Episode Transcript

What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys.

So today I really want to talk about failure, and I really want to talk about the importance of managing and dealing with failure. First and foremost, failure is really a normal part of life. You’re going to experience failure. You’re going to fail in things that you’re doing currently and even in the future.

And what a lot of people do not realize, do not understand how to manage, is failure, and as a result, they don’t really actually ever move through failure. They don’t improve and change and grow, and then they stay and repeat the same process over and over and over again.

It’s super important to know how you’re going to deal with failure, and it’s super important to also recognize and manage in that failure what was done correctly and what was done incorrectly, what needed to change and what caused the failure, what needs to change moving forward, but also what was done correctly.

So as Andrew and I, you know, if we work through a lot of processes in building the company, there’s always the theme of continual improvement. What are we trying to improve? What are we trying to create? What are we trying to make better and improve on each and every day. And part of that process is looking to go, Okay, what is working and what is not, and what is actually beneficial and what is actually harmful, and what we’re doing, are we creating problems, or are we actually solving problems? And part of all of this is managing failure.

So when you experience failure, right? If you’re actually out there doing business, you make a mistake, whatever ‘s happening, and dealing with client relationships, dealing with people, dealing with processes, how do you manage that failure, and what you’ve done? And so part of this, and where I’m going with, what I’m talking about with the company is being able to look and go, Okay, what was my part in the problem? What did I create that caused this problem? What could I have done differently to avoid or actually create a different outcome than the one I’m experiencing?

And the biggest thing about failure is oftentimes, we’ll tie our identity into our work and what we do, and then all of a sudden, failure becomes hyper personal. Now don’t get me wrong, a lot of this is personal. Work is personal, right? Work in your profession, what you put your heart into, it becomes personal. But it’s so important to be able to detach yourself from that, and it’s so important to be able to separate yourself from that, to move forward, and especially when you’re reflecting and looking at what could have been done differently, ownership and owning your part of such a vital piece of managing failure and being able to pick yourself up and get back on the bike and ride is a very important skill set, like having grit and being tough along the way is super important.

It’s really important to have that because you’re going to do things that do not produce an outcome that you want in life, whether it’s in a relationship, whether it’s in a marriage, whether it’s in business, and it’s so important to be able to manage failure and to be able to actually have the emotional intelligence to navigate through whatever scenario is happening in your life at the moment. And I do think that this oftentimes is lost a lot, how we manage failure and how we actually deal with failure.

It’s interesting because taking a lot of music lessons growing up, I got told, Hey, you’re wrong a lot. You’re just wrong. Nope, that’s not right. That’s not right, that’s not quite it, that’s not quite it, that’s not quite it. And so going to actually have a lesson. You got told how to improve more often than you got told, cool, great job. You know the music, we don’t have any more critique for you. And that’s actually life, especially when you’re learning something and you’re doing something new you’ve never done before, it is so important to go through and really be able to manage failure well, and then to look and be like, cool. I still have to improve, and I still have to change.

So anyways, as Andrew and I have been going back to what I was saying earlier about the company we as we’ve been going through and building things we’ve gone through a whole season recently to really just improve our processes, to improve how we’re communicating internally as a team, to improve how we’re in communicating internally as partners, to improve how we’re communicating externally. And we’ve been going through this whole process to improve everything. And what has happened as we’ve gone and what has sparked this is like, Oh, we’re failing in these areas. We’re not delivering the way that we wanted to. We’re not delivering the way that we have had in our vision, in our mindset for how we want to deliver certain services and how we want to do these things.

And so as a result, it’s required us to acknowledge failure and then turn it around and Improve that area. And so first step of dealing with failure, you’ve got to acknowledge that you failed. Second step, you’ve got to reflect where and know where you failed. And then third step, last but not least, what are you doing to prevent that and to change that moving forward in the future?

Anyways, guys, I’m out of time, so I’ll catch you later. Peace.