Overcoming Failure

Hello! Happy Wednesday.  We just had Easter, so if you celebrate, happy belated Easter.  We made a scavenger hunt of eggs in the backyard for the kids.  They are 11 and 14 so not sure how much longer they will work for their candy but so far it’s working out for us lol.  We started bribing them with dollars in some of the eggs.

I will take it as long as I can get!

Last week we talked about achieving the impossible and this week are going to talk about failure.  They are connected to me.

Often to achieve the impossible you have to fail every now and then.

Big things involve risk.  You really see what you’re capable of when you do things that are outside of your comfort zone.

So what is a failure?

To me a failure is anything that didn’t go as planned or the way you wanted it too.

Some examples could be –

Applying for a job and not getting it

Messing up a presentation

Planning an event and no one shows up or maybe less than you planned or expected

Failing your direct report and not handling a situation well

Making a plan for your team or department and it not working

Missing a deadline

Making a plan to exercise and not following through

Really anything that didn’t go as planned or the way you wanted.

You all these things failures, I see them as progress toward my goal.

That is what I want you to think about in this episode.

How can you think about your failures as opportunities, lessons, as meant to be, as necessary for what you want?

If you follow me on social media, which side note, if you don’t, we should definitely connect.  LinkedIn is my favorite place to connect so if you’re there, and you should be, send me a connection.

So anyway, if we are connected, you may know I recently hosted a webinar – 3 ways to get unstuck and advance your career.

I promoted it a couple of weeks and hosted it on a Saturday afternoon.

I had great engagement and participation.

The content is really good, so much so, I may actually turn it into a podcast episode.

So how did I fail?

I created a slide deck for the class, filled with GIFs that supported my teaching.

I delivered the class through Zoom webinar service.

I’m getting started, I share my screen.

I have 2 screens, a webcam, a ring light, a cordless mic, all the things.  Further, for the first time, I decided to live stream to my Facebook group, Navigating Your Career.

So, I’m pumped, ready to teach this content. I share my screen and when you present in ppt one monitor goes to presenter view with notes and one does not.

My face becomes a tile in the corner.

I get started.

The class was really good. I nailed the delivery. I was really happy with it and I knew it was going to really help everyone in the class figure out how to stop feeling stuck in their career and really make some progress.

I finish the class and check Facebook to make sure everything streamed properly.

The screen shows me in the corner, but the speaker notes.  My default thinking kicked in and I thought ohmygosh, what happened? Is it just the stream? Was it like that the whole time?!

I check the recording, yep, sure enough.

The entire time I had the speaker view with my notes showing.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little embarrassed. I mean, I am in a lot of ways a professional facilitator. I’ve delivered whole conferences, seminars, classes, workshops, you name it. Virtually and in person.  This has never happened to me. I’m the queen of over-prepare and over-deliver.

Yet, here I was.

My brain was telling me I screwed up and should re-record, I needed to send the replay out and didn’t want it to be imperfect.

Just like I’ve told you before, your brain is always going to offer you these thoughts.  It is trying to protect me, keep me safe, want to prevent me from feeling any sort of negative feeling. 

The difference is I am able to recognize this and coach myself. I’m able to shift my perspective, this is what I teach my clients to do too.

Instead I thought, how is this perfect? How is this a great thing?

First, working over a decade in adult learning I know that some people learn well from reading, so when my slides were primarily visual without words, having an outline there may have helped the audience get my messaging even better.

I didn’t read from my notes so my delivery was still very conversational and natural.

This shows that mistakes happen.  Even to experts, to sold out coaches, to the best, to every single person.

So, I didn’t re-record.

I kept it, I emailed it out to those who registered and posted it in my Facebook group.  I also shared it with some of my coaching colleagues.

I used it as a lesson, just like we are using it now.

Mistakes will happen.  I called it out as an oops and used it as an opportunity to tell them and now to tell you, that big or small, when you are doing new thins, big things, when you’re growing, you’re going to make mistakes.

You might even make mistakes just because you didn’t get enough sleep and are having a bad day.

Failure will happen.

If you think of success as a house.  The house is built with failure bricks.

You build the success you want, achieve the big things, get happier, with little bricks of failure.

Instead of resisting it, shaming yourself, telling yourself every negative thing, thinking you should be better, some perfect human who never makes mistakes, give yourself some grace.

Know that this is perfect.

If you didn’t get the job, you weren’t meant for the job.

They either didn’t see your talent or you didn’t do a good job showcasing it.  Either way it wasn’t a good fit.  It’s preparing you for something else.

Either another job or opportunity where you are.  Maybe you are going to grow in a way that is going to open up a whole new opportunity.

If you failed with someone, said the wrong thing, mishandled a situation, it’s a lesson, you put yourself out there, you tried, now you won’t make that mistake again and you will learn from it. You are better for it.

Just like my Zoom technology failure, you can bet I will not make that mistake again.  It was a stepping stone.

Failure isn’t something to be afraid of or to avoid.

It’s something you should seek and embrace.

Ask yourself how each failure is perfect.

I guarantee the successful people you admire failed along the way.

The more comfortable you get with it, the more risk and failure you will make.

The more you fail, the more you will learn to process and embrace those negative feelings you avoid and the more success you will experience.

More failure equals more happiness.

You just have to look at it differently. 

So think about a failure you had and ask yourself, how is it perfect?

Then ask yourself how can you fail today?

What can you do to make yourself more visible, to get more experience, to learn to trust yourself to handle anything?

Seek ways to take risks and fail.

I would love to see what you try.  Post a picture or write about it and share it with me.  You can tag me on social media or send me a message.  Let’s normalize failing being ok and stop normalizing the need to be perfect.

We are human after all.

Alright thank you for spending time with me today. 

If you want me by your side to guide you through failing with grace, to help you overcome any challenge, and advance in your career, I invite you to apply for the Career Passion Project.

It’s a 6 month small group coaching program enrolling right now.  The applications close THIS Friday April 9^th at 11:59pm eastern.  We start in May.

You can learn more and apply at www.careerpassionproject.com.

Have an amazing week!