238. Our Relationship with Failure with Mick Spiers

Failure isn't just a stepping stone; it's a wellspring of actionable insights waiting to be tapped. How do we transform the sting of failure into a catalyst for high performance? 

This episode promises to redefine your understanding of failure, moving beyond the clichés of "fail fast" and "fail forward." We navigate the intricacies of learning from setbacks through self-reflection and after-action reviews, ensuring each misstep becomes a learning opportunity. 

By aligning our actions with our core values and maintaining a deliberate focus on our goals, we reveal the potent role failure can play in fostering growth and achievement.

Chapters

• 0:01 Navigating Failure for High Performance
• 12:17 Embracing the Art of Storytelling

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

What is your relationship with failure? There's a lot of talk on social media from gurus talking about that failure is the answer. But that's not the whole story. We need to be able to learn from failure and get failure to work for us. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you my framework on how you can make sure that failure is working for you and driving high performance. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. If you caught my last episode with Jason Schappert, you know we had an eye opening talk about failure, what it really takes to bounce back, to learn and to turn setbacks into success. But today I want to take that conversation a step further and unpack some of my own reflections on failure, learning and growth, and give you a framework on how to make sure that failure is working for you. Here's the thing, failure is romanticized all over social media. You hear phrases like fail fast, fail forward. Failure is the path to success. Embrace failure. It's a gift. And while there's truth in that, failure alone doesn't make you successful, just failing over and over again won't magically turn you into a high performer, a great leader or a successful entrepreneur. The real question is, what do you do with that failure? That's where the difference is made. So in today's episode, we're going to break down let's talk about it in more detail. Let's start with manifestation, the missing piece before we even get into failure, let's talk about what manifestation really means. A while back, I had the pleasure of talking to Dr. John Demartini on the show, and we spoke about the power of intention, focus and belief, the idea that when you align your actions with your values and consistently visualize success, you naturally move towards it. But manifestation isn't about thinking your way to success. It's about putting in the work you don't just sit back and wait for success to come to you. You set the intention, you take action, and you adapt along the way. So manifestation is actually about prolific action that is intently focused on the things that are most important to you. And this is where failure comes into this, because failure is not a sign to stop, it's a signal to pivot, adjust and move forward with new knowledge. That's the real game, and that's where manifestation will find a way. When you're intently focused on what you're trying to achieve in life and aligned with your values, you will bounce back, and you will learn from that failure and make pivots towards the goal that you're trying to achieve. So what is this relationship with failure, and why do so many of us have a funny relationship with failure? It's how we relate to failure. It's how we've grown up. Most of us have been conditioned to fear failure from a young age. We're taught that failing is bad, getting the wrong answer in school, missing You need two things. You need to learn from the failure. Take the a goal in sports, making mistakes at work, we learn to lesson, analyze what went wrong and understand what needs to change. And the second step, you need to then apply that learning. Knowledge without action is useless. The real associate failure with shame, with embarrassment or shift happens when you take that lesson and you integrate. It into what you do next. So failure isn't enough. You need to learn from the failure. Learning isn't enough. You need to convert that learning into meaningful action, and that's incompetence. But here's the truth, we have to fail to learn. where our next step comes in, which is the power of self reflection and after action reviews reflection. Self reflection becomes your superpower at this point, the best leaders, the best performers in any field, don't just experience failure and move on. They take the time to We have to fail to learn. It's one it's one of the most review, analyze and adjust as a team one of our best tools for this is the after action review. And this isn't just about failure. This is success as well. So after the game, after important ways you can tell your kids 1000 times not to touch a the meeting, after whatever it is your team have just done, you need to whether it was a failure or a success, reviewing both our wins and losses, about what worked, what didn't work, and what can we tweak. High performers don't just make major stove, but until they touch a hot stove, they don't learn that course corrections, either. They make small, incremental pivots along the way. That's part of the learning. It's like isolating the variables in your performance and making small tweaks to see what happens to your performance. And this is where my own practice of self reflection. lesson. That's a difficult one to hear, but it's true, and as And for those that have listened to the show for a while, you know that I've been doing this practice for close to 12 years now, ask myself the same five questions at the end of every day, what went well, what didn't go well? What would I do leaders, sometimes that means letting our people fail to we differently next time? What did I learn about myself and what did I learn about others? So there's an element of understanding, when something fails, why did it fail? When something succeeded? Why did it succeed, and what little course have to let them scrape their knees. We can't protect them all corrections am I going to do? So fail, learn and apply the learning, because if you wait until things are completely broken, you don't know how to do those adjustments. So it's little adjustments along the way. So you ask it every day, the time. We can't protect our teams, our employees, or even what went well, what didn't go well? What would I do differently next time? And that's where you make those minor course corrections, not major course corrections, constantly tweaking, refining and improving. And the final step is about resilience. It's about letting go. This is the our kids from every mistake. In fact, if we do, we rob them of final piece of the conversation, the ability to let failure go once you've learned from it, once you've applied the lesson, you have to move on, or it's going to be stuck in your head and you're going to let past failures define you. the opportunity to learn and grow. It's not until they touch When I think about this, Roger Federer instantly comes to mind, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, and one of Federer's greatest strengths was, wasn't his skill with a racket that was amazing, but there was other players in the that stove that they really learn that you don't touch a world that know how to wield a racket. It was his ability to move on after a mistake or even things that are out of his control. So if he'd lost a point, he didn't dwell on it, he didn't carry it with him onto the next point. He reset and he stove that's hot. But again, failing isn't enough. Just moved forward. He learned from it, and went, Oh, that was an interesting point, learning about his opponent through every point, learning about the conditions, learning about his own game, and making minor little corrections along the failing over and over doesn't mean you're getting any better. way, adjusting to what the situation called for, but not letting the failure get into his head. So the crazy stat here is that Roger Federer won 80% of tennis matches in his professional career, 80% and yet he only won 54% of the points that he played. And the thing that set him apart from everyone else was his ability to let that point go, to learn from it, and then let it go and play the next point. You can't change what has already happened. You can only change what you do from this moment onwards. So you learn from that point and you move on to the next one, and we can do that in our life as well. To contrast that with other players that had incredible skills, but not necessarily the same resilience and temperament if they had a bad line call that wasn't in their control, umpire made a mistake. Umpires are human too, and so is the technology. If you let that get in your head, and all you can think about is how unfair it was that point. Before you know it, you've lost that entire game, the set and the match. That's what resilience looks like. Roger Federer, we can't change what has already happened. We can only change what. We do from this moment onwards. So next time you fail, you ask yourself, What can I learn from this? Then how can I apply this lesson? And then you need to be able to let it go and move forward. That's the real formula for success. So what is the framework? The framework is starting with manifestation. What is it that you're trying to achieve if you don't know where you're going, any map will do? If you don't know where you are, any map will do? You need to know where you're going and what your values are so you can make the right course corrections towards where you're trying to get to. You need to redefine your relationship with failure. That failure isn't some dirty word. Everyone fails, all of these successful people you see in the world that look like overnight successes. They've had 30,000 failures before they got to where they are, but they've been able to reset their relationship with failure, that failure is all about learning and adapting. It's not something that you should be ashamed of. Then what do we do? We we fail, we learn from the failure, and then we apply the learning. The next part is the several reflection and the after action review. Make sure you're doing those questions, make sure you are learning from the failure, and then you need to have the resilience to let it go. So my challenge to you this week, reflect on a recent failure. Think about what it was and what you can learn from it. More importantly, what are you actually going to do with that learning, how are you going to apply it? What are you going to do differently next time, little tweaks and how are you going to let it go? Or are you going to carry it around with you, like some kind of heavy baggage or weighing you down every day? Or are you going to let it go? So what was the failure? What did I learn from it? How can I apply that learning and then how can I let it go? Failure isn't a badge of honor unless you turn it into something meaningful. So what you need to do is fail, learn, adapt, and then keep moving forward. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Send us a message. Share us your biggest takeaways. Tell us about your relationship with failure. Put a comment underneath you if you're watching this on YouTube. Tell us about your relationship with failure and how you get to get failure to work for you in a framework similar to what we've shared today. In the next episode, we're going to be joined by the amazing Andrea Sampson. Andrea is a TED trained speaking coach, and she's going to talk to us about the art and science of storytelling. We all know that storytelling works, but many of us have limiting beliefs about our own storytelling techniques or our own storytelling ability, and we don't always know how to begin. So she's going to share with us a much simpler framework for how we can embrace the art and science of storytelling. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo and my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.