What meaning are you giving to failure?
I struggle with failure. I attach all sorts of meaning to it like I’m not good enough, I don’t belong in this crowd, and it’s too hard – I haven’t got what it takes to work through this. I hate that feeling of potentially having let someone down, or not achieving the outcome I expected. And then, when it really gets to me, I sometimes decide I’m giving up and going back to square one. For a while, I even allowed the possibility of failure get in the way of fully committing to do the work I love the most…just in case I turned out to be unperfect at it.
It’s a pretty common fear for a lot of us, right? That idea that if you’re venturing down a path that’s new, different and untested, it might not be smooth; there might be some very tough obstacles along the way; you might have some inglorious fails.
I was running a segment last week as part of Digby Scott’s Changemakers tribe. The group had already done some work on what the journey looks like in their quest to make change happen. My job was to needle people about what happens when they are in the heat of change and choose not to stay the course. The very valid point was raised about recognising when it’s time to drop an approach and go back to the start to try something different. And sometimes that’s the right thing to do. My question to anyone who says an approach has failed / not worked / is wrong and it’s time to hit restart, is to ask:
What meaning are you giving to failure?
Sometimes it’s easier to give up because we were uncomfortable anyway, and this struggle shows it was never going to work (that time I left a job I loved because I didn’t want to have a tough conversation with a colleague who was stressing me out).
Sometimes we dismiss an opportunity because everyone else is taking too long to enrol and we can’t stand the tension anymore (that time I asked an ‘elephant in the room’ question in the team I was part of and nobody showed enthusiasm for it quickly enough).
Sometimes we pull the plug because there’s a whiff of opposition (I once backed down way too quickly on a flexible working challenge when I was told it sounded a bit too far advanced for now).
So what am I learning? I’m learning that trying things and failing gives me a chance to examine more closely why. It’s really easy to give failure meanings like it was never going to work, people aren’t ready or it’s too much of a challenge. Instead, I’ve started asking questions like:
What evidence do I have for the meaning I’m giving to the outcome?
What feedback do I have about what I’ve tried and how it went?
How could I retry this differently?
If I tried it differently, what might happen?
Why am I opting out at this point?
What assumptions am I making about the other people involved?
Of course, there are an endless amount more questions you could ask. When things aren’t going your way, or the heat is getting uncomfortable, you’re probably close to discovering something new. So when you’re feeling like it’s time to throw it in, check yourself. What meaning are you giving to failure, and is there a chance you’re letting go too easily?
My Potent Leaders Coaching Series launches in April for leaders who are early in career. You’ll get what you need to accelerate from emergent to potent, including:
Group coaching sessions with me;
12 experiments to run at work, based on common challenges leaders face when they are starting out;
The chance to build your own network of people who are at a similar stage to you in their leadership adventure.
Spaces are running out, but if you’re keen to get involved let me know. Hit the button below to send me an email if you want more info!