Failure is Okay

All right so Wednesday. Wednesday Workshop, here we are. Most of you may know, maybe you don’t know, I’m not sure. The executive team, Karen, and I went on a trip to do a conference for leadership, and last week we heard from a woman that in the early 2000s climbed Mount Everest. She climbed and she was speaking at the conference on her climb and what she learned through the process and how it relates to business and excellence. It was great. It was a great conference and one of the things she said, her name is Allison Levine, and one of the things she said was that failure is not a bad thing. Not learning from your failure is inexcusable.

Failing to learn from your mistakes is the inexcusable part.

Failing is part of life. I think we’ve all failed. You can’t go through life perfect. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to stumble, you’re going to fall. Both physically, metaphorically, and psychologically, you’re going to fail. You’re going to fail in relationships and you’re going to fail in business, you’re gonna fail in work tasks. You’re gonna make mistakes but the inexcusable thing is not learning from the mistake and capitalizing on what you’ve learned. And then being better the next day, the next time. Learning a little bit as you go and taking on some of that.

We’ve all failed. Some of you might be feeling like a failure today. Maybe you made a mistake yesterday, earlier this morning, who knows? Perhaps maybe you’re feeling like you have had a list of failures behind you. Maybe you haven’t learned from that mistake and that’s one thing I learned early on in life.

The mistakes of the past repeat themselves.

Sometimes in a worse way. A little mistake on one time becomes a great huge monster mistake if I don’t stop myself from making those mistakes. It could be a much greater risk, a greater travesty to my life if I don’t learn from it earlier on in my life. So it’s those kinds of things that are really, really important. Recognize that you are going to make mistakes. You are going to have failure in your life and instead of dwelling on the fact that you’ve made a mistake or that you have failed and letting that creep into your mind saying that you’re going to be a failure. Failure does not make you a failure. It’s a failure but it’s not you. It’s one thing that you did.

Capitalize on learning from what that failure was. Break it down into individual parts and find out where the failure happened. What can you do better next time and then build that backup. Then don’t fail at that same thing again and keep getting better. You’ll find that you’ll have more successes and then you’ll have more failures and you want to fail sometimes.

We learn best from our failures not from our excellent stuff.

You do something right, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what you did right. You stand in the glory of it for a minute, you let it rain down on you, you have that little victory dance and you shake your little booty, maybe. Especially if you’re five years old like my son David is. But you don’t really dwell on what did I do right, to make it right. Too often we don’t and maybe we should. How did I put all these pieces together so well that everything just fell into place and worked super well? We don’t do that very often.

We do more of the celebrating, the excitement, the excellence. Then we go into the next thing and then we fail and then we’re like, ah why did we fail? Drilling down on that failure makes you a better success down the road.

So for this Wednesday Workshop that’s my tidbit. My bring back. One thing that I brought back from that conference and thank you so much for letting us have the opportunity to go to this conference and learn. So that we can bring back these little tidbits of information and stuff to continue to work towards the greatness that is Northwest Enforcement. You are a part of that and we value your input and your contribution to our team.

So on this Wednesday, God bless you. Have a wonderful rest of your week. June is marching along really well and we’re almost halfway through the month. It is hard to believe. God bless you. See you next week. Remember, be valuable because nothing less will do.