Fail better? I’d never heard that phrase before I first read about it in Michael Bungay Stanier’s book: The Coaching Habit. But as I read it, I put stars beside it and made a note to reflect on it, and it’s been swirling around my brain for the past few months.

Fear of failure is one of the biggest reasons we don’t take action and do the thing. I believe that even the most confident among us has the ghost of failure sitting on our shoulder whispering in our ear.

What if instead of being scared we will fail, we accept that we probably will indeed fail in some way, and that it’s a growth opportunity. Furthermore, that we use the learnings from that experience to fail better next time.

I am not sure when we started to expect that we would always succeed. Perhaps it’s been a belief that has always existed, and we just talk more about it now, or maybe it’s grown in strength over a period of time. Regardless, I believe it’s prevalent now, and so it becomes a timely topic.

As a teacher, I go back to the classroom. While I was teaching, there was a shift in philosophy which really threw (and still does) many people my age. We grew up taking tests, and submitting assignments, getting marks and those were the grades. They didn’t change. Today, however, students have the opportunity to redo tests and assignments. While some people think it’s ridiculous, and not the way it happens in the “real world,” I want to challenge that belief. I think it’s important to look at the goal of education which is that students learn: skills, attributes, attitudes. If you read curriculum, it doesn’t say they need to learn a specific skill by a certain date, but rather in that year, or by the end of that course.

Let’s go back to kindergarten when kids are learning their letters and numbers. If a youngster doesn’t recognize the letter “A” in November, but does in March, do we say they’ve learned or not learned it? We don’t worry as much about the snapshot in time aspect. The goal at the end of the year is that they can recognize their letters and numbers.

A student who can’t multiply fractions in February, but for whom it clicks in April and can do it should be applauded, not punished. In theory, they failed in February, but kept working and then succeeded in April.

The same goes as adults, but our fear of failure often stops us from trying. Sometimes the failure creates a sandstorm of negative talk in our brain, and we possibly us give up after the first failure. But we do fail, and we need to learn to persevere and try again. I wonder if it’s more the fear of failure, rather than actual failure that holds us back.

Think back to taking your driver’s license. Do you know anyone who didn’t pass the first time? Did they say, “Crap. I failed. I guess I’m never going to get to drive?” Probably not. They practiced, and made a new appointment and hopefully passed; or if they didn’t, hopefully, they “failed better.”

What if we refame our thoughts to embrace, or at least accept, failure? What if we flipped our beliefs to “I can learn from my failures” rather than, “I failed; I must be dumb/useless/not skilled …”

Samuel Beckett also wrote:

Of course, we want to avoid catastrophic failure. But I wonder if we build most failure up to be potentially catastrophic, when perhaps it isn’t.

How is fear of failure holding you back? Can you reframe your expectations and mindset? As a leader, how would reframing failure impact your team? Would we all be willing to be a bit bolder?

Start small. Pick one thing that makes you a bit nervous and go for it. Then tell me all about it.

In the middle of writing this blog post, I saw a podcast that jumped out at me: Simon Sinek interviewed Suneel Gupta (Episode 37: June 22, 2021) on the Value of Failing. It’s a great listen. Episode Page