I once heard that Sarah Blakley, the Billionaire Founder of Spanx, would sit around the dinner table with her family each night when she was a little girl and answer her father’s inevitable question: “How did you fail today?”

To have failure woven into the everyday vernacular of the dinner table, to have it talked about so matter of factly while continuing to eat and be merry with your family ensures one would become quite intimate and comfortable with failure.

Failure didn’t live so comfortably in my childhood. It’s not that I wasn’t intimate with it, for sure – I was an athlete…I failed all the time! I once had a phase in softball where I struck out every at bat for 4 straight games! My coach called it the golden sombrero. It made me irate.

Failure was uncomfortable and negative to me, something that was internal rather than external – I was a failure.

Naturally, I spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy doing everything I could to delete the failure, which, for this particular example was me spending hours upon hours holding solo batting practices for myself in the back yard.

Then, at the next game, following 2 more goose eggs, I stepped up to bat, the muscle memory of thousands of swings flowing through me…and hit that damn ball right over the center field fence! “I guess the era of the golden sombrero is over!” My coach screamed at me through the cheers of my teammates.

But this is not the success. Because even though I had learned how to channel the pain of failure to create successful results, it would take me years to understand what Sarah Blakely had known as a little girl around her dinner table.

Failures are events. They are not who you are.

Last month, I hosted my very first webinar for the Business Women Rock community. Let’s just say that everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. It was an EPIC FAIL!

And though the little girl inside of me wanted to call myself a failure and crawl under a rock, the 35 year old woman walked through the post-failure protocol like a pro.

1. Find the emergency solution
2. Deliver what you promised – and then some.
3. Let the emotional aftershock flow through you.
4. Identify & implement your lessons.
5. Respect and be grateful for the failure.

And now, grow like a weed.

Ultimately, these failures are the moments when we experience the most growth in our businesses!

So, how have you failed today?