First some compassion for you with all the changes going on in your own life. My heart really goes out to you.

A few years ago, I started reading a book called Failing Forward by Robert Maxwell. Great title, ok book. A bit on the muscular Christian side for me. But there were some really sound ideas in the book and I synthesized them with stuff I learned from my life coaching education and presented weekly study groups on the topic of failure for several months.

Helped me a ton with my attitudes re failure. Can’t say I like to fail but I’ve gotten a lot better at putting it into perspective and not confusing failure with being a failure.

Some other ideas your post sparked for me:

1. I never really gave a lot of thought to gender differences around failure. But you got me thinking and some questions that came up for me include:

Men get involved in team sports a lot earlier than girls (that’s changing but just observing my son I’ve noticed boys tend to be more “pack-like” than girls. In sports it’s easier to learn that there are certain odds behind failure and success. Batting averages in baseball are a good example. You come to expect that failure is normal.

The “good girl” thing: that somehow if we play nice and do everything nice we won’t fail. In business being a people pleaser just doesn’t work and you end up pissing some people off.

2. What failure really “means” it really helped me when I defined failure simply as “an outcome” that isn’t what you wanted. That’s not to say it doesn’t suck. But often taking the long view, failures have ended up working to my advantage.

3. If you can keep some perspective around things going wrong, you do become a better person. You become less reactive, more compassionate, and kinder.

4. To my amazement, empathy and compassion are good for business. How? Because I’m finding most people at first just plain need to be listened to and witnessed and embraced from where they’re at. Swooping in too quickly as an Expert doesn’t give prospects anywhere to go with their vulnerability. Often they won’t take the next step to advance the biz relationship and they won’t even be able to articulate why or they’ll use a common red herring like can’t afford you, don’t have the time, etc.

Thanks so much for bringing up this subject. It’s dear to me for the exact reason it is such a normal part of the human condition and for some weird reason in our culture we can’t discuss it.

Let’s take failure out of the closet!!

The fail script is one I try to set aside every day. Some days I’m able to, others not so much. But I keep trying.

Not to put too fine a feminist’s point on it, but we’re still programmed to think that failure is the end of an endeavor rather than a natural progression of an endeavor.

Great, thought-provoking post!