By Becky McCray (Guest Post)

If you are going to move forward in business, you’ll have to risk failure. In fact, you’ll succeed more often if you come to see that failure has positive aspects. You want to go from fearing the possibility of failure to considering failure necessary and positive.

How can failure be necessary and positive? Failure is a learning experience, and learning is positive. Failure points out a way that doesn’t work and gives you a chance to change direction. Failure allows you to step back, examine the situation, and grow through experience. If you are trying to hide a failure, you can’t learn from it. Despite what everyone has taught you, the shame is not in the failure itself; the shame is only in failing to learn from it.

Business Leader Zane Safrit calls himself a fan of failure. “Maybe it’s because I’m so familiar with it. That familiarity has taught me great lessons like humility, compassion, patience, perseverance, planning, flexibility. And it’s taught me that no success comes without failure. In fact most successes are built not on top of mountains of failure, but on top of mountain ranges of failure.”

Failure is a positive indicator that you are moving forward. You don’t really expect to move perfectly through business and life, do you? Then there will be stumbles, failures, problems. If you fail frequently, then you are making progress, failing your way ahead. If you aren’t failing at all, you probably aren’t moving. The more you fail, the more you learn, the faster you can improve.

Small Business Owner Rex Hammock said, “Even smart businesses managed by smart individuals and smart investors die. Businesses start and die every day. They always have. They always will. I am old enough - and have been fortunate enough - to have succeeded significantly and failed miserably and frankly, the failures have done more for me than the successes.”

Becky McCray is a small town entrepreneur. She writes Small Biz Survival about small business and rural issues, based on her own success and failures. She is the co-owner of a small town retail liquor store and small cattle ranch. She helps tourism related businesses from Oklahoma to Africa to maintain their web presence and helps rural nonprofits and governments with grant writing.

Becky is a noted speaker on small business issues, having made presentations to business associations at the state and national level.