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28: How Getting Comfortable with Failing Will Get You Into Senior Leadership Roles · SisterSmart Leadership

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  Jill Avey: We've been talking the last few episodes about how to push
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  yourself further in your career than you might even think you're capable of.
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  What happens when something doesn't go as planned?
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  Women often take failures hard.
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  And in fact, it can be debilitating and even derail your career if you
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  don't recover effectively from it.
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  I really want you to listen to this entire episode so that you can let go of the
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  mistakes from your past and have a toolkit for the inevitable failures you will
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  encounter along your way in leadership.
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  It does not serve you to hang on to them because each one holds
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  you back in a small way until you intentionally address this issue.
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  I'm Jill Avey, a career success coach, and this is Sister Smart Leadership, the
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  show that explores how women can rise from director to vice president and beyond
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  by fully leaning into their feminine energy as their biggest advantage.
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  Let's get you one step closer to the recognition and promotion you deserve.
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  You might not think you're carrying any regrets on a daily basis, but I assure you
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  they are there draining you of potential until you stop to think them through.
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  So if you've done this work already, congratulations, and if not, give yourself
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  a big hug because you're in good company.
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  We all make mistakes and we all have failures, even big ones.
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  And I want you to celebrate the big ones because it means you've
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  tried something significant and you've learned something new.
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  When I first started my job in the ski business, I'd only skied twice.
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  Congratulations!
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  So I had the privilege of learning how to ski from professionals who'd
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  been skiing their entire lives.
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  And one of the first pieces of advice that I got was if I wasn't falling,
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  I wasn't pushing myself enough.
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  And I've taken this advice throughout my entire career.
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  I see far too many people playing it safe in their careers, even though
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  they have big ambitions and they know they have a lot of potential, yet they
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  stay in jobs too long and they don't take that sort of stretch assignments
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  that are going to get them noticed.
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  They hold back and they don't invest in themselves to get the leadership
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  training that they need to move up and they stay stuck as a result.
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  So let's talk today about what you can do to avoid stalling out in the same way.
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  We cover this topic in depth in the sister smart leadership programs, and I want to
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  share some of what we do with you today.
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  So first let's talk about what types of failure we're talking
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  about here in the workplace.
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  So there could be things like failed projects, you know, you might miss a
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  deadline or have unhappy customers or an unhappy colleague, or maybe your
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  project runs over budget and that's not, people are very happy about that.
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  You might have a product launch that flumped or failed, or worse, it got
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  recalled, or maybe you had somebody complain about you a colleague or a
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  senior leader, or even a direct report.
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  Perhaps you didn't get promoted or maybe you had your manager sour on you.
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  Maybe you got laid off.
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  That can feel like a failure, whether it had anything to do
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  with your performance or not.
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  Maybe you got fired.
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  I can tell you all those things that happened to me sometime in my career.
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  Or maybe you've been the center of a scandal or a lawsuit.
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  I mean, there are many more ways that we can fail in our workplace.
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  So why is it so hard when you have a failure?
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  Why do we do this?
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  This is because we're held to higher standards from the time we enter school.
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  Girls are not allowed to you know, make mistakes as much we get reprimanded
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  more for our mistakes and we don't get the brush it off and get back up
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  kind of advice that little boys get.
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  In addition, We have smaller social networks to draw from
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  when we do have a mistake.
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  So we don't have as many people that can help us to think these
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  things through and to pat us on the back and tell us, good try.
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  You'll do better next time.
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  We're less likely to have somebody talk about it to help us determine
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  what was our fault and what wasn't.
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  And women are warriors.
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  Let's face it.
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  We were more likely to ruminate about things that went wrong for even a very
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  long time, sometimes decades, even.
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  So the mistake that we make is believing that we should therefore stay safe
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  and not push into unknown territory.
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  We think that if we play it safe, That this will lead to
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  more success and happiness.
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  But instead we end up feeling unfulfilled because we know we have
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  potential that's not being used.
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  We see others do bigger things and we know deep inside that we could be too.
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  But still we hold back.
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  You might be asking, okay, how can failure actually help us in our career though?
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  The big thing you learn from failure.
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  One of our members in our Sisters in Leadership community, Leanne Chukowsky,
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  is a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, and we talked about
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  how we can learn more from direct experience than we do from success.
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  So she explained to me, our brains are amazing prediction machines.
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  We are constantly making predictions about the state of the world and
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  the results that would occur if we made different kinds of actions.
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  And so she calls this a different class of neural responses that
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  occur when a result of an action goes not as we predicted it to.
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  For example, let's say if I predicted to get a substantial raise and
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  instead I received a much smaller raise than the expected increase.
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  In this case, my brain would signal a prediction error.
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  So this type of signal is believed to be really important because it helps
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  us learn to make better future actions.
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  And so it sticks with us longer.
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  And even more interesting is that the social context modifies
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  the strength of the signal.
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  Back to our example.
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  When I learned that I didn't receive my expected raise, but my colleague
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  did, this error signal would be stronger than if I experienced a
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  loss without that social comparison.
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  So we want to take two things away from this knowledge.
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  First, it's kind of cool that there's a brain based reason why a public failure
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  often stings more than a private failure.
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  And two, more importantly, our neural hardware has evolved to help us learn
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  from failures so that we can make better decisions in the future, decisions
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  that lead to positive outcomes.
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  So if we respond to the failure by completely avoiding future scenarios
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  that are related to that failure, Then the learning is wasted.
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  It's useful instead to really consider what aspects of the situation could
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  offer useful feedback that could help improve future decisions.
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  And this is why we work in our sisters in leadership program on this.
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  We take a look at what is the internal factor and what are the external factors
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  so we can see what was our responsibility and what was outside of our control.
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  And that way we can know what we can let go of and what we need to learn from.
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  The second thing is that failure is also how we build confidence.
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  In our program, the entire program is designed to develop confidence.
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  But making friends with failure is a big part of this because falling down and
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  getting back up is a really important piece of building our confidence.
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  Once you've gone through a big hardship, then you know that you
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  can go through something like that again and you can recover because
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  you have that experience from it.
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  And women come to confidence more slowly than men do.
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  I've heard anecdotally that it takes women 10 years longer than men.
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  To come to their confidence than men do.
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  And while I don't have research to back that up, it was my experience.
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  And it's also what I see I'm in my coaching business.
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  This also makes sense when you consider how avoiding failure can be contributing
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  to that, because if we stay stuck in perfectionism, we aren't remembering
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  all the things that we did well, as much as we're remembering all the
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  things that we didn't do well, and that perfectionism can kind of fade away.
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  Feed that cycle of trying harder and harder to make everything right, because
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  we don't want to have those failures.
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  But instead if we can really embrace the failure and see it as a learning
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  opportunity, that's going to help us gain that confidence a lot better.
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  When I was writing this episode, I happen to have a coaching call with a client
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  who had a failure recently, and she wanted me to share her story in order to
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  help others who face the same situation.
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  Her division is going through a stressful time and it just got reorged.
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  So reorgs are always hard.
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  But this situation was especially difficult because there's been so much
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  strife for the last several years.
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  My client's only been with the company for a year and has been trying to
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  help turn things around, and she's been making great strides with it.
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  The whole department was together for the first time in many months to explore
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  what this reorg meant for each team.
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  Anxiety was so high during the whole entire meeting, and on day
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  four, My client was told that she had a new role during the meeting
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  with no previous warning to this.
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  She was taken aback and confused about what she would be doing in
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  this new, complicated format, and she voiced her concerns about that.
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  As she spoke, she realized that she should not be saying anything, and she
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  has regretted it ever since because her peer that was rolling out the
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  changes felt put on the spot, even though that was not her intention.
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  She came to our call wanting to talk about how she could bring her better self
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  to this kind of situation in the future.
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  So as we talk, we explored what happened on a physiological level.
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  As the human body experiences stress and anxiety, our reaction is to want to
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  stop that anxiety as fast as possible.
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  And this will cause us to say things before we have time to
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  properly think them through.
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  So, understanding that this physiological response is what is going to happen to
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  us in these kinds of situations is the first thing that we need to do when
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  preparing for a stressful situation.
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  So let me just say here that we are always going to encounter these
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  kinds of stressful situations, especially the higher up you go.
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  So it really makes sense to want to prepare for them.
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  So as we talked, she came up with four powerful messages that she could say to
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  herself when she's failing, anxious to quell the need to speak at that moment
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  because she wanted to give herself time.
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  She wanted to give herself time to really.
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  decide if it was time to speak or not.
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  So the first thing that she decided on was take time to breathe.
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  This always gives us that moment to consider what the best response is.
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  And the second message that she wanted to give herself here was, I don't have
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  power here, but I am not powerless.
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  So this wasn't the time for her to, have any power.
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  The power was in the person's hands that was running the meeting,
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  but she also has power in other circumstances and around the situation.
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  The third thing that she's wanted to say to herself is to look for
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  the person's good intentions.
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  What's positive in this situation?
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  And that helps her to see the person from a different light versus that
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  anxiety feeling that she was feeling and operating more out of her primitive brain.
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  This will help her to switch to more of an empathetic standpoint.
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  And then the fourth thing is a little mantra for her.
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  I see some concerns here, but I want to see how it plays out before I judge.
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  And so her overall takeaway from this situation is that she needs to
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  pay attention to the anxiety in her body and take care of that first.
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  And then she could figure out if she can add value to the conversation
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  without making things worse.
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  So when a client has a failure, I like to take them through some thought
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  exercises that she found valuable.
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  I first had her consider how she could forgive herself for making this mistake.
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  She said, That this might be more of a struggle for her.
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  So we started with compassion instead.
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  She said she could feel compassion for her colleagues, that they were
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  also acting in the same anxious way.
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  And I asked her then to try to apply this same compassion to herself.
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  Often if we start in that mode of feeling the compassion for someone
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  else, that can be a good bridge to be able to apply it to yourself.
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  But that still felt challenging to her.
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  So I had her think about what she would tell her daughter if she had the same
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  sort of situation happen at school.
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  And I loved what she said.
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  It was, the mistake doesn't lessen your talent and worth.
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  It does not change how I believe in you.
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  I know you will use this experience as an opportunity for learning and growth.
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  Isn't that beautiful?
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  So I asked her to apply that to herself.
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  And then we also talked about the internal and external forces in this situation.
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  She was a human being in a room where everyone was anxious.
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  In her brain, her mirror neurons were reflecting everyone else's anxiety and
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  further amplifying her own anxiety.
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  So I gave her the analogy of how on the survivor's show.
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  They put everybody under so much stress that they crack and behave badly.
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  And this makes for good TV, but it makes for bad company meetings.
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  So yes, she's a hundred percent responsible for her own behavior and
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  has a plan to keep her cool next time.
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  But she was also in a situation where she was not set up to be her best self.
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  At the end of our session, I asked her what she was taking from our time.
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  And she said that she was going to approach her peer from that place of
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  forgiveness, compassion, and grace.
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  She will apologize for how she reacted and tell her that she would
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  do her best to make the new plan successful and get the job done.
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  I know that this amazing, talented leader grew by leaps and bounds from this one
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  moment, and by analyzing the situation that we did together, She was able
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  to glean important lessons that will exponentially increase her likelihood to
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  be cool in the face of anxiety next time.
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  While it's uncomfortable as heck for us to go through, as you know now,
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  there is no better way to learn.
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  Renee Brown talks about putting yourself in the ring and daring greatly.
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  She tells the story of running into the quote from Theodore Roosevelt
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  that changed everything for her.
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  And it reads, it is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how
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  the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
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  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is
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  marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and
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  comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or
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  shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who
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  spends himself in a worthy Who at best knows in the end the triumph of high
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  achievement and who at worst, if he fails, at least he fails daring greatly.
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  It is not a question of whether you will fail as a senior later, but when.
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  Life is full of ups and downs and no career takes a path straight to the top.
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  You can look at other people's failure with more compassionate understanding,
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  and this will help you take more risk.
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  So at the end of every episode, I'd like to give you three shifts
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  that you can make today to put what we just talked about into place.
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  So I'd like you to think about first, what is a failure that you've had?
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  I'd like you to just think for a moment and identify one.
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  Second, how can you be compassionate towards yourself about that situation?
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  How can you expand your understanding of both the internal and the
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  external forces in that situation?
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  And give yourself a little more grace.
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  thirdly about what did you learn from this experience?
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  Can you see how that you learn more from that failure than you
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  might have if everything went well?
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  So what's one lesson that you learned from something not going as you liked?
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  Let us know in the comments if you're watching this on YouTube.
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  We'd love to hear about your learnings.
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  If you want to start playing a bigger game and taking more risk, I invite you
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  to consider enrolling in our Sisters in Leadership program where we learn to
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  make friends with failure as one part of our seven step passport to promotion.
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  And if you have a risk that you're considering taking, check
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  out our decision tree framework that's linked in the show notes.
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  It can help you take more risk by understanding which ones are
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  going to have the biggest payoff.
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  If you want to dive deeper into women's leadership and how to
• 15:02
  move up in your career, subscribe either on YouTube or wherever you
• 15:05
  listen to your favorite podcasts.
• 15:07
  I'm on a mission to help more women get into leadership and stay there.
• 15:11
  And if that's aligned with you, I'd love to have you be part of this community
• 15:14
  and tune into more episodes on Sister Smart Leadership that will support you in
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  becoming the leader that you want to be.
• 15:22
  If you're ready to fully lean into your feminine leadership and get promoted
• 15:26
  from director to vice president and beyond, hit that subscribe button so
• 15:30
  you'll get all the episodes to come and check out the recommended video here
• 15:34
  to see how women are rising up without playing by the old rules that built these
• 15:38
  male dominated industries and systems.