This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Why Playing It Safe Is Holding You Back (and How to Fail Forward Instead) with Lorraine H. Marchand | 389

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

We talk a lot about dreaming bigger — but not nearly enough about what it actually costs to play it safe. Fear of failure keeps brilliant ideas stuck in our heads, careers stalled, and confidence quietly eroding. In this episode of This Is Woman’s Work, Nicole Kalil is joined by Lorraine H. Marchand, innovation expert, Wharton professor, and author of No Fear, No Failure. Together, they unpack why failure isn’t the enemy — avoidance is. From reframing fear as data, to designing smarter experiments, to creating cultures (and inner narratives) where learning beats perfection, this conversation is a permission slip to try, fail, learn… and keep going. If you’ve ever felt paralyzed by getting it wrong, worried about failing publicly, or trapped by environments that say they want innovation but punish mistakes — this episode is for you. We explore: Why fear of failure shuts down growth faster than actual failure ever could How to reframe failure as learning (and why that changes everything) Why women are more likely to internalize failure — and how to stop How to test ideas without burning it all down What “failing forward” looks like in real life (not just on LinkedIn) How to stop being afraid of other people seeing you try Because growth doesn’t happen without risk — and playing it safe has a cost. Thank you to our sponsors! Sex is a skill. Beducated is where you learn it. Visit https://beducate.me/bg2602-womanswork and use code womanswork for 50% off the annual pass. Shopify has everything all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at shopify.com/tiww  Connect with Lorraine: Website: https://www.lorrainemarchand.com/  Book: https://www.lorrainemarchand.com/no-fear-no-failure/  LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorrainemarchand  Related Podcast Episodes: 197 / Fear & Failure (Part 1) with Amy Green Smith 181 / Stress Less and Fear(Less) with Rebecca Heiss VI4P - Perfectionism and Failure (Chapter 6) If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Chris Stewart, and I invite you to come and join us here at the History of China Podcast. We've got it all. Wars with millions on each side to help drive home exactly why you should never get involved in a land war in Asia. Come along on the Silk Road to partake in its riches. Join the great cons of the steps on campaign. Ply the Seas on treasure ships or strike out with pirate crews to take their riches for your own. Experience the sumptuousness of the imperial court behind the guarded gates of the forbidden city. All this and so much more here at the History of China Podcast. Are you earning and investing in the stock market? In real estate? How about in relationships? Are you

earning and investing in your life? I'm Doc G, semi-retired hospice physician and host of the Earn and Invest podcast where we have the 201 or next level conversations about money and life. Not only how you make money and grow it, but also how you use your wealth to create a better and more fulfilling existence. Join us every Monday and Thursday wherever you listen to Fine Podcasts. If you love the show, the best way to keep it going is simple. Share it, rate it, and support the sponsors who support us. I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. From boardrooms to studios, kitchens, to coding dens, we meet you in all the places where ambition, responsibility, impact, and real life collide. because I believe that most of us have dreams and hopes that we don't allow ourselves to pursue,

ideas and intuition that just won't leave us alone, callings, yearnings, nudges, whatever you want to call them, I bet you have them. And right alongside those ideas and dreams, a very convincing, very well-rehearsed list of reasons why we're not doing them. Because of X, because of Y, and definitely because of Z. Now, I'm not saying it's all excuses. some constraints are real and not everything is possible all of the time, no matter what that guru out there is trying to tell you, right?

But friend, I'm going to be straight with you. Much more is possible than we believe. Because we buy into our limitations faster than our possibilities. We're too quick to see all the obstacles, too easy to buckle under all the pressure, too worried about all the things that could go wrong. And my guest, most of the reasons we think, think that we can't, most of the explanations for why we haven't or why we don't are stories that

we've bought into. And most of those stories trace back to fear. Fear of failing, fear of getting it wrong, fear of what happens if we try and it doesn't work and God forbid somebody sees it. Now, I know this personally and intimately. To say I have lots of head trash about failure would be a complete understatement. I literally have had to practice making failure part of my strategy. And looking back over the last five years in my business, I can tell you with absolute certainty that there have been more failures than successes, not marginally more, dramatically more. And instead of pulling back, I'm doubling down. Right now, we're testing three new things publicly, and the strategy isn't expecting all of them to work.

It's hoping that one of them will. We just don't know which one yet. Now, this episode isn't a called to chase every idea the second it pops into your head, but it is a call to rethink our relationship with fear and failure because growth doesn't happen without either. And playing it safe has a cost that we don't talk about nearly enough. So joining us is Lorraine Marchand, an acclaimed consultant, author and educator on innovation and the author of the new book, No Fear, No Failure, Five Principles for Sustaining Growth Through Innovation. She has co-founded several startups, held leadership roles at Bristol-Myers Squibb,

Covance Labcourt, and IBM, advised organizations, including Johnson & Johnson and Hewlett-Packard, and serves on multiple boards and teaches at Wharton School. And we are really glad to have you here among all these things that you're doing. So, Lorraine, after everything that you've studied and experienced, what do most people misunderstand about fear and failure and how they actually show up when we're trying to grow or create something new. I know that was a long first question, but hopefully that makes sense.

Oh, well, thank you, Nicole. It's really a pleasure to be here, and obviously this is my favorite topic, and I'm probably sure that I could outpace you in terms of number of failing experiences that I've had, so we should have a competition and count. But that idea of reframing failure is learning. You talked about pivoting in your opening

is so important, because if we set the experiment up with a learning objective, then we really take a lot of pressure off of ourselves to determine whether we had an end result that was a failure as opposed to we accomplished learning something and we moved it forward. But I would love to share a story with you that I hope will resonate with your listeners because the first time that I innovated something, I was 13 years old. And the story is that my dad was an inventor.

He was an entrepreneur, but most importantly, he had no fear of failure, and he wanted to make sure that he imbued that as a culture in our family. So one summer, he took my brother and I to the hot chops cafeteria three mornings in a row, and our job as we sat there eating our scrambled eggs and drinking orange juice was to figure out what was slowing down table turnover. Now initially we said, well, they need to hire more staff. He said, no, we have to define the problem. He was serious and he pulled out stopwatches, graph paper, three colored pens, and gave us permission to interview the waitresses and the bus boys. So after three days of research guided by my dad, we determined that what was slowing down table turnover were sugar packets. People were opening them, the granules were going on the floor and the table. And our stopwatches proved how much time was being spent by the busboys cleaning up those sugar packets.

Now, my dad had a rule of three. And that meant that for every problem he identified, because he would identify a lot of problems every day, around the house, in the yard, daily living. And our job was to come up with at least three solutions. So we did that. We took one to prototype. We showed it to the manager. She got super excited about it. and we developed a product called the sugar cube, sat on the table, it held the sugar packets,

it held the package after it had been emptied, and to make sure that it had additional value, the four sides displayed advertising. It was not only in the hot chops at her store, but it started to spread throughout the Baltimore, Washington area. And I love to close this story by saying that hot chops was the foundation to what evolved into Marriott. So my SugarCube was actually in Marriott before Marriott was actually a name. Now, what did I learn? I learned that I was problem solving. I was having fun.

My dad made it safe to experiment. But when I got moved on in my career, which has been dominated by pharmaceuticals and life sciences, you name some of the companies that I've worked for, what did I learn really fast? Executives were not my dad, and offices were not the diner. And so I, just like all of us, have had to learn to develop that muscle to understand failure, to not be afraid of it, to reframe it as learning, not to let it get me down, but to get energy from it and confidence from it and have it catapult me forward.

So I think that parents should not underestimate the important role that they play in terms of encouraging problem solving and instilling that fearlessness about failure, very on in their children. I encourage everybody, but women in particular, think back at what your dreams were, because you talked about this at the top of the hour. What were your dreams when you were 12 and 13, and there were no boundaries? because what happens is after we're 12 and 13 and we have these big dreams, and then we get into junior high and high school, that's when all of the fear of failure, the obligations, the responsibilities, the criticisms, you know, that's where they all start to mount and they start to shut us down. So a lot of times it's a really healthy, reflective exercise just to think about who you were when you were 12 or 13 and get back to that girl.

That's one thing I recommend that people do. I'm a huge fan of that recommendation. And, okay, so lots of things were going through in my head as you shared your story. But I'd say the two biggest ones were first, thank you for that sort of reinforcement. It's funny, I said this in my introduction. We're testing three things right now. And so this rule of three that you mentioned having three solutions, I was like, oh, thank God. Because I mean, we really have no idea what we're doing, but we are doing.

these three potential solutions, hoping that one of them works. But even more than that, the thought, and you address this, but I want to dive a little deeper into it, the thought kept popping up. Most of us didn't have that experience, right? Most of us, our dads didn't, weren't inventors or didn't teach us that. And I think a lot of us, even if we did, work in environments or with people or in cultures where we say we want innovation and collaboration and yet mistakes are emphasized or, you know, I guess how do we begin to bring that spirit? How do we begin to test and allow for failure and learning in environments where it's maybe not part of the culture or it doesn't feel supported? So that's a great question, comes up all the time.

And actually, one of the reasons that I wrote the book, No Fear, No Fail, No Fail. is because I was out doing workshops and keynotes around the first book, the innovation mindset, which gives you eight steps for bringing your idea to the market. And I was at a pretty well-known pharmaceutical company, Novartis. And they said to me, you know what, Lorraine, we're not the problem. We're pretty innovative on a scale of one to ten when I take your diagnostic. I'd probably give myself a nine. I'm creative. I like to do new things. I'm a risk taker. My problem, is this organization. It is a huge behemoth. We have more attorneys than drug developers here, and around every corner is the big word, no, we don't do it that way, we've never done it that

way, we tried this and it didn't work. What can I do? And so this is really a very common issue for individuals trapped in mid-management roles or even leadership roles that can't move the whole organization. So what I like to say is what you can control is yourself and some of the small ways that you can start to emulate reframing that failure into learning. I like to use the mantra, try, fail, learn. So how can you do that in the working environment with your team? When I was at IBM, a big behemoth, I was not going to turn around the Titanic. But what I started to do with my teams, I introduced a concept that I called Fail Free Friday. Every Friday, I brought my senior team together,

and the sole purpose of the meeting was to talk about what wasn't working. No bragging, no pushing things under the carpet, no making it seem like everything was okay. Let's really get under what's not working well. Let's discuss it together. We don't even have to fix it. In fact, let's not try to fix it. let's just understand it and make it okay to share. And once we started to do that, the people on my team, it made it okay for them to have those kinds of conversations with their team to show that we were going to experiment, that we were going to make failures safe.

And so you can do very small things like that to get started to at least change the culture with your team and to show that you want to create a safe environment for people to try. where they're not going to be punished if it doesn't go well. And one final thing I'll add, as you mentioned, I teach at Wharton, and a lot of students will come to me for advice in the interview process. And they're interviewing with big banks and top employers. And I always say, when they get to that point and they say, well, what questions do you have for me? That's not a throwaway. That is not a time just to say something obsequious back to them. You need to ask them, what happened to the the last person who failed here? What happened to the last project that didn't go as planned here? What is it like when things don't go well in this company? Don't ask them what the culture is

because you're going to get some kind of, you know, sweet chocolate topping on the ice cream kind of answer. You don't want that? Yeah. Ask them a question that is going to make them really think and give you a real answer. And of being in an innovative culture, an experimental culture, where fear of failure is abolished and it's okay because you know that's going to be necessary for you to learn and grow, then that's an important data point that you need about that company. So be bold and ask those types of questions and make sure that you're deliberating the kind of environment you want to be in. Because you can make a choice. You have a choice to make.

You can go into a big default fearing failure environment or you can go in one that wants to be a little bit more edgy. where you have an opportunity to change things. So think about that. Okay, great advice. And I think that there are these external culture, leadership dynamics, the people you work with, but there are also internal barriers. And I read an article and I can't remember when or who. But the crux of what I took away was that oftentimes when men fail, they say I failed at something.

When women fail, they internalize it. I am a failure. And I think we as women have been socialized, generally speaking, to avoid failure a little bit more, to strive for perfection in all aspects of our lives. So any tips or tricks or advice on managing the internal part of fear and failure? Yes. Well, that's also another good question. I remember that there was a journalist, and she wrote an article once about the difference

between men and women and innovation and confidence. And she said, you know, the man goes in the mirror, looks at himself in the mirror and says, hmm, I think I'm going to run for political office today. The woman looks in the mirror and says, wow, these are like 10 reasons why I'm not ready at all to run for political office today. So definitely we're wired very differently. I think that, you know, one of the most important things that women can do is to surround themselves with other confident women, you know, other professional women, accountability partners

that when they start to go down that path of the inside head speak or the head trash, you know, the way you described it, you know, a friend, a confidant who's going to say, okay, you're doing it again, stop. You know, and I think, you know, because women are so social and very much, you know, like to work together, I think it's really important that women have an accountability partner or buddy who can help them out of that kind of speak. I think it's also important that you have a direct manager that is going to be encouraging, that's going to develop you, that isn't going to be someone who's critical. Again, I've been fortunate in my career where I've had great managers, including male managers, but I've also had managers that I realize were not going to be

creating an environment for me to be my best. And so those were oftentimes organizations I didn't really hang around too much. And I found other people in the company or the organization that I could relate to use as a mentor or coach because I saw that I wasn't going to get what I needed from that manager. So I think those really important relationships are one of the best things that women can do. I also like to journal. You know, obviously I'm a writer, but that can be whatever the proverbial form of expression

is to you. But, you know, when you feel something like that coming to, on, sit down, really think about it, maybe jot some notes to yourself. Is something in the environment causing you to feel that way? Is somebody causing you to feel that way? Are you just having a bad day? Like, do try to understand and reflect to find out what it is that's causing that. And sometimes you can see patterns. Sometimes it is an office environment, people that you're around. And if you can start to pick those things up, you need to start avoiding that. Here's my hot take. What if we all gave the finger to resolutions about losing weight and focused instead on gaining pleasure? This year, instead of another resolution that quietly dies by mid-January, more women are choosing something different. They're having better sex.

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Okay, again, great advice. I had one thing that I do that I want to be. wanted to share and get your feedback on. I forced myself to play what I call Angels Advocate. It's the opposite of devil's advocate, right? Because my brain can think of all the worst case scenarios, all the reasons it won't work. Or your example, standing in front of the mirror, 10 reasons why I'm not ready. And every time my brain does that, I force myself to do the, you know, what would be devil's advocate, but I'm already being the devil. So Angel's advocate, if I can come up with 10 reasons why I'm not ready, I need to come up with 10 reasons why I am ready. Or if I ask myself, what's the worst

that can happen? I force myself to ask what's the best that could happen. Just so I have two sets of similar data points, right? Like I'm making up all the worse that could happen. I might as well make up all the best that could happen just so I have both ends of the spectrum. Any thoughts on that? I love that. And I think that I think that's a very healthy exercise. And I think that probably what it does is helps you disabuse yourself of that long laundry list of negatives that you came up with and see that, well, maybe they're really not so bad after all. There's really not as much risk in this as I thought. And, you know, hopefully so often the positives that you think about yourself, the angel's side on that shoulder, you know, can outweigh it. And then I think you just need a

healthy dose of let's try it. Like you said, what's the worst that can happen, all right? What's the worst that can happen here? You know, maybe I'm going to, I'm going to feel embarrassed. well, that'll disappear after a bit of time. And you just have to be bold and make that move and give it a try. And then, you know, again, I think if you define the experiment with a learning objective, I think that's really important to do. Say, you know, the reason I'm doing this is not for the binary positive negative, does it work out or not. But I'm doing this because it's a learning experience. And these are the three learning objectives that I want to design. into this. And so if I learn those three things, it's going to be a successful experience and I'm going to take that knowledge and understanding and it's going to allow me to continue to move forward and to grow. And so, you know, maybe look at the things that you're doing more on a continuum as opposed to just a binary stop, start, yes, no, failure, success. Yeah. I think too, like this learning philosophy around it is so important because the worst case scenario isn't being embarrassed or failing. It's being

stuck, in my opinion. Like when I think of what's the worst that can happen if I do this, I can come up with a lot of things, but asking what's the worst that can happen if I don't do this, it's I'll be stuck. I'll be bored. I'll think less of myself. I'll be stuck in fear. Like, those are the worst case scenarios for me. So I want to talk about. the title of your book, No Fear, No Failure. When I first saw it, I had a little bit of an internal, like, I don't think that it's possible to live without fear. It's generally not possible to do anything worth doing without failure. And I know that that's not what you mean. You're not telling us not to be afraid or not to fail. So what does no fear, no failure mean? Yes, really good point, again, Nicole.

So, you know, on the continuum, I think that, you know, as you point out, it can be that, a fear of failure can stop us short of trying to tackle so many of the things that we are dreaming about that we want to try. And so along that continuum, I'd like for people to move that fear of failure further down the continuum. You know, certainly fear is a healthy response when there's truly risk. But as you point out, so much of what we're facing on the day-to-day, decisions that we're making about taking an idea forward, speaking up in a meeting. These are really very low-risk things. And so we want to build that muscle of being more confident, more willing to take risks, and not letting fear of failure in that kind of small way hold us back, similar to what you were

talking about with the devil's advocate and the angels advocate. And so often I think this fear is more around strategy, around decision-making, around trying something new. So clearly, if a failure is at an operating level, a company isn't delivering on its service promise or something's breaking down, you know, that's very different. Those failures have to be dealt with. But at a conceptual level, a strategic level, the way you think about yourself and the decisions that you make about what you're going to try or you're not going to try, I really encourage folks to get out there, be bold, be courageous, and not let their own internal fear of failure, that voice in the head be what slows them down or somebody else's disbelief. So it's along a continuum. And I just keep

going back to the offering of reframing failure as learning. We are failing so much less than we think we are and we're learning so much more than I think we give credit to. And that's just such a an important reframe. Okay, the subtitle of your book is five principles for sustaining growth through innovation. Can you share with us those five principles and maybe a little bit on each? Do we have time for that? Yeah, absolutely. So everything has to start with culture. And I like to say that this idea of experimentation is critical to encourage in the culture. Microsoft Satya Nadella says go from a know-it-all mentality to a learn-it-all mentality. That's what they try to inculcate at Microsoft. Not that you know it all, because we see a lot of that, but, you know, try to focus on learn-it-all.

Jeff Bezos in a 2019 letter to shareholder said, if the size of your failure isn't growing, the size of your invention isn't going to be increasing at a rate that can actually move the needle. So people like Microsoft, Sataya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos have been really advocates of creating a culture where experimentation and learning replaces that fear of failure. Number two, in our business setting or whatever we're doing, it has to be customer first. And as much as we talk about that, I see so many organizations that practice inside out thinking instead of outside in thinking. and they go in that echo chamber and they try to develop solutions and new products that they think are going to solve somebody's need, but they actually don't. So in order to create this fear of failure, we have to have honest conversations externally with our customers and other stakeholders to understand what it is they want and to be actually solving their problem. So that takes us out of our own head.

Number three, really important is this concept of chance. and it was Sergey Brin of Google who fashioned what we now know as the golden ratio. And what he meant was that the 10% that they were investing in brand new, net new, Blue Ocean, White Space Innovation, five years later was responsible for 70% of new growth. So so many companies don't want to take that risk of assigning some of the budget to invest in something new. They only invest in core. And that same premise is really important for your people. It's really important that you give the talent, the latitude, as we're talking here today, to experiment, not to worry about fear of failure, not to worry about not getting a bonus, losing their job.

It's got to be safe to experiment. Collaboration is the fourth C, and I like to chuckle because when I was at Bristol-Myers Squibb, collaboration was on our behavioral. list was like how well you got along with your colleagues. Well, fortunately, collaboration is now a strategic imperative. And what that means is that everybody in the business, stakeholders and service, product, accounting, legal, everybody's coming together, aligned around strategic objectives, aligned around the customer, all working together to grow the business and to make the customer more satisfied. And so it means all these lines of services and departments, and functions all integrating and collaborating toward a common goal, not operating in silos.

Super important. And then the fifth one is change because underpinning all of this is changing your behaviors. I mean, somebody's going to have to make a conscious choice tomorrow to have the angel discussion with herself. That's not going to be a natural thing to do, right, until you start to practice it. But in an organizational setting, it's really important to help people prioritize so they can make room for the new thing, the new way of behaving. And so I like to say, help people delete something first. You can't just keep piling things on your list of to-dos and expect to prioritize it. So check your list out on a regular basis, remove some of those things that aren't top priorities, insert that new thing, and make sure that you give room and space for that new thing. And also just in the change process,

I'll usually start a new initiative by telling my team what's not changing first. Because so often we're not making wholesale transformative change at a company. We're changing a few things. And it allows people to stay grounded in what they know and understand and really work toward the pieces that are changing if they can stay grounded in the reality of what they know while they get used to what's changing. So those are the five Cs. the culture, the customer first, collaboration and chance, and then the change.

Okay, so that was all incredible. And on behalf of every woman I know, thank you for reiterating that we should eliminate as we're adding or testing or whatever. I often feel like there isn't a problem we try to, don't try to solve by saying do more. Everything feels additive all the time. And I just think it's so important that we look at what we can take off our plate when we look at what we're going to take on or try or test or what have you. Okay, I want to make sure I ask my last question and that's around this concept of failing forward. We hear it a lot and I think it's not just a good tagline. I think there's really something to it. Can you tell us or maybe give an example of what this looks like, what does this mean? How do we begin to practice this in

our day-to-day lives, both at work and with whatever dream or wish or desire might be on our hearts. Yeah. Well, that's a great question, too. And this idea of failing forward or intelligent failure is really thinking carefully about what it is you're taking on, what it is you need to learn. If you do fail, again, what is that critical learning objective that you're going to take away from it? and then designing small experiments that allow you to test things and learn from them. So, for example, I founded a diagnostic company at a certain stage in my career, and I made a lot of mistakes. We've talked about making a lot of mistakes. But what I tried to do is, as I made a mistake, I took the time to think about what I learned, who I met, what I was going to do differently,

and made a commitment that I was going to learn and try to change from it. So they can be really small things that you try to take on, or they can be larger things, but just make yourself a student again. If you're reframing it as learning, then just thinking very deliberately, what do I want to learn from this small test case and what am I going to take forward that's going to make me better at my job, better at what I'm doing? So for yourselves, you have to kind of think about what that experiment might, might look like, but once you become more aware of it and you frame it as learning, you'll see

opportunities to test the waters and figure out what you want to gain from that. I said that was going to be my last question, but I lied. This kept coming up in my mind. Any tips or advice for the person who's like, okay, great, I have my learning strategy, but the feeling or the fear that keeps popping up is people knowing and seeing that I've failed. You like I have made many mistakes and failed many times, and I'm sure some of that was very public. Any way to move past or lessen the worry and concern about other people's opinions? Well, yeah, you get it something very important. So, you know, as human beings, we tend to focus more on not wanting to be wrong than being meaningfully right. But again, if we read

frame things and we say what I want to be is meaningfully right in a very informed way where I've tested the waters and I'm moving things forward. First of all, just from a mindset, we need to replace that with the fear of being wrong. So let me be right. And in the spirit of being right, I'm going to have to test things. And some of my hypotheses may be wrong. And I think the other thing is to try to, again, verbalize this as much as possible, you know, let friends or colleagues know that we're taking this chance. We don't know if it's going to work out. And then people will usually rally around you and say, you know, it's okay. It didn't work out the way you planned, but you tried. So don't put it under the carpet the way you're feeling. I would say,

focus on being meaningfully right and design experiments that will make you more informed so that you can not worry about being wrong. And number two, if you make a declaration that you're going to try something, share it with someone that you trust so that you have a little bit of a cheerleader. And all of this takes practice. Nothing is going to happen overnight. So every day, just try in some small way to take a risk. Like Eleanor Roosevelt said, every day, do something that scares you.

It's really that basic. Every day, just make that commitment to try something new, not be worried about the idea of being wrong. Yeah, and you said this earlier, surrounding yourself with confident people, good mentors, people who support you in your growing and you're learning. And I just think when we do all the things that you mentioned, practice, let people know that we're testing something out,

that it might not work, all of these things, the right people, the confident people, the mentors, the supporters, are going to rally around you. And the people with their strong opinions or judgments or like to try to embarrass you, that is the clearest indication that they can give you that they are the wrong people. These are not the people who should be in your growth and learning journey, personal opinion. But it's worked for me so far. I kind of like when people reveal themselves in that way. Well, I agree with you on that, Nicole. And I think that's one advantage of getting a little bit older is that you realize that who you surround yourself is everything. And it's really

great when you can get to a point in your career when you're a pretty good judge of people and you can surround yourself with positive people, collaborators, people that you know have a good mindset are going to help to move you forward. And you stay away from those who are toxic, have their own agenda. I mean, you know, we can all define the list of people that are not good and healthy for us. And we all have a decision to make. And so just make that decision to surround yourself with those people that are lifting you up. And again, if you look back at your proverbial journal and find out that every time you're in a meeting with this person, you just kind of come out feeling down, you don't really feel like voicing your opinion at the table. You know, pay attention

to that. There can be negative vibes that are pulling you down. And you need to separate yourself from that and be around positive vibes. Amen. All right. Lauren. Thank you. This has been an incredible conversation. Listener, as always, we are going to put every way to find and follow Lorraine in show notes. But let me remind you to go get the book. No fear, no failure. Available wherever it is you get books. But prioritize your local bookstore. Let's keep them in business. And Lorraine's website is Lorrainemarshon.com. Again, we'll put it all in show notes. Lorraine, thank you, thank you, thank you. Oh, thank you, Nicole. And I hope that all of your listeners have a fabulous day. Me too. All right. Friend, I'm going to leave you with this encouragement from Lorraine. Make try, fail, learn your personal mantra. Embrace it, encourage it, and maybe you'll end up changing the world, or at least your world. Not because failure is fun, but because growth doesn't happen without it.

And playing it safe has a cost. So go chase dreams, test ideas, follow deep desire to because more of you isn't reckless. It's required. And that is woman's. work.