When Failure is Not All Bad – How Women in Leadership Can Take a Different View of Failure
If you are a woman in leadership, it might be time to take a new look at what you might have always perceived as failure. What if you could learn why you should look Leadership Coaching forward to failure, and how it can help you ultimately get where you want to go? For instance, when you read this statement, what’s your reaction? “There is no such thing as failure.” Do you think it’s true? Maybe it makes sense to others but not to you.
But what if you learned that you have the power to decide whether or not something is indeed, a “failure” or not, changing your whole idea about failure? In fact, some highly successful people have already learned to look at the word failure in a very different way than others. Let’s talk about why.
Why Others Watch a Leader Handle Failure
Doing something that seems to be a failure shows the fact that you are only human. People watch how a woman of stature handles a mistake and how she recovers from it. Watching isn’t to be cruel, but it gives others hope that they too could recover from a mistake.
Mistake making takes on a whole new form when a person sees how a leader faces and overcomes a problem. Everyone can have a failure or a setback but not everyone knows what to do about it. Making a successful comeback after a failure can increase your reputation, build confidence and show you as a person of integrity. The comeback doesn’t even have to be huge or earth shaking. It just has to happen.
When “Failure” is Feedback
What if starting today, the idea of failure took a radical change in your vocabulary? What if failure really meant a form of success? How could you acknowledge your success, even as you speak the word “failure”? Well, you can point out these ideas:
That everything you learned in the process of getting to where you are now is not going to get thrown out – you learned good things to keep along with the stuff that didn’t work.
That simply being able to recognize everything hasn’t gone according to plan, or achieved the desired outcome (i.e. “failed”), is in itself a positive outcome
That even if the specific method you used this time around wasn’t the right one for this situation, you can surely use bits and pieces and parts from what you learned in another project or idea.
That you can eliminate and not repeat the same behaviors the next time a similar situation arises. Failing to achieve a goal in one way just increases your creative understanding of what works for a situation, project, or idea or what doesn’t.
That you’ll know to do things differently in the future. You will create in a new way to approach a problem and your creating will be quicker and more confident as a result of knowing what not to do?