catastrophes. They’re using failure as fuel to fire their drive, their desires, and their ambitions.

In contrast, I once had a client cry to me about having to stop using a particular software because, in her eyes, she had equated having that particular software as success, and needing to give up the subscription because of her financial constraints signalled failure to her. I once had a client who was devastated by running a free webinar that only had a handful of participants, most of whom were her friends that she’d invited to show up. And when I say devastated, I mean she turned this very, very normal, everyday hiccup into a failure and used it to justify completely changing direction in her business and retreating from her visibility strategies.

Turning molehills into mountains, catastrophising regularly, indulging regularly in pessimistic doom and gloom—these are all self-defeating behaviours, make no mistake, and they end nowhere good. But to see failures as fuel, this is resourcefulness, and resourcefulness counts way more than resources. Resources can be easily squandered, but resourcefulness thrives no matter the environment.

A quick trip through some of my business failures. And we’ve only got a short time together, so I can’t list them all, but goodness knows there’s been a few. A quick one is a business retreat that I had planned in California in 2024 with a business buddy. I had to cancel because we didn’t have any sales.

There was also the plane that I was on to Kuala Lumpur where I’d been booked to teach some marketing courses at a business college. And there was an attempted hijacking of the plane. This happened in August 2023. The pilot needed to do a U-turn over Orange in New South Wales. We came back to Sydney. We sat for three hours on the tarmac. Everybody around me became increasingly excited and excitable. Except for me. I was busy booking a one-way ticket on the last plane leaving Sydney. And I was the only person on that plane who managed to hustle her way out of another three hours after the federal police stormed the plane and, you know, acted completely over the top. We had another three hours in the terminal, and I was the only person in that terminal on that aeroplane that managed to hustle themselves out and onto the last plane out of Sydney so that I could be teaching the following morning at 9am in Kuala Lumpur.

March 2020—you remember that date. I lost about $30,000 in booked face-to-face training work. And I used that to get myself back out there and pitch. 2020, 2021 turned out to be extremely busy times for my business. And of course, everything turned online because I was a digital marketing trainer and a business coach specialising in online businesses. I was booked out and sought after.

2000—all the way back to 2000—brief mention for the biggest misadventure and failure of my life, that, you know, the kind of misadventure overseas that results in the Australian Consul calling your family to come and pick you up. This was 26 years ago. The following year was devastating—the worst year of my life, 2001. But at the end of 2001, I was back overseas, and exactly, almost exactly a year to the day, I was in a brand new job in Vietnam as a tour leader for two years, which was one of the best, most exciting jobs of my life and, by far and away, the biggest, steepest learning curve.

So learning how to use failures as fuel and also to not turn tiny setbacks, tiny molehills into big, giant big deals—to resist the temptation to turn dashed expectations into some kind of character flaw and to go down into a negative spiral. These are just some of the most important skills that we need to develop as business owners because our resourcefulness and our energetic capacity are absolutely critical to our sustainability as business owners.

Having something to push against is really, really useful. It’s also really great for storytelling because any good story, right, needs a villain, and a villain is not necessarily an individual. Ideally, when you’re a storyteller, when you’re telling stories, you’re not, you know, naming a villain as an individual. Oftentimes it’s something like a system or it’s a status quo that’s the villain.

But refusing to take the role of victim and not do performative vulnerability—because, you know, I tell you what, I don’t want to call in those types of clients. I don’t want to get on the internet and start showcasing every setback, every failure, every dashed expectation into performative vulnerability, even though I know that the algorithms will push it out further. I have no desire to do that. Firstly, because it’s completely out of integrity with my values. But secondly, and for a very practical reason, I don’t want to be attracting clients who think that that’s awesome.

What am I talking about instead? I’m talking about having something to push against gives you real motivation to change your circumstances. When things are utterly and thoroughly shit, you have real motivation to change. This is why I love hearing these stories on sales calls because I know that it will give some indication that the person is coachable. Because make no mistake, not everybody is coachable, and real change is hard.

If your circumstances are too comfortable, if you are happy turning setbacks and problems and issues and failures into character flaws and dwelling there, if you don’t want to change because your circumstances—even though you tell yourself, “Yes, yes, yes, I do want change, I do want change”—but your circumstances are a little bit too comfortable, then it’s really, really hard. Coaching becomes really, really hard and sometimes almost impossible. It’s almost impossible if someone says they want to change, but they aren’t prepared to experience the discombobulation, the existentialism, the lack of certainty and the inherent risk involved in change.

So one of the tools in my toolbox that I have been using on myself and sharing with clients for a good ten years or longer is what I call the banking confidence meditation. And the banking confidence meditation is a practical process of taking note of all the wonderful, fabulous things that happen to us each and every day. And one of the things that we can bank, one of the stories that we can bank and reflect on and relive and draw interest from, is experiences we’ve had where we have directly challenged our self-limiting beliefs.

We had a certain belief about who we were, and then a story happened, an event happened. And it’s not just like I sat and pondered a light bulb moment. That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about an actual action, an event that happens, which challenged the way that you saw yourself and split open what you believed was possible in relation to who you were, who you are. You had a certain way of viewing the world. You were wearing certain glasses, certain lenses through which you saw things and saw yourself. And then those glasses shattered and you saw yourself entirely differently because you had evidence of this. You had real life evidence.

Dwelling on this, revisiting this, reliving this—not just intellectually, but somatically—is what my banking confidence meditation is all about.

I want to leave you with these immortal words from the legend, the icon Dolly Parton. She says, “Well, honey, nobody knows what’s around the corner. But I know one thing: if you keep yourself out of the game for fear of losing, there is no way on earth you’re going to win.”

Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or is having you change the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favour and write me a short review? Your podcast review means so much to me, and it helps other values-based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.