In recent posts, I’ve written about why we focus on deficit fixing, the power of changing the narrative to focus on our strengths, and the cycle of both endings and beginnings that many of us are experiencing at the moment.

Intricately weaved into all of these topics is how we understand, navigate and respond to failure. Yes, I’ve said it – the “F” word. It’s a word and concept we’ve been taught is bad, to fear and to generally never talk about. In a recent keynote I delivered, I had the chance to talk about reframing our relationship with failure, and the overarching message was:

If you’re not failing, you’re not learning. In fact, these moments can lead to some of our most significant life lessons.

Let me give you an example. In the summer of 2010, I was two years into my first professional role after finishing graduate school, and already had poor work-life balance skills coming from my experience working in Residence Life. Early that summer a colleague left to pursue an exciting new opportunity, and I was asked to take over their work, which meant I was doing two fulltime roles simultaneously. Excited to have the opportunity to further prove myself, I agreed.

For the next three months, it wasn’t uncommon to find me at work until 10 or 11pm at night. It also didn’t help I could walk to work in under 10 minutes. I wasn’t getting enough sleep, was eating a lot of take out, and at times was so focussed on work that I forgot to eat. Being someone with high standards for my work, wanting everything to be perfect, being a workaholic and blessed with amazing student staff resulted in all of my projects in both roles going off without a hitch.

About 24 hours later, with everything accomplished, I woke up in the middle of the night in excruciating pain and was rushed to the Foothills Hospital emergency room. 24 hours after that I was in surgery getting my gallbladder removed, and a surgery that took significantly longer than it should have because of the damage caused by said gallbladder.

This brings me to what I learned. After this I made the decision that never again would I put my health, balance and self, second to my work or anything else in my life. Had I not had this experience when I did, and kept working like I described, the outcome could have been significantly worse. In my work as a Manager and Coach, I also use this story when I’m working with colleagues, students and clients as an example of what can happen when we don’t focus on our own health.

As a takeaway this week, consider how you would answer these questions:

1. Think of a specific example of a time you experienced failure, something unexpected occurred or didn’t go according to plan.
2. Thinking of this example, how did you respond in the moment? Looking back what was the most significant learning that occurred for you and how did you apply that learning?

Coming Up Next on the #WhatsYourSparkBlog
May 28: Following up on this week’s post, I’ll be writing about moving from reframing failure to embracing a growth mindset.

June 2021: Around the world, June is Pride Month, a celebration of the beauty of the rainbow of identities in the LGBTQ2S+ community, a chance to remember and honor the advocacy, work and protests of our past, and the recognition that there’s still so much work to do. June posts will celebrate just a small part of the tapestry of our community narrative.