In business literature there’s a
lot of emphasis on success, but less on failure. So, I decided to share some
thoughts about the fine art of failure with a simple emotional intelligence
practice that Dr. Brene Brown calls “holding the rawness of vulnerability in
our hearts.”
Learning how to fail will help you more than almost anything
else in life—in the next six months, the next year, the next ten years, for as
long as you live.
Failure presents a golden opportunity
to practice the emotional intelligence techniques that are taught in the
Leadership Academy. I emphasize the word practice because leadership is not a
role; it’s a practice. You should know that this is a fierce practice and not [excuse the pun], for the feint of heart. 😀
When we fail—in other words,
when things don’t work out the way you want them to—we feel our vulnerability
in a raw and powerful way. Our uncomfortable *ego tries to escape from the rawness.
[*Ego. There are various ways to
talk about this word. The definition I like is “that which resists what is.” Ego
struggles against reality, against open-endedness and the natural movement of
life. It is very uncomfortable with vulnerability and ambiguity, with not being
sure how to pin things down.]
One of the most
common methods is to blame our failure on something outside of us. Our
relationships don’t work out, so we blame the other person. We don’t get a job,
so we blame our potential employers, or society or the state of the economy.
The other common approach is to
feel bad ourselves and label ourselves a failure. Either way, we feel there’s
something fundamentally wrong with us.
There’s a third way, which is to
train ourselves to simply feel what we feel. This is a simple but challenging
practice is learning to hold the rawness of vulnerability in our hearts.
When
we’re resisting or trying to escape from “what is” there is usually some kind
of physical sign—a tightening or contraction somewhere in the body. When you
notice this sign of resistance, see if you can stick with the raw feeling just
for a moment, just long enough for your nervous system to start getting used to
it.
Master teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche,
wrote, “we don’t have the patience to stay with uncomfortable feelings for
even three minutes.” When I read that, I thought, “Three minutes! That
would be enough to win you some kind of grand prize!”
For most of us these
days, staying with discomfort for even three seconds without checking our
device or eating something to distract ourselves from the edgy feelings takes a
lot of effort! But whatever the amount of time, the idea is to keep increasing
it gradually, at your own pace. Keep allowing yourself to hang in there for just
a bit longer.
The ego wants resolution, wants
something secure and certain to hold on to. The ego freezes the emotions that
are actually fluid, it grasps at what is in motion, it tries to escape the
alive nature of everything. As a result, we feel dissatisfied, haunted and
threatened. We spend much of our time in a cage created by our own fear of
discomfort.
The alternative is to train in
holding the rawness of vulnerability in our heart. Through this practice, we
can eventually accustom our nervous systems to relaxing with the uncontrollable
nature of things.
If we close down to our
unpleasant feeling without self-awareness (The first skill of Emotional
Intelligence) or curiosity, if we always mask ourselves or try to make our
vulnerability go away, out of that space comes addictions of all kinds as well as unproductive leadership behaviors.
On the
other hand, if we go beyond blame and other escapes and just hold the space for
our vulnerability, we can enter a place where the best part of ourselves comes
out. Our bravery, our kindness, our ability to care about and reach out to
others—all of our best human qualities –come out of that space.
"Vulnerability is like a connector... it connects you to the rest of the world." ~Phil Stutz
In addition to the emotional
intelligence practice of embracing your vulnerability, here are three more techniques
to add to your art of failure toolkit.
1. Change your vocabulary. Failure isn’t if you do better the next time. In Leaders on Leadership, Warren Bennis interviewed seventy of the nation’s top performers in numerous fields.
None of them used the word failure to describe their mistakes. Instead, they referred to learning experiences, tuition paid, detours, or opportunities for growth. You may think that’s a small difference, but that small difference can make a big difference. The way you think determines how you act.
2. Learn from your mistakes. Successful restaurateur and celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck said, “I learned more from the one restaurant that didn’t work than from all the ones that were successes.” Isn’t that usually that way it is? We can often learn more from our failures that our successes—when we have the right attitude about the failures.
When we don’t try to make excuses or blame others we always learn something. Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad says, “Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn.” That’s the mark of a great attitude! You don’t lose—you learn.
3. Make failure a gauge for growth. Successful people understand the role failure plays in achievement. That’s true in any endeavor in life. Thomas Edison said, “I’m not discouraged because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” And gold medal- winning gymnast Mary Lou Retton asserted, “Achieving that goal is a good feeling, but to get there you have to also pick yourself up and continue.”
Whether it’s thousands of experiments that don’t work or thousands of falls from a balance beam, the milestones on the road of success are always failure. The farther you go, the more failures you experience.
We all have tremendous potential
and yet we stay closed in a very small, fearful world, based on wanting to
avoid the unpleasant things like failure. There is a vast, limitless richness
we could experience if we trained our minds to the open-ended,
uncertain reality of how things really are.
Check out three related posts:
15 Quotes About Bouncing Back
from Failure
The Best Leaders Dare to Be Vulnerable
How to Stretch Outside of Your
Comfort Zone (Where the magic happens)
To your greater success and well-being,
Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
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