High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 88: How to Fail Forward

Episode Date: January 30, 2017

High performers know that how they interpret their failure greatly determines their success. They approach failure as an opportunity. They see failure as essential for them to grow, learn, get better, understand themselves. They see failure as helpful in reaching their full potential. Week’s Affirmation:  I see failure and mistakes as opportunity to learn and grow. I know failure is a  learning tool so I embrace it instead of fight it.

Welcome to High Performance Mindset with Dr. Sindra Kampoff. Do you want to reach your full potential, live a life of passion, go after your dreams? Each week we bring you strategies and interviews to help you ignite your mindset. Let's bring on CINDRA. CINDRA KAMPOFF walks into the studio with a big old bottle and some cups because we're celebrating

today that we are friends. And we have been friends for four years. Isn't that amazing? She said, this is the fourth year I've been on the radio with you guys.

Huh? What? Get out. Really? Let's get out. Really? Time goes fast. Time does go fast. Thanks for coming in and sharing your knowledge with us for four years. We certainly appreciate that.

And it's been fun to watch you grow and the things that you preach and you practice and how they come to fruition in your life. It's just kind of neat for us. So we appreciate that. I appreciate being here. You've helped me in lots of different ways. So the cool thing is, is our topic today is talking about failure and what that does to us and how to fail forward, which is something that I really have not heard of.

I mean, we talked a lot about failure and what that can do to us, but how do we fail forward and what is that? What is that? So I'm going to start with a quote by Zoe B., an author. Anyone who has ever achieved anything great, anyone who has changed the world, has at some point made a choice to embrace failure instead of fight it. And this talk today, our discussion actually comes from, I was inspired this weekend as I listened to a woman named Carrie Lawrence.

She was the U.S. Navy's first female F-14 Tomcat fighter pilot. Okay. And she shared this research by Lewis Schiff that I want to share with you today because it's really powerful. Kind of the point of this research is that this research suggests that people of the middle class are discouraged by significant career setbacks or failures and more likely to kind of change their career paths or quit as a result. Whereas self-made wealthy people, on the other hand, are far more likely to think of failure as a clarifying moment. And I want to give you this data because it's really surprising. So here's the actual numbers. 17.5% of middle class

people, when they hear the statement, failure has taught me what I'm good at, only 17.5% agreed. Whereas people of high net worth, and we're talking about make a lot of money a year, 10 million to 30 million a year, which is a lot. I know 78.1% agreed that failure has taught them what they're good at. Do you think it's because the people with money don't have to worry about where it's coming from if something in their life would be considered a failure? You'd think that, but they're self-made millionaires. So the point of this, what this data is suggesting is that those people who are self-made millionaires saw failure as significantly different than the people of the middle class.

And they really saw failure as good as helping them move forward and as helping them learn something about themselves and learn what they're good at, what they're not great at. Okay. Maybe follow that path. So how do you see this connecting to how to fail forward? So I'm seeing this as like exactly what you said, as evidence of failing forward. So those with a high net worth thought that failure taught them something that they were good at and what they weren't good at. And they saw failure as an opportunity to grow and to learn, get better, even understand themselves. So the point of this is how you interpret failure greatly determines your success. So why is this topic so important? When you think about fear of failure, you know,

it can be paralyzing for any of us, all of us. But the key is for us to really think about how we typically respond to failure, even how we define it. And we typically think of failure as like, you know, a time where we're not meeting our goals or our expectations for the situation or ourselves or we're not achieving perfection. But failure is inevitable. It's part of living and it's actually part of us being at our highest level and really important for us to reach our potential. We have to fail. All right. How do you how do you encourage us to think about failure then doing?

Yeah, I would say if you're not failing, you aren't challenging yourself and you're just getting too comfortable. So think about it as a leader, maybe as a leader of your house or your team or a leader of your business. You can significantly impact how people understand failure. So you can communicate that failure is actually a good thing. It's a learning tool. And that high performers, those people who are working to reach their greater potential, they see that failures are going to occur and that that's not the enemy. It's really like the real enemy is fear of failure. Now, control freaks like myself tend to think that we can avoid failure altogether

if we just work hard enough and are stubborn enough about it. This is a myth, it yeah this is a myth yeah it is a myth yeah so why is that i have two myths to share with you just for you to think about this so the first first myth is you know i can avoid failure if i work hard enough and so we all experience failure at some level you know we can't avoid it unless we're like doing nothing unless we're being nothing unless we're just staying really comfortable in what we're doing. And so I like this quote by the founder of Honda, success is 99% failure. Ah, okay. I like that.

The other myth is that failure is harmful. So it can actually be easy to exaggerate negative emotions when we fail or feel embarrassed or shameful. But what we're saying today is that failure is an opportunity for us to learn something and for us to basically, we can choose how we see failure and it can determine how we see it, can determine how we feel and how we think about it. So then what is a question or the question you would like us to ask ourselves today? I would like you to think about how do you typically respond to adversity or failure or challenge? Do you see it as an opportunity to learn or something

that's going to crush you? And do you let it crush you just for five minutes, 15 minutes a day, maybe five years, maybe 10 years? Do you let it paralyze you? Because it's your choice in how you see it and you can see it as an opportunity to fail forward. And so we're talking a little bit about journaling. And I know that you have like a gratitude journal and you talk a lot about writing your thoughts down, but you have a new journal now to add to our collection of journals. Cinder's the first one that I've seen that has ever had one of these. Okay. So I was listening to Carrie Lawrence and I thought, you know what? There are times that I, I'm stagnant by my failure. And sometimes it's like 15 minutes, sometimes it's 30 minutes. And

sometimes it's a day where I don't do something because I'm just scared of it. Or I made a mistake and I'm just embarrassed and so I don't move forward. So it's something I recognize about myself. So I decided to, on my way home, to go to CVS and pick up a journal. It's an empty journal. And it's going to be my fail journal. The failure journal. And today I'm going to start writing in it something I failed. And then I'm going to write what I learned from it. Because the reason I'm going to start writing in it something I failed, and then I'm going to write what I learned from it. Oh, okay. The reason I'm going to do that is because I want to even naturalize failure even more in my mind so that I just think about what I learned.

Just something that happens and I'm going to learn from it. Absolutely. That's a great idea. So I can continue to grow and get better. Failure, your fail journal. Not a bad idea. So what's the affirmation that you have for us this week and how do you summarize everything? Here we go.

I'd summarize it this way. High performers, those who are working to reach their greater potential, they know how they interpret their failure and how that determines their success. So they approach failure as an opportunity. They see failure as an essential for them to grow and learn and get better, understand themselves. And they see failure as helping them reach their full potential so the affirmation is this this week I see failure and mistakes as an opportunity to learn and grow like the best I embrace failure and don't fight it I like that okay there you go feeling forward for the falling forward I'm good at that try not not to fall. I make no promises.

Well, thank you so much, Sindra. It's awesome to be here. Thank you. It's been four years. Four years. Let's pop that bottle and we'll get into some ads here and get some music back on. It is a high performance mindset. I love this.

How to fail forward. If you want to connect with Sindra, how do we find you? You can head over to webdrsindra.com, D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A. And I'm always on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset. If you like today's podcast, make a comment, share it with a friend, and join the conversation on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. For more inspiration and to receive Cyndra's free weekly videos, check out drcyndra.com.