In this episode, I’m talking about one of my favourite “taboo” subjects of all time: Failure. The more we can get comfortable having real, meaningful conversations about what it means to fail, when we fail, and how we handle failure, the better we become at moving through the mistakes we are all, inevitably, going to make!
This solo episode is short and sweet and truly, just the beginning of the conversation I want to continue to have about failure. I wanted to start with this because I believe it’s imperative that we change our relationship with the idea of failure on an individual level. Part of that starts from recognizing and shifting the paradigms that we have in our head—right or wrong, win or lose, pass or fail. “We stay in those paradigms because categories make our brains very happy.”
The more we can lean into the idea that “Failures” are opportunities to practice something and gather data the more we can continue to learn and grow inside of that same thing, or take that data and find a different way of doing things.
- I'm Céline Williams and welcome to the Leading Through Crisis podcast, a conversation series exploring resiliency and leadership in challenging times. Hello, so back in the beginning of the year, technically the end of last year but there was a mistake in publishing the episodes. So at the beginning of this year, I promised more sort of solo episodes where I was talking about different things and this is gonna be the first one that I'm doing. I'm gonna make this a little bit more regular but I had a conversation with someone this week. I've actually had a few conversations about this this week. And so it's kind of top of mind as something to talk about. And I had some thoughts on it and I thought I would start here. It's a big topic 'cause, you know, go big or go home. And that is the topic of failure. So this has come up in a number of conversations I've had whether it's with individuals that I was coaching, whether it's inside the organizations I'm working, or even inside of some of the interviews I've been doing. You know, things always come together and this is one of those times. And it's come up because people are talking about a fear of failure or how, you know, organizations are avoiding failure or they're not setting their folks up to be able to fail and then learn from that failure. And it's really interesting because one of the things that I have found over the years is that there really is hesitation to even talk about the concept of failure. And it's really seen as a dirty word, you know, I have a whole workshop. I've run multiple times on, you know, failure being the other F-word because people don't like to talk about it and they don't wanna think about it. And it brings up all sorts of things for them. And it's just easier to avoid or brush under their, sweep under the rug if that's what the saying is. And I just don't think that's a good thing. I just, I think it creates a whole lot of problems. And I think that as individuals, we have to start talking about failure and exploring what it means for us and where that comes from and really getting comfortable with the idea of failure. And I wanna flag something here because I've recently started to question this idea of the fear of success in a lot of cases because this is something that's often spoken about in relation to failure. And that is that some people don't have a fear of failure, they have a fear of success. And I think that is, listen. I think that definitely exists. And I don't think it's real fear of success. I think it's often a fear of the consequences of success, right? If I'm successful in these ways then how am I gonna have relationships with the people that are in my life? How am I gonna show up? What does it change about me, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really more the consequences success that people are afraid of. But the reason I bring this up when it comes to the fear of failures that if someone is listening to this and thinking, oh I don't really have a fear of failure, I do have a fear of success. I would just encourage you to think about that a bit more deeply because my experience has been with a lot of people, not everyone, but a lot of people who believe that they have a fear of success or have told themselves that story, actually have a fear of failure that they're not willing to examine or look at because of whether it's shame associated with failure, whether it's fear of what that really means, whether it's having to rewrite stories or examine where it came from, whatever the case may be. I think a lot of people tell themselves that they have a fear of success when it really is a fear of failure. And I know personally, I have certainly been in that camp in certain regards, where it was easier to say that I had a fear of success and not examine the fear of failure that was really the thing that was holding me back in those moments 'cause that's scarier. The fear of failure is something I can look at immediately and imminently, but is holding me back. The fear of successes is future space. The consequences of that success or this future unknown that are just an unknown. There are a thousand things could happen. So it's a lot easier to project that out than to actually look at the thing that's holding me back in this moment that I have some control over, that I can take the power back from. And I think it's really important that we start to change our relationship with the idea of failure on an individual level. And I wanna start here because we can't ever change it on a team or in an organization until we have looked at it on an individual level. And part of that starts from recognizing and shifting the paradigms that we have in our head that there's a right and wrong. That there's a win and a lose that there's a pass and a fail, there's a black and a white. And we stay in those paradigms because categories make our brains very happy. It's very easy to understand, it's if we do something, if we pass something that we don't have to worry about failing, if we fail something then there's another way of passing. Whatever that case may be, we put it in these category one or category two and that just doesn't serve us because if we fail, if we are wrong, if we lose, if we're on the negative side of those things, negative air quoted not actual negative. Then we tend to a lot of us, not always but in many circumstances and in specific circumstances cause not everyone is always in a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. We are a mix of both, but in certain circumstances we stop ourselves from trying again because we've lost, we've failed, we're wrong. There's no point 'cause we're in that box already. We've categorized ourselves in that way. And failure is this box, making a mistake results in failure and it puts us in this box of, well, just the way it is, I'm gonna go do something else. I think it's really important that we as individuals start to think about things more in terms of the scientific method and full disclosure. I heard about this. I think it might've been Adam Grant who was talking about it, but I cannot for the life of me find where I heard it. But who was talking about it, and it made me really curious and I started thinking about it. But in terms of, if we think of things not just experiments in terms of the scientific method but how we approach our work, how we approach ourselves, how we approach the things that we're doing and use that generally speaking we're much more primed to grow and learn and move forward. And we step out of that paradigm of pass or fail, win or lose. So what I mean by that is we all know the scientific method, right? You come up with a hypothesis or a theory, you set up the right circumstances to test that theory, whatever that looked like to test that hypothesis. You test it, use the data that you get from that to either make a better theory or make a different assumption or test a different hypothesis or build on the one that you already have. It's constant iteration, right? There's no judgment inside of well, that didn't work. There's no failure inside of, well we didn't get the result we want. It's okay, that data showed something else, let's use that to move forward. And I think that we have to start individually thinking of our "failures," thinking of the things that we're working on, the things that we're trying out as experiments that we are running, as opportunities to practice something and gather data, and then either continue to learn and grow inside of that same thing we're practicing or take that data and find a different way of doing things or a different thing to practice or a different way of showing up or whatever the case may be. And the more we talk about failure and the more we normalize that failure is just really, it's just practice. It's part of thinking about things differently. It's part of moving from that, you know, two part polarization, two-part categorization, the pass and failure, right and wrong, black or white into an iterative way of moving forward. And that failure, the thing that you're disproving your hypothesis is just part of that iteration. And isn't data gathering point to be able to do something better or different or change or whatever the case may be more appropriate. I think when we start to do that for ourselves as individuals, when we start to not let the fear of the failure, not let the fear of something not working hold us back, the more we can start to do that with our teams and our organizations, the more we can start to create that practice 'cause it is a practice, right? That constant iteration is a practice. It's something that we have to learn and put into a constant way of showing up. But then we are able to do that for our teams, for our organizations. And we move away from this idea that no one can make a mistake or fail or we blame other people or we have to cover our tracks or we all of the things that happen to us as individuals that then impact teams and organizations, we start to move away from that and make it so that when those failures happen, we share them. And we talk about them because we're all learning them because we're all in this process of growing and changing and moving forward together. And that it is a practice and a journey. And the reason I wanted to talk about this is because I've had so many individual conversations this week especially, but over the years with these workshops around shifting this paradigm of failure and it often resonates with people and people don't always put it into practice. It's really easy to see the value in this. It's a lot harder to put it into practice every day and to make it part of how we're showing up. And I think it's really important that we stop agreeing with this theoretically and start making it part and parcel of our processes individually and as of how we practice things as teams and organizations. And that we make space to have conversations about what we're working on and what's not working as well as what is working and why those things aren't working and what mistakes we've made and what we've learned from it. And we start to normalize the conversation so that failure stops becoming that other F-word. And really, it just becomes part and parcel of how we show up as our best selves, as humans who are on this journey of work and growth and all of the good stuff that comes with that. And so that's where we're gonna end this. These solo episodes are going to be something like this I think. Always subject to change who knows, where they're a little bit unscripted and I have a topic in mind that I just kind of want to riff on for a bit and give you some thoughts. And I would love to hear if there's things that you would like me to talk about more, whether it's something that I've spoken about in a podcast episode, or you've seen, you know, you've seen me speak about it in other ways or whatever the case may be. You can get in touch through their website leadingthroughcrisis.ca and let me know there. I always love feedback. So if you have anything that you would like discussed or if you have a question, I'd love to take questions. If you have a question that you would like to have me answer, I'd love to do that, make that a regular part of the show as well. So send them in, anonymously. I will not put your name to it, but we can talk more about these things, we can riff I can riff out here, on these shows about the things that you wanna talk about and even bring on guests to address them specifically as well. So, you know, give me feedback. I wanna know what you all want to hear and what is going to be impactful to you. And so thank you for listening and being on this journey with me. And I hope that you are enjoying all these conversations on Leading Through Crisis 'cause I am definitely enjoying having them. Thank you. Thanks for joining me today on the Leading Through Crisis podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a minute to rate and review us on your podcast app. If you're interested in learning more about any of our guests, you can find us online at www.leadingthroughcrisis.ca.