What Happened When My Event Went Wrong…

How I used a negative situation to create something better.

The old saying about “best laid” plans is something I know well and have experienced.

There’s no-one alive who hasn’t planned something and tried to make it work – and seen it go wrong! This brings me to thinking about an event I tried to do over a year ago, that didn’t happen but lead to a better surprising end result 🙂

Thrive and Strive – The Perfect Theme

So what happened? Well I wanted to do an event for black women for Thrive and Strive – a theme and topic I feel passionately about. The event would have included speakers on making the most of our beauty, dealing with life challenges and building our careers. My speakers are two fantastic women with great experience on these topics. I definitely have experience in getting over career ‘set-backs’ and building my professional life, so knew I could talk about this.

Venue booked & Social Media Conversations…

I booked a lovely venue that had the right feel. I produced the web page and content to help me sell tickets and wrote endless social media posts. Some of my followers even shared my posts and said “they would come to the event”. I was smiling and feeling happy…and then…guess what – no-body bought tickets! Or to be accurate, 1 person bought a ticket.

So while the days and weeks ticked by, I waited for the avalanche of ticket sales… and still they didn’t come. I had to accept that it just wasn’t going to happen. So with knots in my stomach and feeling fed-up and angry, I admitted defeat and cancelled the venue. Next I refunded the 1 ticket that had been bought and that hurt!

Lessons Learned

I licked my wounds for a few weeks and then even found myself laughing about it – yes it felt good to laugh at myself 🙂  Then I realised that if ‘something’ doesn’t go wrong, you don’t learn how to be strong enough to fix it or even learn valuable lessons! I’ve now read this so many times by people like Richard Branson and yes, when something goes wrong with your business plans, you can stay negative or try to learn from it as best as possible.

So, what did I do with all my ‘lessons learned’? I created an online event – Thrive & Strive: Get the Tips to Build the Life You Want – which contained all the things I wanted to do but it was online. It was a great opportunity to turn a negative situation around and create something new. Also working with the two fantastic women – Joyce Connor and Janet Brown who were speakers at my online event, gave me a chance to support them and also learn from them – the type of empowerment I like to see.

I hope this will help you with your plans that haven’t worked or if you’re dealing with something now, how you can find a way to improve it. I’d love to hear your experience on dealing with ‘plans going wrong’, so leave me a comment below 🙂

If you didn’t see it before, here’s my video below from Thrive & Strive – Part 1: Career Survival Tips: