As a fan of Brené Brown’s work, I’m grateful for how her work has facilitated my reframing of what I have viewed as failures, allowing me to see how these experiences have formed my character and backbone as an authentic leader.
It’s a struggle, at times, feeling as if it’s culturally counterintuitive to not feel shame over my failures. Vulnerability around sharing my failures has become easier but certainly not easy.
We’ll spend the next few weeks examining the mindset around failure and resilience or bouncing back from failure.
This is part 1 of the 5-part series on Leadership Resilience by Diana Gabriel, Certified Strengths Strategy Coach.
Responding to Failure?
“Some of the most important and insightful learning is far more likely to come from failures than from success.”
— Former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley, interviewed in Harvard Business Review (April 2011)
How you respond to failure and how you bounce back from your mistakes can make a huge difference in your success as a leader. Resilience is key to successful leadership. The wisdom of learning from failure is undeniable, yet leaders, individuals, and organizations rarely seize opportunities to embrace these hard-earned lessons.
Fail Fast, Fail Often: How Losing Can Help You Win, by Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz, discusses the importance of failed attempts and how we should encourage failure more often. Even for the best companies and most accomplished professionals, long track records of success are inevitably grounded in taking risks and, at times, failing.
Brené Brown recently tweeted “Failure can become our most powerful path to learning if we’re willing to choose courage over comfort.” Your response or mindset to failure is often counterproductive: Attitudes and mindset regarding failure become bad habits that can set the stage for feeling shame when failure happens. On the other hand, a reframing of your mindset regarding failure allows you to view failure as “another word for education,” a Brené Brown suggests. Failure has the potential to become the training ground for your success and building your character.
Luckily, most leaders can learn to become more resilient with training and coaching.
The Best of Times, the Worst of Times
How you handle failure can illustrate opposite ends of the spectrum. Some people bounce back after a brief period of malaise and grow from their experiences. Others go from sadness to depression to crippling fear of failure. In leadership, inertia and fear of risk invite collapse.
Particularly in these uncertain times when your next failure may be just around the corner, it’s worth spending some time with your coach to learn how you can become more resilient.
Ask me about this if you’re interested in learning how.
Diana Gabriel, PPC
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