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Especially when I was younger, I really struggled with how I dealt with mistakes or failures.
I took them really personally, I thought it was like a negative connotation or negative thing against me when I made a mistake. And so I figured making mistakes… I didn’t like failures because I felt like I was a failure then.
And obviously I took them the wrong way. And for example, in a past business I did, we were working on a project and we put it out and someone just said something negative about it and I just took it way too much to heart.
And you know, it was a failure. Instead of just seeing it as an opportunity to grow, and okay, this is a way to improve, I embraced the concept of I’m a failure because it’s a failure.
Obviously, in that I did not have a growth mindset. I wasn’t thinking growth, I was thinking status, image, attaching my worth to how well I did or didn’t do. And that’s silly, that wasn’t good for me.
The Five Critical Elements of Thinking
Those aspects of it still sometimes reach and grab me some where…. They’re still like traces that affect me. Recently, actually, I was reading a book. I think it’s called The Five Critical Elements of Thinking something of that nature, and it’s really good book. I recommend it.
In the book it was given things… they gave the example for four of them. There’s earth, wind, fire, and air… Yes, that’s right. No earth, air, fire, and I can’t believe I don’t remember the last one, water, there we go, water.
So each one was like a concept when it comes to thinking. And earth was, when you’re looking at something to go back to the foundations for something, the simple, like if you want to really learn something, often we think we know something, we really don’t even know the foundations as much as we do.
And we should look at the foundations and work on the foundations and then we can grow. Or sometimes that helps us simplify things.
When it came to fire, he talked about mistakes. And one of the things that kind of stuck out to me was, one suggestion was just to assume that you’re going to make a mistake nine times, that you’re going to fail, I’m sorry, you’re going to fail nine times, and the 10th time, that’s when you’ll succeed. Like you’re just expecting it that you’re going to fail.
And that just really stuck with me, that even sometimes now, sometimes I still want to see failure and mistakes the wrong way. Instead of just embracing it that, hey, I have to fail, I have to try, so I have to fail and then learn from my failures so I can get better and better.
And that was actually some of the concepts in the book… was instead of trying to write the perfect draft of your essay or blog, just write and then go back and fix the mistakes. You’re not going to get it perfect the first time.
Expect mistakes and just make it part of the process of learning. If you’re doing Facebook ads or whatever, just do it and then learn from it and then keep improving. And so it’s that concept of growth and having the right mentality about it.
The fixed and growth mindset
Sometimes leaders, we can get that fixed mentality. Carol Dweck in her book, Mindset, talks about the growth and fixed mindset. The fixed is that you don’t think you can grow, you don’t think you can improve, that you’re kind of born with your smarts.
And so people with a fixed mindset, they don’t try challenging stuff because it might show them deficient because they don’t think it’s about growth, they think about showing the status how smart they are. They see a failure as something bad because it shows them as deficient, things of that nature.
Growth mindset just believes you can keep growing and learning, and so if you have a growth mindset you’re more likely to try new things and challenge yourself and embrace failures and mistakes because there are ways you learn.
Leaders and their mindset
Sometimes when leaders get that fixed mindset it becomes about status. They’re worried about how they look and their image. They walk around, kind of how great they are because they want to be seen as good. They want to be seen as a great leader and their, what they view as a great leader.
But the mindset, of course, is wrong because if you’re, first of all, that’s about you and you looking good, and you’re never going to be effective if you’re focused on you looking good. But some of the negative effects of that is, of course, like if you’re worried about looking good you’re not going to admit your mistakes. You’re not going to admit your failures. You’re going to try to hide them or whatever or downplay them.
The problem of course, if you avoid mistakes and things or revealing or admitting is that you won’t grow, you won’t get better, you won’t learn, I mean it just hurts you. But more than that, when you hide your mistakes, first of all, often your employees or team sees it anyway so they will just… or you’ll just lose respect with them because of that. It hurts you in so many ways when you have that.
Another thing is when you have a fixed mentality, you worry about your status or image. leaders, you, whoever has that mindset, won’t admit when they don’t know something or they are rare to.
I heard a story of this director, I don’t know if he was doing TV or movie or whatever it was, they asked him to look through a lens to look at a shot or something, but he didn’t realize the lens cap was on.
And he was afraid to admit he didn’t know why he couldn’t see whatever it was. So he just said, yeah, it’s good. And he lost respect, obviously, because the lens cap was on. And so I’m just admitting, “Hey, I don’t know. I can’t see anything.”
Sometimes we’re afraid to make mistakes or admit that we don’t know something. Cause we’re afraid of looking bad, afraid of looking stupid and it will hurt people’s viewpoint of us. And that’s just, we shouldn’t do that because first of all, we’re not learning. We’re choosing to be dumb instead of look dumb, and we should choose the other.
Second, we lose respect from people. And also, again, makes people not want to admit it themselves when they don’t know. But also, sometimes this happens from the CEO executive team down. People will be discussing a topic, and you may not understand it. So instead of saying, “Hey, I don’t understand what you’re saying. Could you explain it differently?” “Hey, what’s this word?”
It’s easy for us to just pretend we know, because we don’t want to be the one that stands out and asks the question and maybe looks stupid with other people. Now it’s kind of similar to the other thing but we don’t want to look stupid so we don’t say anything, we just pretend we know and sometimes dumb decisions can be made that way because really nobody understands it well, but everybody’s afraid to ask so they just keep going forward because they didn’t want to look dumb.
When you speak up and ask, other people are also wanting to ask the same question. And it actually looks good on you when you’re willing to say, “Hey, could you explain that better? Hey, I’m not sure what you mean by this.”
And so usually people are thankful that you asked because they were too afraid themselves to ask. And of course, it goes back to the growth mindset. If you’re about growth and learning and getting better, then you’re going to ask the questions. You’re not worried about looking stupid.
I mean you only have to ask the stupid question once because once you ask it one time then you know. Then eventually all the different topics you’re asking questions about, especially like you’re in a new position and you’re not sure about stuff and you start asking questions, you only have to ask those questions one time for each of those questions.
Then you know and you grow and then you know versus trying to pretend that you know and really in the end looking dumb because you’re pretending.
So think about you as an individual and as a leader and what kind of mindset you have. Do you have the growth mindset? Are you willing to admit when you don’t know something? Are you worried about your status or image or looking good more than your growth?
Because when you have the growth mindset, that’s going to help catapult and really explode the kind of growth you can get in your business because you’re constantly trying to grow and learn. When you have that status and fixed mindset, it kind of fixes your growth because you’re not trying to grow.
So something to think about both for you as an individual and as a leader, and don’t make the mistakes I’ve made in the past of trying to take failure the wrong way. See it as just opportunity to learn, see it as just a step in the process.
You know, sometimes you can fail on purpose in a way so that you can then learn from it and get better and improve. So think about it.
Hope it helps and I’ll see you next time.
