Don’t Let Failure Dent Your Confidence

It’s easy to reduce the process of learning from your mistakes to a few pithy sayings:

• “Failure is another stepping stone to greatness”
• “When we give ourselves permission to fail, we also give ourselves permission to excel.”
• “Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly!”
• “I never fail — I either succeed, or I learn”

Yeah, OK… that stuff is motivating, and it’s true. But it ignores one crucial element. When you make a significant mistake, it can really dent your confidence.

And all the platitudes in the world won’t help – it’s how you feel deep down that matters…

Which is why you need a strategy that goes beyond those bumper sticker slogans.

My favorite mental framing for failure is that you need to view any failure in the context of risk. What do I mean by that?

One of the most important principles of great leadership is to let go of perfectionism, and instead drive towards excellence… it’s the ultimate application of the 80/20 rule!

Understanding risk is critical to getting the Pareto Principle right!

For those of you who’ve read my book, No Bullsh!t Leadership, you’ll see how the “excellence over perfection” principle weaves its way through every aspect of great leadership.

An implicit element of this principle is that you’re not going to get everything right – that’s not even your objective… instead, you’re building failure into your leadership philosophy…

But with this approach, it’s important to have a process for examining your failures, so that you can reset. 

There are 2 situations in particular that require real introspection.

The first, is if you’re making the same mistakes over and over – in that case, you need to step back.

They may only be little things, but they add up over time — small, repeated failures are cumulative, and at some point, it will end up denting your confidence.

In these situations, it’s important to seek some counsel, to get to the bottom of what’s going on:

• You may have a problem with your decision-making process
• You may have an issue with your team’s capability
• You may simply be trying to do too much, and diffusing your mental capacity across too many low-value priorities

But, whatever it is, you need to treat it seriously, and get on top of it!

The second case is when you have a significant, or high profile failure.

This is sometimes easier to address than the small repeated failures, because it has a level of visibility that you can’t ignore… you have to do… something!

With any major failure, it’s vital to take personal accountability, because otherwise, you’re subconscious reaction will be to rationalize… 

You’ll convince yourself that the failure was the result of all the external factors that contributed to it. This is dangerously seductive!

But if you stand up confidently and accept accountability, two interesting things occur:

The first is that people will rally around you – you’d be surprised how willing people are to back you when you stand up and take accountability.

The second is that taking accountability forces you to be explicit about the role you played in the failure… and when you focus on the cause and effect of a failure, you tend not to repeat it.

Instead of a major failure denting your confidence, it actually gives you confidence… 

You find security in the fact that you’ve learned a valuable lesson, which you’re most unlikely to repeat.