I now know that as an entrepreneur I will lose more battles than I will win and that I will fail many times before I succeed.
When you lose a project, a business or a valuable employee you grieve as you would when you lose a friend, a loved one or a beloved animal. An understanding of the process of grieving helps to resolve these feelings so you can get up, dust off and start over.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross first proposed the five stages of normal loss in her 1969 book "On Death and Dying". She describes these stages of denial, anger, negotiation, depression and acceptance.
These are not necessarily experienced in this order and often you bounce from one to the other if you haven't fully resolved one stage.
Denial: the disbelief, the shock and horror that it can't possibly be happening.
Anger: transferring the emotions to someone else - it's their fault. The client, the partner, the supplier...
Negotiation: maybe if we do something this will change the outcome - give them a bit more, increase a salary, reduce the price, throw in a freebee
Depression: that empty sad feeling of it being over. Of no hope, no future.
Acceptance: coming to terms with the loss and moving on (usually to better things). This is the stage that I look forward to each time...
So, it's not life an death and when you lose something, you gain something else.
As Richard Branson said, 'business opportunities are like buses, there's always another one around the corner'.
It just may be slower and more rickety and have a lot more stops - but you can still get a ride so hop on!
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