High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 627: How Failure Has Gotten You Where You Are Today

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

In this week's 5-minute episode, Dr. Cindra shares that failure is inevitable and when you define failure on your terms, you are able to see failure as an event, not who you are. You are able to keep pushing outside your comfort zone because that is how you learn and grow. Remember you want to fail. That means you are pushing yourself to be all you can be and stepping into your potential. This Week's Power Phrase: “I see failure and mistakes as opportunity to learn and grow.” Quote of the Week: Zig Ziglar said it best, “Failure is an event, never a person; an attitude, not an outcome; a temporary inconvenience; a stepping stone. Our response to it determines just how helpful it can be.” 

Hi, friends. My name is Dr. Sindra Kampoff, a national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology. Every week, I'm on the local radio sharing my top tips on exactly how to develop the mindset of the world's best so you can accomplish all your dreams. Get ready for a jammed, packed episode focused on practical tips to help you get after your goals and step out of your comfort zone. Let's go. It's time once again to check in with Cindra Kampoff today. And Cindra, today we talk about how failure has gotten you where you are today. Usually start us off with a quote. So let's go there. This is one of my favorite quotes by Zig Ziglar. He's a motivational speaker or was, and he said, failure is an event, never a person, an attitude, not an outcome, a temporary inconvenience, a stepping stone.

Our response to it determines just how helpful it will be. So what inspired this particular topic today? Lisa, I've interviewed hundreds of experts on mindset and grit on the High Performance Mindset podcast, which we've had since 2015. And many times I ask guests to describe what failure means to them, and then share a time that they failed so that we can learn from their failure. And it's always really interesting. And today I want to share with you a few definitions of failure that these experts have shared. And as you're considering, I want people to think about how they define failure because we want to define on our terms and I'll describe what I mean by that. All right. So I do know you had the bestselling author Jack Canfield on your podcast. What did

he have to say about all of this? Yes. So Jack Canfield is the bestselling author of all those tickets to the Soul series. I bet you read them or maybe you read some of them. His book was actually submitted to 142 publishers and 141 rejected the book, which is crazy when you think about the success of that book or the book series. And he said, failure is simply a delay in result. We learned to walk by falling down. And if our parents had said, you know, if you fall down 20 more times, you're just a serial failure and we're not going to work with you anymore. Like no one would ever do that. And he said, fail, F-A-I-L, if you take the I and put a line on it, it becomes fall. And when we fall down,

we get back up. All right. Do you have any other examples? Sure. I also interviewed Amy Morden, who's the best-selling author of a book called 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do. And she said, failure is proof that I tried hard and then I put myself out there and I tried to do something that was outside my comfort zone. So I would think that the best of the best fail less, but that's not necessarily the case. Can you tell me about that? Absolutely. I would say, Lisa, that typically, you know, the really great athletes, business people, entrepreneurs, they actually fail more because they are willing to take risks and they don't fear failure. And if we fear failure, we won't try new things.

We will hold ourselves back. We'll play small. But if you're really working to reach your potential, you're going to give it a try and you might fail. And so actually, I think the best athletes in the world actually feel are more likely to fail for that very reason. And so why is that important for us to consider how we define failure? Well, it's important because failure is just inevitable and essential actually for us to perform at our best because we learn a lot from failure. But to be at our best, we have to embrace failure. And so for people who are listening, I'd encourage you to think about answering two questions that are really important about failure.

Number one, how has failure gotten you to where you are today? And that's kind of a mind blowing question. I think people really don't ask themselves. And then number two, what's the definition of failure that you want guiding your life? You know, maybe one of those definitions I mentioned by Amy Morin or Jack Canfield, or maybe you might even think of the, you know, fail equals first attempt in learning that acronym. But the key is that when we define failure in our terms, it takes the sting out of it, and you're able to see failure as objective and not take failure personally. And when you look back at your past failures, you can actually see that they served a purpose.

Perhaps they're even, you know, the reason that you are where you are today. So, Cinder, how would you summarize today for us? I would say that failure is inevitable. And if we define failure in our terms, we're able to see the failure as an event, not who we are. And we're able to keep pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone because that's how we learn and grow. And so remember, we want to actually fail. That means we're really pushing ourselves to be who we can be and stepping into our potential. All right. We want to fail. So we push ourselves. What's this week's power phrase then? I see failure and mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow. All right. I like that one.

If we want to follow along with you, maybe listen to one of these podcasts that you're talking about, where's the best place to find you? You can head over to Dr. Sindra. So C-I-N-D-R-A or Dr. Sindra. And it's all over there. And if you want to learn more about any of these topics, they're in my book, Beyond Grit and Beyond Grit for Business. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump.

Holy cow. Did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers, where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A dot com. See you next week.