146. Eliminate the Fear of FAILURE When You Try Anything New With This Awareness Hack

When you're reaching for a new goal or learning a new skill, fear of failure can stop people in their tracks. In this episode, you'll discover a way to redefine failure, to eliminate it completely from your vocabulary and your life experience at work and at home. It's a very simple remembering that you're a scientist. These are experiments. Let me show you how to make this work for you so you can stretch your boundaries, learn new skills and reach new goals. Check it out.

The Perception of Failure

The perception of failure is a very powerful learning device for all humans. We look back on things that we wanted but failed to achieve, things that we tried that didn't work out the way we thought they would, and we see those things as failure.

And I want you to know that that judgmental part of your personality is making an error in judgment. To call anything you tried new that didn't work out the way you thought it would a failure.

What we're going to do is eliminate failure from your thought process as you plan to do new things and build new skills, show you how failure gets in the way of you learning, and reprogram this whole concept so that you can smoothly move towards your goals and acquire the skills you need along the way. Check it out.

The Programming to Avoid Failure

Dike Drummond here again with the latest edition of the Stop Physician Burnout Podcast coming at you from our home, on the internet, at thehappymd.com, and in the physical world, Seattle, Washington.

I'm really excited about this lesson, because the fear of failure, especially for healthcare professionals, doctors, is a huge obstacle to your own personal and professional growth.

Part of the reason is that failure in a healthcare setting can have life-threatening consequences, so to get the right answer every single time is fantastically important, especially when you're seeing patients, especially when the stakes are high, there's a life at stake, you're doing life-saving maneuvers.

But that programming to avoid failure at all costs bleeds over into the rest of our life in a way that doesn't support our personal and professional development.

Redefining Action as Experimentation

So let's look at the idea of failure when it comes to the thought that you might want to do something new, to acquire a new skill or to reach a new goal, specifically in your leadership role.

And let's go ahead and keep our scientist hats on, because what I'd like to do is interpret you contemplating doing a new action in pursuit of a new goal. I'm going to put that in the framework of an experiment.

We're all scientists, by the way. Remember, basic science is where most of us started, right? And what do you call something where you're trying something new and you don't know what's going to happen? That's called an experiment.

And what is the point of experimentation? It's to learn something new.

Is the point of experimentation to get it right? No. You have a hypothesis, but the experiment is to test the validity of the hypothesis, and you're not interested in getting it right or wrong. What you're interested in is getting enough data to determine what happened so that you can use that learning to take the next step in the right direction.

But that's not how we treat ourselves when we're trying something new.

Example: Using the Parking Lot Technique in Meetings

And let's just take an example. Let's say that I taught you how to run better meetings. And you run the meetings in your department, and you're going to decide to use the parking lot, a parking lot in your meetings, which is a flip chart on the wall where people write down discussions that are important ones we don't want to lose, but they aren't on topic for this particular meeting.

So we're going to park them for now. So you set up a parking lot and tell people about it at the start of your next meeting, and during the meeting, there's a discussion about the call schedule that's important, and there's some feelings around it.

We don't want to lose that discussion, but it's not germane to the topic of this meeting. So with the group's permission, you have the person who brought up the issue write it on the parking lot.

At the end of the meeting, the person who parked it on the parking lot comes up to you and is upset. You're not sure why, so they fill you in.

You had them park the discussion, but you didn't say what you were going to do with it in the end of the meeting. Is that a failure? You blew it with the parking lot.

From Failure to Learning Experience

Actually, it's not. What you did was you didn't listen to me completely, because the cardinal sin of a parking lot is to abandon things in the parking lot. People will never let you park anything again if you abandon it in the parking lot.

And again, if you had listened to my instruction, you would have told the group exactly what's going to happen with that parking lot item, when you're going to discuss it, what the next step is before the meeting was over.

So what you had was not a failure. You just had your own learning experience. I tried to help, but you had to learn it yourself.

And now you know what? You're never gonna forget it. I encourage you not to abandon the parking lot because the parking lot was a failure.

No, you got some feedback. You had a learning experience, and now in ways I could have never taught you, when you use the parking lot again, you will make sure nothing dies there.

You had a learning experience. You revised your use of the parking lot to the correct structure, and you'll never get it wrong again. I promise.

You didn't fail. You had a learning experience.

The Only True Failure

And anytime in personal development, in leadership development, you try something new, and you think you know what's going to happen, and it doesn't work out that way, that is not a failure.

That's simply feedback—from failure to feedback, from failure to learning experience.

You have to be willing to step outside your comfort zone to try something new. Otherwise, you're just stuck in Einstein's insanity trap, by the way.

And you have to be willing to accept the feedback and refine your actions going forward.

But there is no such thing as failure—except in one circumstance.

Let me delineate it.

When you know you want a different result and you know that's going to take new actions, you know what new action to take, and you don't do it, and you sit in the dirty diaper of your current results, refusing to take new actions—that is failure.

The failure is a failure to step up to the plate.

Once you take that new action, as long as you can remain open in mind and spirit to learning coming to you in taking this new action, every new action cannot fail.

It can only provide you with a learning experience.

Coaching Call to Action

So coaching point here:

What's the new action you've been putting off?

You know you need it to reach the new result you're looking for.

What's that new action you've been putting off?

And when will you get started—knowing you cannot fail?

You.