The F Word
There are few words as powerful as the F word.
For me, there are lots of powerful F words. But they aren’t the ones you think (not that I’m against using that F word from time to time). The F words I’m thinking of right now are: failure, frustration, fear, and feedback.
Each and every one of them are powerful and define a lot of my relationship with growth and career.
Failure
I have always had a strange relationship with failure. I’ve never much minded failure for failure’s sake. In fact, I’ve always been pretty good at including small, regular doses of failure into my life on a daily basis with the expectation that each of those small doses of failure moves me closer and closer to success over time.
This is the concept behind working out. Each workout you push yourself to the point of failure on a small scale. After, your muscles grow and rebuild stronger to handle the load. Then you come back and do it again, but this time you can get a little farther before your body hits the point of failure.
Repeated, consistent small failure (and a comfort with that feeling) is the key to success anywhere. It is that dedication to repeatedly overcoming small failure after small failure that ultimately gives you the title of a “success” at some point.
It is how learning works. It is how life works.
A Changing Relationship with Failure
I have, for quite some time, considered this relationship with failure as a hugely positive and healthy one (and there is plenty of research and information out there to confirm that opinion). A willingness to fail over and over until you succeed is a very good thing.
I’ve always been good at this concept from an “individual contributor” point of view. I’m perfectly fine constantly forcing failure on an individual skill until I get better at that skill. It is what has fueled most of my career success.
But as I’ve stretched to new and different roles, I’ve found a hidden part of my relationship with the concept of failure that I didn’t quite realize was there.
I don’t mind failing when I’m the one who feels the results of that failure. In learning a new skill, working out, or trying to get better at something, I’m primarily the one that is hurt if my failure is large.
As a wife, a parent, and in my career, I’ve started to realize quite recently that I had another, quite hidden side to my relationship with failure.
When I am put in a situation where I feel my failure has a strong effect on someone else like my kids, my family, or my team, I become significantly less comfortable with failure. Because my failure affects someone else. Because my failure becomes something that is capable of hurting someone else.
Failure Becomes a Label
I had never really noticed it before, but I started seeing a consistent pattern as I mixed more roles in my life and took on larger leadership roles in my career. Suddenly I was balancing being a wife, mother, and manager to a very large team. And suddenly every failure felt like it carried the weight of the world.
Every small failure was magnified because it wasn’t just me that felt it anymore.
Now, instead of looking at failure as a meaningful tool to learn and grow, it became a painful label applied to myself in whichever role it presented itself.
I made a mistake as a parent and snapped when I should have been more patient. I was a terrible mother who failed her child.
I let one part of my life take time away from another when I should have had better boundaries. I was a terrible wife who failed her family.
I didn’t know how to handle something new as I grew into a new, larger role at work. I was a terrible leader who failed her team.
Frustration
Instead of points of learning, failures turned into labels. And, the more this happened, the more frustrated I became. Not with others, but with myself.
Suddenly, failure ceased to arise in me the same reaction it had in the past. A moment to step back, learn, grow. Failure became a label I applied to myself, a judgment I assumed others passed on me because I had passed that judgment on myself.
At the end of the day, it’s likely that I was right, and people did pass that judgment on me in the moment. But a solid relationship with failure usually means that you can let go of the judgment and know you can learn, improve, and turn that judgment around.
And I got even more frustrated. Frustrated at what felt like the unfairness of it all. I felt like the rest of the world was imposing a requirement on me that I wasn’t allowed to fail. How could I be great at something I had never done before? How could I not fail as part of learning?
But when I stepped back, and slowed down, what I realized is that nobody was imposing that on me but myself. I realized that I was feeling the weight of my failures more because they affected others, but that I was the one ruining my relationship with failure in the process.
Re-redefining My Relationship with Failure
I never minded failure when it meant failure just for me. In fact, it was one of my greatest tools for reaching the level of success I had up to that point in my life and my career.
So how could I turn it around now that my failures had larger consequences? How could I get back to using failure as a tool rather than a weapon against myself?
I needed to redefine for myself the skills I needed to focus on to continue to improve. I realized that what I needed to be successful in larger leadership positions, or with the sheer volume of relationships and roles I was looking to simultaneously take on, was different from what had made me successful in growing my own individual or personal skills.
I needed to revisit improving and growing this new set of skills with the same mindset about failure I’d had in the past.
Identifying a New Set of Skills to Grow
And then I needed to define for myself how to get comfortable with failure that affected others. And I came away with two big things.
I needed to do a better job of interpreting when I had an opportunity to take a small failure and learn from it.
I needed to learn how to better acknowledge and move forward with a failure that affected someone else, without letting it make me so angry with myself for having failed that person.
So I started from the beginning and decided what my individual skills needed to be to be successful for others. It was easiest to break it down by role.
Mom: Be patient, create opportunities for learning, don’t let your focus get stolen from the moment.
Wife: Clarify what you can’t do, ask for help, be ok with doing less.
Leader: Help people hear feedback and act to improve their areas of weakness, get blockers out of the way for people to be successful, make good decisions for longevity, slow down and redirect “reactivity.”
It was difficult to do, but identifying different types of skills I needed at this phase in my life was incredibly helpful. No longer was I necessarily focused on hard skills (like writing for instance), but at least I knew what skills I needed to improve on for my new phase of life.
This process made it easier to take a failure and apply it to a skill I could then improve. For each skill I wanted to get better at, I tried to identify a resource I could use to improve that skill.
Going Back to Failure as a Tool for Growth
Then I worked on my ability to handle failures with this new class of skills.
I started by using my natural frustration that bubbled up as soon as I felt I was failing someone to my advantage instead of disadvantage. When I felt myself getting frustrated, I immediately stopped, wrote down what I was frustrated about, and tried to trace it back to the thing I was feeling that I was failing at.
This practice helped me to identify when I felt I was failing, and gave me the opportunity to immediately reflect and determine how I could have not failed, allowing me to learn and grow much more quickly.
I also decided that the best way to work with the person who I felt that I had failed was to immediately acknowledge the failure to them out loud. “I think I failed to be clear enough about X, which is what I can work on improving.”
Matter-of-factly acknowledging the failure allowed me to let it go and not feel so weighed down by it. And often it helped me see that the small failure was not really a big deal, or didn’t irrevocably hurt the other person. And so I could let it go. And just learn from it, and not be pained by it.
Fear
Fear of failure is one thing. But fear of failing those you care most about is something entirely different. And it can be very hard to grapple with. It was taking so much more out of me than I realized.
Being able to grow individual skills, or as an individual contributor, is one thing. But adapting the same tools when it comes to growth from failure can be very different when you start to expand the volume of people who are affected by your failures.
It becomes much harder on you mentally and emotionally. And it requires a different approach than what you might have done for so long when growing your individual skills.
I’m still figuring it out. I still have small failures every day, but at least I’ve figured out how to constructively learn from them in a way that was initially very hard for me when I started taking on larger leadership roles.
I’ll still fail at something tomorrow. In fact, I’ll go ahead and acknowledge it today. I promise to do something useful with that failure, and use it to make one of the skills I’ve identified as important in my new role in life better the day after.
