Failing is hard. But not near as hard as learning from it.

Thomas J. Watson, former CEO of IBM, once said, “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”

It sounds good. Yet it’s not wholly true.

Sure, risking failure is crucial for success. Not stupid failure – the kind that results from testing the depth of water with both feet. Rather, the well-considered variety: the ‘intelligent failures’ essential to advance through uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

Yet having the courage to risk failure, even the smart kind, is not the full “golden ticket” to achieving great things. The other half of the ticket is the ability to learn and apply the lessons that failure holds.  

And therein lays the problem.

While failing is always hard, it’s not nearly as difficult as learning from it.

The chief barrier to learning from failure is not its complexity, it is us. It stems from our resistance (unconsciously directed by fear) to confront our failures honestly, to examine them thoroughly, and to identify their deeper causes.

In my recent  podcast with Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, she unpacked the common elements of intelligent failure codified in her new book Right Kind of Wrong (an excellent read!) She also categorized the key ways people fail to learn from failure, helping us avoid the double whammy of ‘failing twice.’

“Learning from failure isn’t as easy as you’d think.” – Professor Amy Edmondson

Zoom up high enough and you can generally see how every failure holds the seed of an equal or greater benefit, over time. However, you have to do your part to find the seeds of learning and facilitate their application to reap rewards over time.

To help you do that, here are three questions to help you get the very most out of your failure. 

#1: Am I honestly examining the cause(s) of failure for maximum learning?

 A study by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach found that the most common response to failure is not to learn from it, but to brush over it. The researchers found that failure is “ego threatening, which causes people to tune out.” ‘Mine’ your failure for every shred of insight and nugget of value, mindful that complex failures rarely have one simple cause and the higher you rise, the less likely you’ll think it’s you. Research by Sidney Finkelstein from Dartmouth University found that senior leaders are less likely to consider themselves as a source of failure. 

#2: Am I taking responsibility for my role in failure? 

Gary, a functional EVP in an industrial business, was charged with the rollout of a project in his business. While his CEO was fully behind it, the project fell far short of producing the desired outcomes. Gary attributed it to a complex mix of factors – market disruption, insufficient integration across the business, an incompetent CFO… his list was long. At no point did Gary take any ownership of his role in the low employee engagement and any hint that it may have been a partial leadership failure was met swiftly with defensiveness.

Stories like Gary’s – of people overly attributing to external causes and culprits – are not uncommon. Failure is threatening to our sense of identity. It’s why part of my work with leaders is guiding them to do the ‘inner work’ (what I call ‘vertical development’) so they aren’t reacting from defensiveness but responding with curiosity and a genuine desire to grow – themselves and those they lead.

Failure is an event, not a person. Only when we can separate who we are from the results we achieve can we rise above the egoic temptation to brush over failure or deflect it onto others and instead, put failure under the microscope and look at how we may have contributed to it, even inadvertently, 

As I have learned from my failures, sometimes a lack of courage to confront awkward issues or intervene promptly perpetuates a problem and magnifies the fallout. My learning: Conflict delayed = conflict multiplied. 

Of course, no one sets out to fail. We want to ‘win’. Yet having the courage to be vulnerable in the wake of failure, to own our role (even if through our inaction), and to apologize when needed, deepens trust in ways that sharing only our wins never can.

#3: Am I sharing and scaling my learning to benefit others, including my team and business? 

Leaders play a magnified role in fostering a learning culture that de-risks intelligent failure. Sharing lessons from failure makes it safer for others to follow suit, optimizing the value of failure, and accelerating collective learning to ‘fail forward faster, together.’ Learning organizations such as Microsoft put in place systems and processes to capture and scale learning to do just this.  

We can never accurately measure the leakage of value, opportunity cost, and wasted resources from failing to learn from failure but we shouldn’t underestimate it.

In today’s fast changing world, accelerating the pace of learning builds edge and creates a meaningful competitive advantage. 

As you work toward your bravest goals for the year ahead, I hope you will shelve perfectionist tendencies and grant yourself permission to risk ‘not nailing it’ more often than feels comfortable.

In the final ledger of leadership and life, the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. In which case, we’re failing twice.

• Listen to my full conversation with Amy HERE.
• Check out Amy’s new book Right Kind of Wrong

As President and CEO of the UN Foundation, Kathy Calvin has been instrumental in bringing Ted’s vision into reality, improving the lives of millions around the world.

I had the privilege of meeting Kathy while living in the DC area and have worked with her and the UN Foundation ever since. In Kathy’s usual generous style, she shared her insights on a range of issues from bridging the gender gap to managing stress, spreading positive energy, saying no and handling mistakes when you get it wrong (as Kathy said she has many times!).

One insight she shared was that any mistake you make is only as bad as what you do afterward. Try to bury it and it will just get worse. Don’t own your part, and you’ll lose trust. The only useful response is trying to rectify it and learn all you can so you don’t repeat it!

I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation on my latest Live Brave Podcast her.

I’m not sure if it was brave or foolhardy, but last week we hired a van in Rome to drive up to Tuscany. Thank God for GPS! If we’d had to rely on the paper map in my guide book who knows where we’d have landed!

Yet even a GPS isn’t fail-proof. On a couple of occasions, we ended up on a one-way street… headed the wrong way! I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences yourself.

Likewise, as we set out each morning in the Alps, rarely did our map help me foresee how hard the climbing would be.

Which brings me to an important lesson for travellers and life alike: the map is not the territory.

How we think it is – in our head or on a map – is often not how it really is. We can so easily live with a set of unquestioned beliefs, assumptions, and ‘stories’ about ourselves and the world around us that can derail our decisions, limit our actions and land us in some place we don’t much like. I’m sure you can think of people who do just that. What’s harder is seeing where you’re doing it yourself!

Of course, there’s a good chance that many of your mental maps do precisely what they’re meant to do – help guide you from your current Point A to your desired Point B – to enjoy more love (and less conflict) in your relationships, raise responsible kids, stay healthy, create financial freedom, move forward in your business or career and bounce back from your disappointments and setbacks along the way.

If they do, these maps are working for you.

Other times, particularly when you find yourself in unfamiliar territory like me making my way through Rome or through the medieval towns of Tuscany, [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]your mental maps can give you a bum steer… down a dead end or simply back to the same place you’re trying to get away from.[/inlinetweet]

Needless to say, these maps are not working for you.

So if you aren’t happy about an aspect(s) of your life right now, then consider that it’s because you are using a faulty map; one that is out-of-date, incomplete, inaccurate or ‘all of the above’. It can leave you looking at a problem and thinking there is no other way to deal with it when, in fact, there’s a lot more avenues available to you that lay outside your awareness (that aren’t on your map!).

You simply don’t know what you don’t know!

If you sense that doing more of what’s already not working isn’t going to help you, I hope the four-step process below, adapted from the chapter in Make Your Mark titled Upgrade Your Mental Maps, will help you make braver and better decisions and help you get to where you want to go a whole lot faster and with a whole lot less stress!

You alone are the ‘captain of your ship’ and so you alone must take responsibility for the map you’re using to navigate through life. If you don’t, you run the very real risk of moving forward with blinkered thinking, repeating self-defeating cycles of thought and behaviour, and dealing with the same problems again and again. (And you don’t want that now do you?!).

Now find some time, get out a pen and paper and see where you may be moving ahead using an old map. I promise you, it will be time well spent!

1. Create a compelling future (where do you want to go?!)

Vision = Power. Anytime you lack clarity about what you truly want, you can end up someplace you don’t much like. Invest time to connect to the biggest and most compelling vision for your life five years from now. Write down what you would be doing, who you’d be doing it with, the value you’d be adding, the emotions you’d be feeling, the legacy you would be creating and what people around you would be saying about you. If you’d like some more help in doing this, please check out my new Life Compass Course.

2. Challenge your stories

Your stories are like little signs saying “Road closed” or “Detour ahead” that can keep you from going down the very road you need to take.

The stories you tell yourself — about what you can and can’t do, about who you are and who you can become — shape your life. Every story you tell (and you tell plenty, all the time) triggers and amplifies the emotions you feel and the actions you take. If you think you cannot possibly change an aspect of your life that is pulling you down, then you’ll live in resignation, resentment and won’t bother trying.

Likewise, if you tell yourself you haven’t yet figured it out but that if you persist and be brave and are open to learning then it will fuel ambition and self-belief and eventually you will achieve so much more than you ever otherwise would. So…. where are you living in a story that is keeping you stuck, fuelling fear, blame, doubt, despair, resignation or resentment? What new story would you need to tell yourself in order to manifest your biggest vision?

3. Shelve your “shoulds”

At the end of life, many people regret that they lived the life others felt they should live, not the one they truly wanted to live. Such is the power of our “shoulds”. Of course, we all have “shoulds” — like where we should study, which career we should pursue or how we should raise our kids — but we often don’t realize that they are often a far stronger reflection of other people’s expectations, fears, beliefs and values than our own. What would be possible if you decided to let go of what you thought you should do and just did what you truly wanted to do, what would you start doing and what would you stop doing?

4. Exit the safe lane

Fear is wired into our psychological DNA to steer us away from threats and toward comfort and safety. Yet left on autopilot, fear can keep us living in the “safe lane” of life, unwilling to take the very actions needed to build a rich and rewarding life. Fear drives us to overestimate the risks and underestimate our ability to handle them. It’s why we must be vigilant to focus not only on what we could lose if we take a risk but also what we risk losing if we play it safe and stick with the familiarity of the known.

Close your eyes, put your hand on your heart and step into the shoes of you at age 90, looking back on the journey that was your life. Then, tapping your own inner ‘Braveheart’, ask yourself, if you stay on your current path, what might you one day regret not doing? Where do you need to veer out of the safe lane of life and into the brave lane? More so, what price will you pay if you don’t? Fear regret more than you fear failure. At the end of life, most people regret far more the risks they didn’t take than those they did.

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard (and felt!) many times before. It’s driven by a nagging fear of being “found out” as not as smart or talented or deserving or experienced or (fill in the blank) as people think.

Impostor syndrome is a term coined by a psychologist back in the ’70s to describe this phenomenon where, despite external evidence of their competence, people feel intrinsically unworthy of their success and afraid others will eventually realize they don’t deserve it.

Acclaimed novelist Maya Angelou once said, “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.” Having penned four books myself, I know just how she feels. Sure, I’ve worked hard, but I’m always so acutely aware of how much I don’t know and how much better my writing would be if I’d truly mastered my craft. (The fact that my kids revel in pointing out my grammatical mistakes doesn’t help much!)

If you ever wrestle with a quiet fear of being unmasked as an impostor, I hope these suggestions will help you own your success and get that little fear monkey off your back. It’s a fraud.

Which brings me to why it’s so important to be vigilant about not selling ourselves short by continually focusing on what we haven’t done or are yet to master, and too little on what we have.

1. Own your success; don’t minimize it.

“I thought it was a fluke,” said actor Jodie Foster of her Oscar. “I was afraid I’d have to give it back.”

Attributing success to luck is a common feature of those who struggle with the impostor syndrome. Particularly women, who have tendency to chalk up their good fortune to a helping hand or lucky break, whereas men are more likely to attribute it to a combination of internal factors, such as grit, talent or ability.

Impostor syndrome tends to be the domain of high achievers who are wired to focus more on what they haven’t done than on what they have. So if you tend to be a go-getter, give yourself a minute to acknowledge and celebrate your accomplishments up to now. It’s not only good for self-confidence, it’s good for the soul.

Minimizing your success doesn’t serve anyone. If you sometimes feel undeserving, get out a pen and paper and write a list of all that you’ve done just over the last 12 months. I would hazard a guess that even attempting to record how much you’ve done will help you realize that you’ve earned every bit of the success, influence and respect you enjoy.

2. Stop with the comparisons.

When I was invited to spend a week on Necker Island with Richard Branson and a host of successful entrepreneurs, I spent the first two days waiting for someone to realize I was there by mistake. And then, after an illuminating conversation with Marianne Williamson, I had an epiphany. We’re not all made to be like Richard Branson nor would it serve the world if we were. Each of us has a unique mark to make on the world, and when we are caught up comparing ourselves to others, it only leaves us feeling less than or not enough in some way and diminishes our capacity to make the impact we alone can make.

The fact is, most of your comparisons are unfair because you have a tendency to compare…

• Your weaknesses to others’ strengths
• Your insides to others’ outsides
• Where you are now starting out against someone who’s been in the game far longer

As I write in Make Your Mark: A Guidebook for the Brave Hearted, “Comparing yourself is a race you’ll never win. Don’t get caught up focusing on the gifts or good luck of others. Focus only on making the most of your own.”

3. Focus on the value you bring, not on being perfect.

If you are someone who isn’t willing to settle for mediocrity, more power to you. But there’s a distinct difference between giving your best and being the best; between trying to better yourself and being better than everyone else on the entire planet. All 7 billion of them. One is focused on how you can improve the world; the other is about your ego.

The truth is that you don’t have to have Michelangelo-like mastery or have Einstein’s IQ to provide value for others or be worthy of your success, plus any accolades you receive along the way. Focus on adding as much value as you can, not on scaling some arbitrary bar of perfectionism that leaves you forever striving, never arriving and only feeling perpetually inadequate.

4. Risk outright exposure.

Fear of being found out can dial down our ambitions and cause us to stick to whatever we know we already do well. It’s less risky that way. But while playing safe can provide the short-term illusion of safety, over the long run, it can only leave you less secure and deprive you of ever knowing just how capable and more than adequate you truly are.

Sure, it takes guts to pursue a bold dream with no guarantee of success. When you refuse to let fear of being found out sit in the driver’s seat, you open the door to discover new strengths, grow existing ones and build your own brand of brilliance.

No one else has the same combination of skills, talents, passions and hard-won wisdom as you. Likewise, you are here to make a mark that no one else can. But you’ll only do it when you can embrace your one-of-a-kind brilliance and focus on running your own best race. In the process, you will come to realize that the only impostor you’ve ever had to worry about is the fear that seeks to take up residence in your head.

As you will see from our exchange, one of the things I shared with him is my belief that failure is never final but really just an opportunity to learn about what ‘doesn’t work’ so we can be smarter in succeeding at what does!

Over the years I’ve fallen short of achieving the outcomes I’ve wanted (my definition of failure) more times than I care to count. Yet every single time I’ve learned a really valuable lesson and ultimately ended up far better off than had I never risked the failure to begin with.

I hope our interview will inspire you to embrace a ‘risk-ready’ mindset that embraces failure as a necessary requirement for success.

As I wrote in last week’s blog, when we try to make perfect choices about everything, every-time, we reduce our capacity to make really smart ones when they matter most. Likewise, when you don’t give yourself permission to fall short of your ideal outcome, it stops you from daring to try and, in doing so, deprives you of valuable opportunities for discovering whole new possibilities for yourself in your work and life.

When I asked Bill Marriott if, at eighty-something and having built the world’s largest hotel chain with over 6,000 properties, whether he still worried about failing, he laughed. “Every single day,” he chuckled. Yet he said that he’d long since learned that if you let your fear of messing up keep you from starting out you’ll never learn, you’ll never grow and you’ll deprive yourself of reasons to celebrate when you do succeed!

So as you think about what you have going on right now, ask yourself, where is an experience of failure from your past keeping you from taking the risk you need to experience the success you want in the future?

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Remember, failure is an event, not a person.[/inlinetweet]

No outcome ever defines who you are. You define yourself and, to quote Martin Luther King Jr, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

Stand tall amid your failures and challenges and you’ll discover that they hold far more valuable lessons for you than success ever can.

Your children, the goals you’ve achieved, the challenges you’ve overcome or the ways you’ve helped others to overcome their own.

As you should be. Yet sometimes we can be too proud for our own good. Like when we let our fear of losing face keep us from forging new ground and taking a risk toward the things we want most.

Let me explain.

Over the weekend I hosted my first Live Brave Day here in Melbourne. It was a very special day as nearly 100 big-hearted people came together from across Australia to reset their compass on the highest vision for their lives and confront the fears and beliefs that stand in their way.

Yet the day would never have happened if I hadn’t lay my own pride on the line and risked the possibility that no-one would register. In fact, initial registrations were slow and back in mid December, I found myself feeling very vulnerable. I recall saying to my husband, “I guess I can share this failure in the years to come… once my pride has repaired.”

Fortunately, as people returned to work in the new year registrations took off. (Phew.) But that isn’t the point. The point is that unless we are willing to lay our pride on the line when life calls for it, we we cage ourselves in and cut ourselves off.

Misplaced pride, driven by our fear of losing face and desire to keep up appearances and win admiration, can keep us from taking the very risks needed to build our confidence, competence and courage to enjoy more of what we most want in our lives – personally and professionally. Left unchecked, it can keep us living so safe that we fail by default.

Like grapes on a vine, if we aren’t growing, you are withering. It is only when we dare to do more, be more and give more than we have up to now (and risk having your pride dinted in the process) that we can ever blossom into the full quota of the human being we were born to become. As a wrote in Brave, “Growth and comfort can’t ride the same horse.”

Research by Harvard’s Dan Gilbert (outlined in his book Stumbling on Happiness) found that at life’s end, people regret far more the risks they didn’t take than those they did – including those that didn’t pay off. Why? Because even when we don’t get the outcomes we want, we still learn a lot in the process that helps us do better in the future. But when we risk nothing, we learn nothing.

It’s why even if only 7 people had turned up for my Live Brave Day (that’s how many had registered by late December), I would not have regretted it because I long ago decided to live by the mantra, “Fear regret more than failure.”

I’ve met many people over the years who’ve unconsciously allowed their pride to limit them in many ways. People who have:

• Turned down roles they deemed ‘beneath them’ even though they would have been valuable stepping stones to bigger and better opportunities ahead.
• Hit a plateau  in their career/ business because they weren’t willing to try anything they didn’t want to risk jeopardizing their image as a guru/legend/gold-maker (and been lousy uninspiring leaders in the process).
• Struggled in their job rather than asking for help and support, afraid of being seen as needy or incompetent (and ultimately paid a price when they failed to meet expectations).
• Refused to admit making a mistake, much less apologize for it (profoundly damaging trust in their relationships).
• Lingered for years in unhappy, sometimes abusive, relationships because they couldn’t stand to think of how others might view them if they owned the truth.

So let me ask you:

Where is your fear of losing face keeping you in a ‘holding pattern’ (or worse, going backward) in your work/career, your relationships or your life?

More so, what goal is worth the possibility that you might fall flat on your face in the process?

• Taking your career to the next level and beyond.
• Creating a business that is far more competitive & adds far more value.
• Being a true leader and role model for the people you care about.
• Making a change in your life that’s been weighing you down for far too long.
• Building truthful and deeply trusting relationships.
• Using your talents and know-how to make a more meaningful mark in the world.

As I say in the video above (which I filmed live on my Facebook page yesterday), when we let fear of losing face keep us from forging new ground, we stagnate, we sell out on ourselves and we cut off the possibility of ever knowing all that we could ultimately achieve and become.

When I interviewed Ita Buttrose, one of Australia’s trailblazing entrepreneurs for Stop Playing Safe, she said to me: “True success in leadership and in life requires being willing to lay your reputation on the line.”

Steve Jobs expressed a similar sentiment as he battled an incurable cancer:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

So as you look toward your future, consciously decide not to let your pride keep you from putting yourself ‘out there’, however vulnerable you feel in the process. What you want most is riding on it.

She asked for my advice and I encouraged her to ‘get back on her horse’ and keep applying for other positions that leveraged her strengths. In the meanwhile, I suggested she continue developing her skill set and doing an outstanding job in her current role, even if she was past ready to move on.

I totally understood how she felt.  I recall feeling deflated by a spate of rejections when, on returning home from a year off travelling the world after graduating university, I was unable to land a ‘good job’ and ended up washing dishes in corporate cafeterias to make ends meet for a couple months. It was hard staying ‘positive’ (particularly when I had to clean the plates of some of my former classmates). Yet as I’ve learnt from numerous rejections since, that’s when it matters most.

Unless you’re made of psychological Teflon, it’s hard not to feel the sting of being rejected. Yet many people cut themselves off from the possibility of getting what they want because of their fear of how they’ll feel if they are rejected in the process.

Put another way:

We reject ourselves before anyone else has a chance to do it!

I remember finding myself standing beside Oprah’s best friend Gayle Kelly while checking into a hotel and thinking to myself, “This is my chance to connect to Oprah!” But my fear of Gayle fobbing me off as a crazy person invading her personal space was enough for me to say nothing. I kicked myself afterward because I was left wondering “But what if I’d tried?”

Last year, while doing a little self-reflection, I realised that despite all my talk of being brave, I often hold back from saying or doing things for fear of people not responding how I’d like. So I decided to do a little experiment. I set myself up a “Risk Rejection Scorecard” and set a goal of risking 50 rejections over 10 weeks. It wasn’t that I wanted to be rejected 50 times (I’m not masachistic) but that I wanted to build my ‘rejection resilience.’

It worked.

Every day for ten weeks I asked myself “What would I do today if I weren’t afraid of being rejected?” As I was working on my next book Make Your Mark (coming out in April) at the time, a lot of the time the answer was to ask people I admired if they’d review my book and, if they felt it worthy, write an endorsement. I went for the big names.

I got tons of rejections. Or no reply at all (another form of rejection.) But while I did feel a little kick each time, with each email I sent (or resent) I gave myself a pat on the back for being brave. At least I was walking my talk. In the end, I got some wonderful endorsements. As I say below, it’s simple maths:

The more you risk people saying no, the greater the odds you’ll have people say yes!

The truth is, you can never have what you want if you’re not willing to risk rejection. Not the job. Not the book deal. Not the love of your life. Not the client of your dreams.

So if you’ve been reading this thinking I’ve been spying on you, then I hope the following three tips will help you risk more rejection and bounce back from it faster.

1. Don’t take it personally!
The most successful people – whether corporate executives, politicians, artists or entrepreneurs – risk rejection time and time again throughout their working lives. When it happens, they know it’s not personal. It’s just life. Accordingly, they refuse misinterpret someone else’s subjective assessment of them to mean anything about their own worthiness.

Sadly though, too many talented people, burnt by an early rejection, spend their lives avoiding the possibility of feeling it again! As I wrote in my latest book Brave, “It’s not the rejection itself that we fear, it’s the negative meaning we attach to it.”

Just like Teresa, people take it to mean that they are deficient in some way – not clever enough, good enough, worthy enough or attractive enough. It means none of that. It just means that someone – who may have no clue about who you are – has decided you aren’t a fit for them. They may have incomplete information. They may be extremely biased. They may have a whole host of reasons. So whatever you do:

Don’t make rejection mean something it doesn’t.

2. Use rejection to fine-tune your offer
Not only do successful people not misinterpret rejection as a permanent inadequacy on their part, but they use the feedback from a knock back to improve their odds of success moving forward.

When it’s appropriate and possible, ask for feedback and look at what others are doing that you aren’t. Use that information to fine tune what you are offering (a new product or service) or polish how you are offering it (e.g. rework your application letter, polish your presentation, practice your interview skills).

Just don’t let a rejection go to waste. It’s too valuable not to put to good use.

3. Risk more rejection
You don’t have to be a statistician to understand that the more often you put yourself out there, the better your odds of achieving what you want.

As a little known first time author, I submitted my first book to over 30 publishers before I finally landed an international publishing deal. Find Your Courage is now in 6 languages. As the saying goes: ‘You’ve got to be in it to win it’.

By refusing to get sucked into negative comparisons, blame, self-rebuke and self-pity you can turn your ‘rejections’ into stepping-stones that take you closer to your goals.

I am pleased to say that Teresa took my advice and did just that. She kept applying for new positions and eventually she landed one. Better still, the very process of applying for roles gave her greater clarity about the sort of roles she actually wanted and her value in the wider job market. She ultimately ended up leaving her firm for a far more senior role with a competitor company.

Life’s like that.

Those who consistently show up and press on, even when things don’t go to plan, are those who ultimately get ahead and win in the bigger game.

It can be the same for you! If you stay open minded, act on feedback and refuse to get pulled into your own little pity party, you will find that risking rejection when life calls for it will eventually pay big dividends.

Which begs the question: If you knew that rejection was no more than a stepping-stone toward your goals, where would you risk more of it in the year to come?

I dare you to put yourself ‘out there’ and brave the possibility of rejection —not to injure your pride, but to expand your possibilities. Surely that’s worth the occasional sting?

It’s not true. What is true is that each of us can do pretty amazing things. We just have to refuse to buy into the stories we tell ourselves about why we can’t, roll up our sleeves and do the hard yards!

While not everyone aspires to build a global fashion empire or design jewelry for the stars, every single one of us can take an idea that inspires us and turn it into something that inspires others.

Drawing on the hard-won wisdom these big thinking women had to share, along with my previous interview with Emma Isaacs, founder of Business Chicks, below are eight lessons for building whatever it is that lights you up.

1. Be passionate: Building any business requires enormous investment of energy, grit and hard work. So be clear about why you’re up to the challenge and if you can’t put your heart into it, get out of it.

2. Define your difference: Know what your brand stands for and how it stands apart from your competitors. Your value lies in what sets you apart. So while you may want to out do everyone else on what they do well, your competitive edge is doing what no one else will ever do as well as you.

3. Communicate your Why: Get your employees on board with the bigger mission you’re trying to serve. People are hungry to feel that what they do serves a purpose bigger than profit. As Samantha Wills shared, “You need to be always going back to the ‘why’.”

4. Risk mistakes: Don’t wait to have a perfect plan. Just do what makes the most sense and trust that you’ll finesse the rest as you go along. Fail fast, fail often and fail forward. As Emma Isaacs shared with me the first time I interviewed her for RawCourage.TV, “Every minute of the day I’m thinking I hope I can pull this one off.”

Unless we’re willing to back ourselves, to lean in to our fear and take the risk we never discover just how much we can do!

5. Work from your strengths: You can’t be good at everything and if you try to be, you’ll hold your business back. So work from your strengths and recruit people to do what you’ll never do well. Richard Branson shared the same advice with me when I interviewed him on Necker Island. Do what you do well and leave others to do what they do better than you ever can!

6. Don’t over personalize: Things won’t always go well and people won’t always respond the way you’d like. That’s business. That’s life. So don’t take rejection too personally or interpret a mistake as a personal and permanent deficiency on your part. If you’re forging new ground, you’re going to get it wrong some times. As Emma Isaacs also shared during our conversation above, “When things don’t go as you want, don’t make a big drama about it.” Learn the lesson and move on. People who achieve the most aren’t continually avoiding the possibility of rejection or failure. They just aren’t taking it personally when their risks don’t pay off.

7. Ditch your ego: Too much pride can hold your business hostage and keep you from taking the risks needed to forge new ground, admit mistakes and ask for help. There’s no space in a growing business for ego. Not if you want it to succeed anyway. No matter how big  your business grows, it’s never ‘too big too fail’ as we learned in 2008. Pride is the enemy of learning, innovation and growth.

8. Hire (and fire) on values:  Management guru Peter Drucker has said that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ It’s why hiring people who will fit with your culture is more important than hiring really smart people who may only undermine it. All three women spoke about the importance of only bringing people on board if their values align with your own. If you get it wrong, waste no time letting go those who don’t fit. The wrong people can be toxic to the rest of your workforce and cost you far more in the long run that cutting your losses as soon as you realize you have a cultural misfit.

The goal of leadership is to find a just balance between competing values and competing goals, but sacrificing values in pursuit of your goals can exact a steep toll in the longer term. As Lizzy Abegg, founder, Spell & The Gypsy Collective said, “You need to find people who literally get up in the morning and bounce into the office.”

Margie has been appointed Australia’s first Ambassador for Women in Global Business by the Australian Federal Government. WIBG was created to support Australian business women in expanding their businesses around the world. To access support and resources, visit www.wigb.gov.au

Yep, me too.  It’s a common phenomenon. So much so that there’s likely been times that you’ve left others feeling that way. I’m sure I have.

The reality is that we’re wired to think our view of the world (along with the problems and people in it) is the right one. If only everyone would see (think and act) as you do all would be well, right?! But consider this:

While your perspective may seem completely logical to you, other people think the same about theirs!

The most successful people I’ve ever met have all been great listeners. People who asked lots of questions and don’t assume they have all the answers. People like Richard Branson who carries a notebook with him everywhere he goes and Bill Marriott who recently shared with me (below) why lousy listeners make even lousier leaders.

If you’re currently dealing with tension in a relationship, I have a suggestion for you. Find some time to sit down and spend at least 15 minutes trying to understand their perspective more fully.  Here are six ways you can listen better:

1. Listen to understand, not be understood.  In other words, put aside your agenda and concerns and commit yourself only to seeing through their eyes and feeling through their heart. Think beyond what they are saying to why they’re saying it
2. Create safety. People often struggle to share what’s on their mind and heart, so do what you can to make them feel safe and at ease.  You could help them to open up by saying “I’ve got a feeling that somethings been on your mind and I’d love to know what it is if you’d be open to talking about it. What’s been troubling you?”
3. Speak sparingly. Since you’re only intention is to understand you should never push back on anything they say or attempt to ‘enlighten’ them as to the error of their ways. Rather the only time you should speak is to:
   1. acknowledge their experience (eg. “I get that must have been really tough”),
   2. clarify you’re on the same page (e.g. “So let me just check I’ve got this right, you’re saying that…. ” and
   3. ask questions to draw out more information (e.g. “So what happened before that?” or “Why did they do that?”)
4.  Listen for what’s left unsaid.   As they share, listen for what they are not willing or able to say out loud. What are the “unspoken concerns” (fears, motivations, wants and needs) they are speaking from. For instance, are they anxious about the future and how they’ll handle it? Are they afraid of being left behind? Are they trying to protect their job or ego?  Are they too afraid to ask? Are they feeling unvalued? Are they scared of rejection or being humiliated in public? Are they craving affirmation or encouragement?
5. Lean in to your intuition. The deepest level of listening goes beyond relying on what you hear or see. It requires tuning in to your intuition and letting it point you toward whatever you really need to get present to in the other person.
6. Allow the silence. It’s in the silence of a conversation that it can get to the heart of the issue that really needs to be addressed, yet too often we fill the silence to avoid the discomfort it can create.  Don’t. Let the silence do its work because the more sensitive an issue, the greater space people need to think about the issues, work through their own conflicted feelings and find a way to express what they have to say.

To view my Facebook Live video on why listening better can impact your relationships at work and home, just click here.

Of course, listening to someone better than you have before may not change your opinion. However it may give you a whole new appreciation for why others see, think, feel and act quite differently to you.   By genuinely trying to see through their eyes and understand how they feel, you place a big deposit into the ‘relationship account’ which can open the door to building bridges, growing collaboration and finding a ‘middle ground’ that you could could otherwise.

As I wrote in Brave, listening is the singular most valuable yet underutilized tool of communication. Ironically enough, the word ‘LISTEN’ has the same letters as the word ‘SILENT’. (Bet you didn’t know that huh?)

Winston Churchill once said, ‘Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen’.  Given all the turmoil going on in our world right now, there’s never been a better time to start being more deliberate in trying to understand those who see the world differently to you.

Your ears will never get you into trouble and, who knows, you may just learn something that changes everything.