CVC Succcess Group coaches Jerry & Sheryl Isenhour
Join us this week on The Chimney & Fireplace Success Network podcast as Jerry and Sheryl
share with you ways to deal with the overwhelming feelings of failure we all have from time to
time. We will be telling you about proven methods you can use to conquer the negative
thoughts in your head and help you navigate through the daily stresses of the life of a business
owner. This will be a discussion you won’t want to miss.
The Chimney and Fireplace Success Network. A weekly podcast brought to you by the CVC
Success Group and hosted by industry expert, Jerry Isenhour. Each week you will find new
presentations to assist business owners and managers in turning their business dreams into
their business realities.
Transcript
HOW DO YOU HANDLE CHAOS & FRUSTRATION?
Jerry Isenhour: Today, I am going to address a subject matter that, to be honest with you, I feel like I am an expert in it, a true expert. Because you see today, we’re going to talk about failure. Sheryl’s going to also planning to address this in her portion of the podcast, and I think she is going to be talking about stress from what she shared with me.
But again, I don’t know what her words will be. But what I’m going to deal with is the steps of failure. And furthermore, I want to share with you why failure might just be the gold nugget that leads you to success. Let’s get on the path to move from failure to a level success; stay with me, I will be right back with you for the rest of the story.
LET’S DEFINE WHAT FAILURE IS
Okay, let us get started. The first thing I want to do is let’s define what failure actually is. And to get that definition, I went to Webster’s dictionary. And the simple explanation of this is lack of success. But you know, as I went through planning and thinking about how to put together this podcast, I thought to myself you need some other words that will define failure. So here are a couple words that could be used in place of failure. Maybe we talk about collapse; maybe we’d say defeat. Here’s another good one, what about setback? Another one is botch.
Misadventure, misfire, misfiring, mishap, non-success. And here’s one that I don’t think anybody ever uses, which is unsuccessfulness. You see, as I started thinking about failure, I came to the following conclusion. Failure could be failure of an idea; it could be failure of a path to your own. It could be a failure of a direction you’re headed in. And it could be any number of things that we start out on, and we fail to reach our destination because see the paths that we take in life are journeys.
DEFINE A PERSON WHO FAILED
Value could also be used to define a person who failed and how we define a person who did fail. We could take looks at this for people that ran for public office and not get elected as failures. But we can also look at someone who failed to get elected, but who then ran again and did get elected. And maybe they presented their self as a success, or maybe their legacy is that they were a failure.
You see, as we look at this, there are a lot of these over the course of the history of our country and as a world. And you know as we look at the failures of our world, I want to assure you something. Being called a failure actually puts you in the company of great people in this world; we’re going to take a look at a few of these. I can remember my own attorney sharing with me one time when I was going through tremendous challenges from failure.
JERRY YOU ARE IN REALLY GOOD COMPANY
And he said the words to me, Jerry; you are in really good company. And I did not understand it at the time, but as I did some research on this and studied this deeply, he was right. The company of failures, the community of failures in this world, are pretty remarkable people when you look at it. And I want to share a few with you. Let us start off with one of the persons that has been identified as the greatest thinker of our time.
ALBERT EINSTEIN IS A NOTED FAILURE
He actually did not speak until he was four years old. He failed his entrance exam to the Swiss federal polytechnic school located in Zurich at 16 years old. And even his father, until his father died, considered his son to be a major failure. After eventually graduating from college, he worked as an insurance salesman. But the problem was he quit that because he failed as well. What was his name? Albert Einstein.
DID BEYONCE FAIL?
Let’s look at someone else, Beyoncé Knowles. She’s got a net worth of nearly 500 million dollars. Beyoncé is considered one of the most successful recording artists in history. She sold over 17 million albums as a solo artist and another 17 million albums when she was a member of Destiny’s Child. When she was nine years old, she had a group by the name of Girls’ Time. They appeared on Star Search, and they lost. In 1996 after signing the Columbia Records, the group had a lot of internal drama forcing the departure of two people, that’s the story of Beyoncé.
WHAT ABOUT THE FAILURES OF BILL GATES
And here is another guy, this guy’s worth 80 billion dollars. He’s known today as the famous father of personal computing software. He has brought us operating systems such as Microsoft dos and words. And he’s got other things such as Microsoft offices, word, excel, and PowerPoint. However, his first software company failed traf-o-data. It failed.
And that was Bill Gates, a tremendous failure. How about this guy? He was a great comedic mind of all time. He was raised and grew up in sheer poverty in the United Kingdom. His father abandoned him and his mother when he was two years old. He actually lived in a workhouse at the age of seven years old. When he was nine years old, his mother was committed to an insane asylum.
WHAT ABOUT CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Throughout his lifetime as an adult, he failed so many times. But he still considered one of the most famous comics ever, that’s Charlie Chaplin. And here’s a guy that I love his story; I actually stopped that where he was based in the state of Kentucky. And his name is Colonel Harlan Sanders, through his entire life; he failed at just about everything that he could until, at the age of 65 years old, he set out in this car. He had a hundred and five dollars a month social security check, and he set out. And he was rejected by 1,009 restaurants before one accepted his offer.
SEUSS AND FRED ASTAIRE, THEIR STORIES HAVE FAILURES
And we can continue to go through these various failures such as here’s another one, Dr. Seuss and another one is Fred Astaire, And another one of my favorites, a vastly quoted person from the world of business. He is the father of the automobile, and he is quite possibly one of the most famous industrialists to ever live in our country. His name is Henry Ford.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN HENRY FORD WAS A FAILURE
He helped bring transportation to the masses in America and throughout the world. But the whole problem is his first car company went bankrupt. His second company also went bankrupt after a dispute with his partners. He was forced to walk away, and the only thing he had left was his name, the rights to his name.
HOW DOES STARBUCKS HAVE FAILURE
Another guy, Howard Schultz, Howard Schultz he was an employee of Starbucks, and he envisioned bringing coffee shops to the masses. Schultz bought out the name of Starbucks, but even that 217 of the 240 investors that he approached, they turned him down.
INVESTORS TURNED HIM DOWN, THEY REGRET IT TODAY
Another guy Jim Carrey, he worked as a janitor. He was booed off the stage at one time. An author J. K. Rowling, she didn’t grow up poor, but as an adult, she struggled. A single mother living on welfare, it took her seven years to write the story Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone. And when she finished it, 12 major publishing houses rejected the book. And then we go to the story of Katy Perry, another one Keanu Reeves, tremendous hardships.
OPRAH WAS A MEMBER OF THE FAILURE GROUP
And the person that we see on television, one of the most successful individuals of her time. She grew up in sheer poverty. Her mother was a single mother living on welfare. Her upbringing was wrought with pain and anguish. She was physically, mentally, and sexually abused in her childhood, so she finally ran away at 13 years old. She got pregnant at 14 years old, lost the baby shortly after birth. She was fired from her first job; she was judged as being unfit for television. And that is the story of Oprah’s failures
WHAT ABOUT STEPHEN KING
And we keep going through here, Stephen King, we have all heard of Stephen King. Probably one of the best-known horror authors of all time. His work’s been lauded, it’s been celebrated, and he sold over 350 million copies of his books. Not to mention the royalties he’s received from movies and television series based on his books. He threw his first book away, threw it in the trash. It was rejected by 30 publishers before it was finally accepted by Doubleday, the name of the book Carrie.
SYLVESTER STALLONE, IT WAS SO BAD HE SOLD HIS DOG
Or how about this guy? He had a young adult life; it was tough. At one time, he was homeless for a period of three weeks, living in a bus station. He was so broke while he wrote the script for a movie, his electricity was turned off. And he sold his dog, his best friend, for $25 just to get his lights back home. He was rejected by 1500 talent scouts; what was the name of that movie? Rocky. What was his name? Sylvester Stallone, okay.
YES, THE BEATLES FAILED BEFORE THEY HIT TOP OF THE CHARTS
And it keeps going; if you look at the Beatles, the background, they were judged to be on their way out before they finally got that big break. And probably viewed as one of the most influential musician groups of all time. I can still remember when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show on a Sunday night.
We also have a famous inventor in history; this gentleman holds 1093 patents in his name. He tried to invent something that we use every day, and he failed over 10,000 times. A reporter asked him how it felt to fail so many times, and he made the following statement. I have not failed 10,000 times; I have not failed once.
HOW DID EDISON FAIL
I have succeeded in proving that 10,000 ways will not work; when I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work. That product was the electric light bulb. That gentleman’s name was Thomas Edison.
And here’s another famous one, this gentleman he’s recognized today as one of the most creative geniuses of the 20th century. He created things that are known throughout the world.
WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH MICKEY MOUSE
This guy created Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Snow White. He created his own company after his own name, the Walt Disney Company. And you know, it took him years of heartache after he created Mickey Mouse before it ever took off. So this is what I want you to realize, and the stories go back more and more as you look at the failures in life. If you read the stories of Abraham Lincoln, Milton Hershey, so many others, you’re going to find that their lifetime is filled with failure.
And see, here’s what you got to realize, failure is often the catalyst to tremendous success. You’ve also got to remember as much as we would like, there is no overnight success. Being an overnight success is going to involve years of work to become that overnight success. One of my mentors, a gentleman I am certified under Dr. John Maxwell, advises that when we fail, that we always failed forward.
THERE COMES A TIME YOU HAVE TO JUMP
You know one of the most influential videos I ever saw was the comedian Steve Harvey, who also hosts game shows. And he came out before his studio audience and made a talk. And I’ve used this video in seminars before. Because what Steve Harvey said is, he came out and talked about a fear of failure. And he talked about there comes a time you got to jump. But he also told you there’s going to be times you’re going to get battered, you’re going to get bruised, but you got to jump.
As I put this together about failure, I told you I’m an expert at failure because as I did my prep and put my notes together for this particular podcast, it took me back to a time. It took me back to a time that allows practically everything, material things. I lost it all. The only thing I did not lose was my family; I did not lose those.
THROUGHOUT FAILURE I NEVER LOST MY WIFE
And I did not lose my wife during my time of failure, she was behind me when I was at the lowest point of my life. But I had lost it all in regards business and purpose. But today you know there is a guy that holds a special place in my heart because he asked me to have breakfast with him in Hartford, Connecticut.
JERRY THESE GUYS NEED YOU
And he shared something there with me that inspired me and excited me and still drives me to this day. Because he said the following words to me, he said Jerry; these guys need you, you need to be a coach. And from those words spoken to me in Hartford, Connecticut, and at the lowest point of my life that I’ve ever been, those words gave me a process. It gave me a purpose; it gave me a goal to go after.
And even though there are times today, yes to this day, that people will hold my life failures up to discredit me. Personally, I consider my personal failures the greatest gift I have ever been given, to drive me to what I wake up and do every single day of my life. And that is to help others reach their dreams in business and in life. So here’s the message for you today, if you’re failing, learn from it. Learn how to move past it; learn how to profit from it. But I also want you to remember this because in life, you are going to see others fail.
THIS MIGHT BE YOUR OPPORTUNITY TO INSTILL A GOLD NUGGET OF OPTIMISM
And this might just be your opportunity to instill a gold nugget of optimism in them. You can become that gold nugget in another person’s life. They’re going through the agony of defeat, and from this, you can help turn their life into the thrill of victory; think about it.
What better feeling could it be for you to help another get through the failures that they are going through in life. And with that, I’m going to turn the mic over to Sheryl; she’s going to be right with you, just hang on with us. And she’s going to share her tidbits of wisdom with you today. And I can assure you; it’ll be a time of value for you.
Sheryl Isenhour: I want to say thanks to Jerry for letting me have my moments. I am Sheryl Isenhour, and my opinions as I state them are solely mine. To tie this into Jerry’s a little bit, failures many times cause stress. How do you deal with it? We’re going to talk about that for a while. But with that all being said, I hear so many times a day; I’m so stressed.
And I hear it from every age and every point of every point of people. Let’s face it; these are stressful times. But how much of it can you do anything about, and how much of it can you control, or how much of it are you causing? My thoughts are to focus on what you can control and leave what you can’t alone. Let’s face it, as leaders, many times; we think we can control everything.
YOU CAN CAUSE MORE HARM THAN GOOD
Well, you cannot control everything, and you can cause more harm than good just by trying. We cause a lot of stress, and also the stress of others by assuming that we choose to do for a person or an organization is what they need. Only to find out it’s not only what they don’t need, they didn’t want it. And also that it was a bad decision in the first place. Now the stress begins for you when you do this, and for others that you impose it on.
DO YOU HOLD FAST TO BAD DECISIONS TO SAVE FACE
Do you revoke your decision and, as they say, lose face? Or do you do what’s right for the group and for the best of all, including yourself? Or do you hold fast to the decision and lose the respect of those you hurt? What happens is in your control. Leaders sometimes think they have all the answers, but we don’t. I’m seeing people leaders and employees that aren’t looking well these days, and I think stress is one of the huge culprits.
Just so we all know what stress is, stress is defined in the dictionary as a feeling of emotional or physical tension. It can come from any event or thought or action that makes you feel frustrated, angry, or nervous. Stress is your body’s reaction to a challenge or demand. In short burst, stress can be positive such as when it helps us to avoid danger, the flea, or fight move.
STRESS CAN CAUSE AND ACCELERATE SERIOUS HEALTH PROBLEMS
Ongoing chronic stress, however, can cause or at the least accelerate many serious health problems, including your mental health, such as depression, anxiety, and personal disorders. Cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease, high blood pressure, abnormal heart rhythms, heart attacks, and strokes, are caused from stress. These are the physical problems, but we need to keep in mind of the emotional symptoms of stress as well.
Depression, or just generally being unhappy. Anxiety, agitation, moodiness, irritability, anger, how many people have you seen in the last little while that are angry? And they’re letting it get the best of them; it’s just the stress. The other statement of people feeling overwhelmed, everyone’s overwhelmed these days. Then they are the others that are lonely, and they are isolated, and they are stressed.
STRESS SLOWS DOWN MANY OF OUR NORMAL FUNCTIONS
Stress slows down some normal bodily functions, these functions that are digested in your immune system, when they’re not performing those, they have to pull off of those so your body can concentrate on the resources of breathing, blood flow, alertness, and the preparations of the muscles for sudden use.
This is what is picked up when we’re stressed. So now our digestion and our immune systems are lower, illnesses follow. The body changes during a stressful reaction. Your blood pressure and your pulse rise, your breathing speeds up. Your digestive system slows down. Immune activities decrease, muscles become more tense. Sleeplessness decreases due to the heightened state of the alertness.
GOOD FOR A PRODUCTIVE DAY AT WORK
None of these are good for a productive day at work for you or for your employees. I’ve been working with several managers of different companies right at this time, and the reasons that they are telling me they’re becoming stressed are, and it’s a shortlist, and there’s more. The leaders have not made the expectations of the performance clear; there is a lack of personal and professional support.
ARE YOU GIVING SUPPORT TO THOSE YOU LEAD
Are you giving support to your employees? Are you giving it to your managers? Their work isn’t challenging or engaging enough; they have too much time on their hands. They think that there are too few opportunities to advance any further development; they think where they are at, they are not going any further. That’s why we’re seeing so many people quit jobs. They’re looking for other jobs that they can progress farther in.
Other times, the workloads just too much. If you put too much on one person, not to put enough on another. And the big one their salaries too low, or it is not equal to the work that they are doing. So as leaders responsible, we are responsible for our managers, but then they are in turn responsible for our employees, which we’re responsible for. But we have handed them the sword to take it and lead the employees.
CREATE THE SOLUTIONS
We need to create the solutions and the situations where stress is minimal in the work location. But first, you must learn to control your own stress. The ones I’m seeing more stressed than the workers are the leaders. Now you can control your situations as they come up, don’t wait till they turn into a huge problem when it’s a fight when you have sleepless nights.
Many people procrastinate; they don’t face their problems as they come. The stress grows, they can’t face the problem, and then before you know it, they’re ill. Another biggie is just talk with your employees often, both alone and as a group. Communication is 95% of our problems in the workforce. You must learn how to speak their language, and no, I am not referring to their nationality; I am referring to how they want to be spoken to.
MOST PEOPLE PROCRASTINATE
Different personalities like to be spoken to in different ways, and you would fare much better by learning these. It is no use to cause stress just by the way you’re talking to people. It’s very easy to learn, and it’s very easy to manage. On the personal side, the last couple of weeks, I’ve watched people in control make some really bad decisions. Decisions that many will not quickly forget because of the stress they have caused them, financially and emotionally.
WHAT DO YOU WANT YOUR LEGACY TO BE
My question to them is, do you want your legacy to these people to be this kind of a situation? Think through what you do. So is not to cause stress to others or yourself, don’t be the maker of the stress. Remember to always be able to say I’m glad I did, instead of I wish I had. And as I’ve said many times before, karma’s a bitch, and stress is one of the things karma dishes out. With that note, I turn it back over to Jerry to wrap up this session, have a good day.
Jerry Isenhour.: I hope Sheryl and I have shared some ideas for you to consider for implementation today in your life. Hopefully, we’ve shared some ideas to get past those overwhelming feelings of failure when it occurs. And how to get past the stress that life throws at us each day, it seems. You know, as you go through this, one of the terms that I’ve heard is reinvention because what you may need to do when you fail. You may need to modify; you may need to change your course; you may need to change your direction.
REINVENT YOURSELF
You may need to even reinvent yourself because that is what life’s all about. When you look at it, it’s a constant reinvention. As we go through life, we’re reinvented at different points in our life. As we graduate high school, we’re reinvented into an adult, and we take forward all the failures of our childhood. And hopefully, we’ve learned from these. Could be from the discipline of our parents; it could be from the things we have learned in school.
WE BEGIN THROUGH ADULTHOOD
And then, as we begin through adulthood, many of us we decide there is someone who we want to live our lives with, the person who will become our spouse. And from there, the day may come that you become a parent, and as any parent knows, the only way you learn to be a parent is you go through it. And then as you watch your children grow and watch them become adults, there comes another day.
WHAT LIFE IS ALL ABOUT
And that day is when you start to see your own children come into this world. And it can go on from there, but see, that’s what life is all about. When we look at life, life is a series of failures; we all have them, nobody is impervious to them. In fact, if we look at life, we are probably going to fail more than we will ever succeed.
THAT MAGIC HOPE KEEPS US GOING
But what keeps us going is that magic hope, that hope that the next course of action that we take will be the one that’s going to take us to that dream destination, what we all hope to get to one day. So with that, my name is Jerry Isenhour, our company is CVC success group. And myself and my team, we are here to help people just like you.
We want to help you move past the failures of life, help you navigate through the stress that so often overwhelmed you. And we want to help you construct your GPS, your road map to those dreams. And let’s make those dreams into your realities. Appreciate you joining us today for another episode of the chimney and fireplace success network. See you next time; appreciate you being here; it means more than you’ll ever know.