“I don’t start from the lens of risk. I think about doing, because the risk is assumed for me.”
What a bold and refreshing perspective on leading from a place of purpose and vision instead of from a place of fear and risk mitigation. This kind of thinking frees you up to lead with intentionality and focus instead of lurking in the shadows in hopes that you won’t make a mistake that harms your reputation or your career.
This is the perspective that my good friend, colleague and mentor, Beth Fisher shared when we talked last week about how to fail well, learn from it, and move on effectively as a leader.
Failure is a natural and expected part of everyday life in business and leadership. In fact, if you’re a leader who is not experiencing failures, you’re probably not pursuing anything of significance in your work or life. That means you’re limiting your ability to learn and gain new perspectives.
That’s much more of a risk, in my opinion, than failing as you learn and grow.
You have to trust yourself enough to develop enough resilience to take those risks — to do the things that might not be perfect, and where you might make mistakes (because trust me, you will make mistakes), because it is in those very mistakes that you’ll learn and grow most in your leadership and your career.
It’s also crucial that you develop a network of trusted partners and friends who can help you in these critical times. These are the people that you can call on who can support and guide you through a failure, who can provide you with advice and counsel as you approach key decision points in your work, and who will be there to pick you up when you fall.
And at the end of the day, all of these support structures and perspectives should hopefully lead you to one critical point.
Rather than shrinking away from key decisions and challenges in your career, you need to embrace opportunities to learn and grow, even if it results in mistakes and failures — and use all of those experiences to learn, refine your leadership and thinking, and come out of those experiences stronger and more effective than you were when you entered into those challenges.
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