My Favorite Mistake: Business Lessons from Failures and Success “Little Failures” Author Alisha Wielfart’s Failed Yoga Studio Was Her Greatest Learning Experience
Episode page: https://markgraban.com/mistake166
My guest for Episode #166 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Alisha Wielfaert, a leadership, creativity, transitions and resiliency coach for women.
She started her career at an over one-hundred-year-old insurance company. She moved on from that. Along the way, she started studying yoga at the Asheville Yoga Center not just as a physical practice but as a spiritual path. She opened a yoga studio… and then sold it…
Alisha is also the author of a book that’s just been released, titled Little Failures: Learning to Build Resilience Through Everyday Setbacks, Challenges, and Obstacles.
She is the host of a podcast, The Yoke and Abundance: Wise Women Podcast and her company is called Yoke and Abundance.
In this episode, Alisha shares her “favorite mistake” story about opening a yoga studio that “did nothing but lose money” as it went into bankruptcy. Why was this her “greatest learning experience” but also the “most shameful” that has happened to her? Why did the business fail and what lessons did Alisha learn that she has (and will) apply to other businesses?
We also talk about questions and topics including:
- Passion plus seeking for purpose in life
- Bootstrapping was a problem – couldn’t fully commit
- Lessons for when you became a coach?
- Do the failures help you be a better coach?
- The Dropout? Elizabeth Holmes
- Other thoughts or tips on how to analyze or process our failures?
- People who are successful after failures do what things?
- How to not get stuck in the grieving and processing time?
- Fear of mistakes — Atelophobia is an obsessive fear of imperfection
- Do you see a difference between “mistakes” and “failures”? Let’s explore that…
- “Planning for failures” in the writing and release of the book?
- You write about the idea of “Failing out loud” — the implications for women and minorities?
- TEDx talk – founder of Girls Who Code (Reshma Saujani)
- Tell us the story behind the name of your company, Yoke and Abundance?