Hello, I'm Tina tower, and you're listening to Her Empire Builder.

For my first decade of business, I thought grinding and hustling and working harder than everyone else was my path to success. It was pretty successful by a lot of measures, but it led to burnout and adrenal fatigue. Then, when I travelled around the world on my family gap year, I discovered the simplicity and the reach of online business, and I completely fell in love.

You have so much knowledge and expertise that's within, and I want to help you to package that, so you can also help to lift others up. So, how do you build a thriving, million-dollar business based on everything that's in your mind? This is Her Empire Builder, the podcast.

Hello, and welcome to Episode 48 of Her Empire Builder. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I know you’ve probably got this massive day and you're either out and about or you're on the way to something, and I thank you for choosing Her Empire Builder to listen to, and to fill your next 20 or so minutes. I don't know how long I'm going to talk for today which will hopefully, my, my aim is to give you that massive value that can help bring more joy into your life. So that is my whole point.

Now before I get into today, quick message I want to say is, thank you to the people that have been jumping on to iTunes, or Apple Podcast is it's called now, and giving it a bit of a review. I really, really appreciate it and so, and if you've got two minutes, you’re sitting on the train listening to this, or you've got your hands available, if you can jump on and give us a review, gosh, I'd be so thankful because it really is how they tend to grow and reach more people.

Alright, let me get into the value for you. So today, I wanted to talk about disappointment and dealing with disappointment and bouncing back from disappointment, because, it's something that is completely inevitable really. If you’re never getting disappointed or you're never experiencing failure, then you're really not trying hard, really, is the simple way of putting it.

Whenever we, whenever we stretch, we’re evidently going to, you know, sometimes win and sometimes lose, and that's okay, but even though we know that's okay, and even though we know it's inevitable, still, when it happens, it hurts. It's discouraging. It can be disheartening, and we have to have a process to really take stock of that, regroup, and then be able to go on for the next adventure.

So, as you know, for people that listen to the podcast quite regularly, the ones that I do as my solo episodes, I really like to touch on something that's affected me in a recent time, because they're the ones that are easiest to talk about and to share lessons as I'm going through that.

So, if anybody jumps on Cocktails and Coaching, so, on the podcast, we put each Friday the Cocktails and Coaching episode from the Friday before that. So, our normal episodes come out on a Wednesday, so if you're listening to this on podcast in chronological order, what I'm talking about will actually come out two days after this episode, but if you were actually live on Cocktails and Coaching last Friday, it was a little bit unorthodox.

So, I had started that with talking about, I can't even remember what I was talking about now. I really should have checked that before I started speaking. Oh, pricing. That's right. Thank you brain. Pricing your services was what I was talking about, and how to determine pricing structures and that sort of thing, but when I went on the call, I was, so it starts at 4:00pm, Cocktails and Coaching every Friday on Facebook Live, and at 5:00pm, the cooling off finished on the house we were trying to buy. So, I was pretty beside myself with that. I had the whole sweaty palms. I was really nervous, and, you know, just when you want something to happen so bad and just waiting for that.

So, that was my headspace at the time, and so I told everybody that, that was my head space because otherwise people would have been thinking, “She seems a little off today. What's going on?”, and then, like five minutes into the call, the mortgage broker rang to say there was still no update, and you know, we had 45 minutes until cooling off finished and she was still trying, so I answered the call halfway through that which was, you know, awkward as fuck really, but I did that because I didn't want to stop Cocktails and Coaching and I didn’t want to miss the call. Anyway.

So for us, we got back from an around the world trip six months ago, and have been trying to buy a house ever since, and so the situation we’re in is, you know, not great for lending, and I should have, we sold our house before we left, and what we should have done, in hindsight, is either waited and sold our house when we came back so we could do a security swap with mortgages, or sell our house and buy an investment property with it straight away that we could then live when we came back. Anyway, you live and learn.

So now, we're in the situation where I had to, I closed my previous company because that was part of our, our earn out deal when I sold my company, was to close the entity down, and then we had to start a new entity for the new business, and so that's under two years old which disqualifies us for a lot of loans. I have more than three investment properties which also disqualifies us for a lot of loans. We had no home address because we were travelling the world so that, you know, disqualifies us for a lot of loans. If they look back into expenditure for the last 12 months it involves all of the world travel for which I spent about triple, more than triple, what our normal cost of living is. So, all of these things kind of compacted together that made us not qualify for all types of finance and I wanted to stretch, I wanted to get the absolute dream house that had a lot of zeros on the end and it didn't come through. So, in the end we, we just missed out and everything else went for so much higher, that we then had to kind of reconfigure and get a plan B and work that out, which I'll touch on again, a little bit later in this episode.

So, it got to 10 to five and we were still thinking it was going to come through. So, we were still saying, you know, we had the verbal yes, we were just waiting for the sign off, but it didn't make it in time. So, when five o'clock hit, so we knew our cooling off had actually finished the day before. The beautiful old man that owned the house extended it 24 hours for us. Like, get this, how amazing is this? So, we had our offer in that was accepted, and we were given our normal cooling off period, and then another family wanted the house as well. So, they had their contract there ready to go with no cooling off and $60,000 more than what we had offered, and still with that, he still gave us another 24 hours. Like, who does that? Just beautiful. Anyway, it still didn't work, and so at one minute past five, the other family then got in and got the house.

So, I was pretty devastated, and when things like that happen, you know, just cry. So, buying a house I think is a difficult thing because whenever you're, you're looking at, at a house, you can't get that unless you really envisage yourself living there. So, you can't spend that amount of money unless you really imagine, you know, “What's it going to look like? Where are the kids’ rooms going to be? Where is the dog going sit? Where are you going to put the office?”,  you know, “Where are you going to park the cars?”, like, I even go to the visualisation stage of imagining my grandkids running around and all of the different things throughout life. This is where it kind of jumps over in the applicability to business is, I'm a big believer in visualisation. So, I think when you really want to have something happen, you can help it along by manifesting that and, and being open to what you want to have happen and really believing that it's possible, and the way that that happens is by, like, great visualisation. This is something that I've been doing for so long that sometimes I can visualise something so many times and so often in my meditations of the life that I want to lead, or something happening or getting some sort of opportunity, that often I will have to remind myself that it's not true. Sometimes I'll be talking with my husband and going, “So, these. Hang on. No, that didn't actually happen yet. No, that's something that's going to happen in the future.”, because, you know, you believe it to be true so much, and that, I do that all the time, which means I often, I do think it helps, but it also sets you up for a massive fall when it doesn't come off because every fibre in your being was like, “Hang on, it was a no brainer for me.”, like, “It was already done.” So, it's got its positives and negatives there.

So, I have a process that I go through when this happens because my husband is the polar opposite of me. He doesn't let himself get invested and excited about things until they actually happen because he likes to protect himself from that disappointment. For me, I lay that soul bear. I go, “You know what? I'm all in.”, and I feel it. I feel that rush of excitement and I feel everything and man though, if something doesn't come off, then the ultimate crash comes down, which I know you know what that feels like.

So how I deal with that. So, what happened on Friday, you know, there's that moment of realisation of, “Oh my gosh, the future that I visualised for myself is now no longer possible.” So that's going to have some disappointment with it, and, what I think is that you just indulge that and throw yourself a pity party. Have a total pity party because there is no point in glossing over those emotions. There is no point in pretending that what you just went through wasn't significant to you. Ignoring that and just kind of burying that down in the depths of your soul, because that shit comes back to haunt you.

So, I am totally okay with feeling sorry for myself for a limited time. So, I gave myself the rest of that day to do it. I had my gorgeous best friend drop me off a tub of chocolate mousse because she knew that that was kind of my, my go to when I was really disappointed. So, I didn't even have to ask, and the mousse just appeared. You know, and you need a beautiful soul like that in your life, and then I went to Kmart because it was my son's 10th birthday on Sunday, and I was getting him lots of little bits and pieces. He didn't need anything big, but he needed lots of little things. So, I went to Kmart and just kind of walked around going, “You know what? Anything that I see that I think you might like, I'm just going to chuck in the trolley, do a bit of retail therapy.”, because all of a sudden, I had so much money that now was not allocated. So, I'm really thankful that like, Kmart, was my closest shop and we weren’t surrounded by really gorgeous shops, or, I could have been in a little bit of trouble financially, but no, I went, I literally went and I filled the entire trolley and I couldn't carry anymore. I had it loaded up and checked out at $280. So, I was like, “God I love Kmart.” So that was good. Came back, had mousse for dinner, put the kids to bed, got upset, watched some trashy TV, went to bed all like, “Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.”, throwing my pity party, and then go to sleep.

Then you wake up and it's the dawn of a new day, and with the dawn of a new day, everything is possible again, and so it's time to wash it off. So, for me, I like to jump in the salt water and really just literally wash it off. Let it go. Get over it because you've got to give yourself that moment to grieve what was, but also then, to move on because there's no benefit in sitting in that for a really long time. So, it's different for everyone with the different timing and it's different depending on what that level of disappointment is. I mean for, sometimes, like the example I've given you now is for a house, but it happens with things like, you know, say you launch a new product or a new service and the uptake isn't very good, that disappointment that follows is huge. Or, you put yourself out there with something and, you know, it bombs, which somethings are going to. No one gets it right 100% of the time and often we can be looking at other people because we see the good stuff and we go, “They just like hit the target every time.”, but you don't see all the misses. You don't see all the times that they created something and no one bought it, or not enough people bought it, or they had to change it. So that disappointment is real and it happens and when we invest in something and then it doesn't come off, you know, you've got to be able to have that moment of going, “Okay, it didn't work out.”

Where it falls into trouble is when you blame yourself for it, and sometimes, you know, we do have different parts that are, that are our own, to own, but what I want you to be wary of is, is developing that feeling that you weren't enough to do something and that that's a reflection on you, because sometimes when something bombs or when something doesn't kind of pull off to the vision that we had, it just wasn't the right thing for the market, rather than it, you know, rather than having anything to do with you. So yeah, so that's, that's the one thing. The other thing I'll touch on at this point is, you know everyone says, “Everything happens for a reason.”, and, “It was meant to be.”, and that sort of thing. So, the amount of messages that I got on Friday was, you know, “The universe, it’s just not meant to be, the better thing will be around the corner.”, and, you know what? Sometimes I believe that and sometimes I don’t because not everything happens for a reason. I mean, there’s some shitty, shitty things that happen in the world. People's children get sick and die. There's, people suffer rape, there's all sorts of things that are horrible that do not happen for any rhyme or reason, but I do think that we as humans, are beautifully resilient and can find some sort of meaning in every bad thing that allows us to cope, and allows us to recover and then set off on a more positive journey, and to use those hardships and use those disappointments as fuel for something even greater in our lives as we go on. So, I think that's really, really important, and who knows, you know? Maybe, I mean, a little bit of a caveat on, still on our house here, but, so we actually bought a house today. So, we lost one on Friday. It's now Wednesday. We bought a house, half the price of the other house that we just lost because I changed my tact completely and went, “You know what?  I'm not going to be able to get my Barbie Dream House right now, because we keep falling like, just short”, so I went the opposite tack. I went, “Alright. Let's go half the price. Let's get a house, do it up”, because I actually love renovating. So, we can do it up, and then in two years’ time we'll sell that, then get the Barbie Dream House. So, we'll see if that one works, and I mean, maybe, at the time that we get that, which will be a far better house than the one where we just missed out on, we’ll go, “See? All happened for a reason. This was fantastic. This was a much better plan.”, but had that not happened, we would have thought that we got that house for a reason. You know what I mean?

Anyway. Okay, so first thing is to have the pity party. Second, reflect. So, I do think it's really valuable when you go through a disappointment or a failure or something doesn't work really well, is to have this period of reflection so that you can look at what actually happened and learn from that. So, derive any lessons that you can out of it. So, say it's a new service launching or a new product launching, and it doesn't get received as well. Look at that and go, “Okay, did you do everything you could on the marketing? Was it the price that was wrong? Was it the offer that was wrong? Was the way that you presented it wrong?”, you know, “Where could you improve and where could it go wrong?”,  so you can actually, physically write down the lessons that you get from that so that next time you can do it better.

The third one is perspective. So, as I said earlier, our problems are significant to us. They're real to us, but there comes a point where you have to get that in perspective. I mean, for me, there was no way I was going to wallow in my disappointment longer than just Friday night, because on Saturday, I wake up and I think, “You know? What a privileged problem to have, that I just missed out on such a beautiful property. You know? That's a really privileged problem. So what? Poor me, I'll have to just buy, like, a nice house?” It's just, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous, and so getting that into perspective is really handy. It's the same when, you know, often we have many disappointments in life, and I'm not talking about trauma and tragedy here. I mean, like, our normal level disappointments, it can feel really real to us in the moment, and it is, it is real, it is very disappointing, but once you can kind of get some space and time from that and put it into perspective and go, “Actually, the problems that I have and what I'm disappointed about, I can actually, I have the ability and the opportunity to recover from that really quickly, and to create something really great and to learn from it.”, and it's actually not, not such a big deal. I think that's really valuable to be able to, to have that lens so that we can then continue on.

So, this then leads me to my next one is, Plan B. Always have a Plan B. I would even recommend, C-D-E-F-G-H, you know. If Plan A doesn't work, there's 25 other letters in the alphabet. So, life is constantly about experimenting, you know, putting yourself out there. Trying something new because if you're not stretching and you're not trying, like I said in the very beginning, you’re just never going to get a great result. If you want to do something exceptional, if you want to lead an exceptional life, then you have to be willing to stretch a little, to put a little bit on the line and go for something that you haven't gone before, and risk it not working out and risk feeling that disappointment in your soul, because when you invest like that, you'll be amazed at how many wonderful things actually come of that if you hadn't have tried, you would have fallen way short of that, and then you fail by default. So, being able to go, “Alright, now that we've done that, and we've learnt from that, and that hasn't worked out what, what next? Where to next?”, and then creating that next plan, because, you know, us humans, the way we're wired is, we like to, we're optimists, we like to have something to look forward to. So, if you're there and you're just like, “Well, now that hasn't, hasn't worked out and I don't know where to now.”, that's a murky area for us to get lost in. If you can really go, “Okay, let's look at what's just happened and what I now want for the future, and how I can adjust that.”, and look at it with a really curious lens in going, “Okay, let's kind of analyse that and what do I want going forward?”, and then make that plan and then go, “Alright, new plan. Let's go this way”, and go 100% all in on the new way there.

Then my final message is once you've decided that, go on with, without fear, because when you get disappointed when something hasn't worked out, you can be left feeling disheartened, and it can create fear in trying to do that again, but life is all about trying, and trying again, and seeing what you're capable of, and surprising yourself with how amazing you actually are. So, I want you to be able to, when something negative happens, to reflect on it, to get any plan, to bounce back, and then continue on with the same level of enthusiasm and momentum, as if that bad thing never actually happened, because we've had our pity party you know? We've mourned that loss that we had, and now we're on to bigger and better things. So, there is no point in dwelling in what happened. All we can do is learn from that and make a really great, great future as we move forward.

So, that's my lesson for the week in how to bounce back over disappointment. So, I hope that's helpful to you. If you want to share your experience with me with that, I would love to hear it. You can get me at [email protected], or on any of the social media channels, let me know. Alrighty, everybody, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you have the most fantastic day, and I look forward to talking to you soon on Her Empire Builder.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Her Empire Builder. If you loved it, please share it on Instagram and Facebook for your friends, and if you really want to deliver me smiles, you can pop a review on iTunes. I'd love to hear from you so if you have any questions, email me at [email protected] and if you want to know more about what we do, head over to tinatower.com. Now I truly hope this podcast gives you so much value and you can use it to dream big, plan well and take massive action in building your very own empire that’s perfect just for you.