 Are you not trying that new thing because you're afraid of failing? You're not alone. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Halloween is a fun time for dressing up and letting ourselves be scared. When it comes to our professional lives, our fears can hold us back from living to our full potential. One of the most common fears that limits us is fear of failing. I think we all get a little nervous when we get assigned a new responsibility or are considering an opportunity that takes us out of our comfort zone. Just like we talked about with the other things that scare us, the actual failure isn't as important as how we react to it. One of the reasons we're sometimes afraid to try is that we're afraid we won't be good at it right away. There's often a lot of emphasis on getting it right the first time, or if we're going to do something, we're going to do it right. And there are times when those ideas are important, but in order to grow and learn we have to be willing to make a few mistakes along the way. Also, like many of our fears, we've had some bad experiences in our past that we don't want to repeat, and negative motivation is much stronger in our brains than positive motivation. The most important thing to remember when we don't get the outcome that we're looking for is that in the grand scheme of things, it's probably just not that bad. If no one's dead and no one's physically injured, we're probably all going to be okay no matter what happened. There are very few individual mistakes that we can make that can result in complete failure of our companies or result in us losing our jobs. It's important to assess what the real impact of the failure is without exaggerating it or following it down a rabbit hole to an extreme worst case scenario. I'm not saying we should sugarcoat whatever it is that went wrong, just avoid letting our brains spiral out of control on all of the negative possibilities that could occur in the future. We want to recognize what happened, correct it if possible, and move on without dwelling on our negative feelings. Failure is one of the best teachers that we'll ever have, and while we don't want to dwell on the feeling of failure or treat ourselves like we're a bad person because we failed, there are many things we can learn from not getting the things we went after. Some of the questions we can ask ourselves are, what really caused the failure? Was it one thing or a combination? Did we make assumptions that later turned out not to be true? Did we have a good understanding of the environment and circumstances around us in regard to this situation? Did we underestimate the impact our decision would have on others? Did we underestimate the amount of resources we needed? Were we too aggressive on our timeline? Did we utilize all the members of our team? Or were our expectations too high? And there are a lot of other questions we can ask to assess why we didn't get the outcome we wanted. Remember, we're asking these questions to see what lessons we can apply to our next endeavor without judging ourselves. We may learn some things about ourselves that we didn't expect, or find some areas for personal development out of this process, but we shouldn't cast ourselves as a bad person or a failure because we could have done some things better. Once we've done a little self-reflection on what happened, it's time for us to look to the future. If we have an opportunity to try again to the same task, let's apply what we learned to build the plan to get it done successfully this time. If we found some things out about ourselves that we'd like to improve, let's pull out our leadership development plans and update them with some new short-term goals and action steps to address those areas. If the moment has passed on whatever it is we were trying to do and there's no chance to recover it, it's time to let it go and find a new project or idea to put our time and energy into. Nobody likes to fail. Nobody. And we've all had our share of failures, so no one's alone in that. What's really important is that we don't let our failures prevent us from ever trying again to achieve something that we can do to make some good in the world. As leaders, we also want to encourage others to do the same. When we don't achieve the outcomes we desire, it's helpful to remind ourselves that while it's disappointing, the situation is probably not all that bad. It never feels good to fail, but we don't want to dwell on that feeling for too long. We do want to honestly evaluate the circumstances and causes of the failure and learn from it to do better in our next project. Failure frees us to move on to something new that might turn out to be even better than what we originally tried to do. Now that this endeavor is over, where would we like to spend our time and energy next? Find a new challenge and take it on. If you found this helpful, please share it with a friend or coworker. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and click off on that globe to the right. That'll get you to subscribe to our email list and that'll bring all of our content direct to your inbox. If you have any leadership or business questions you'd like us to answer, reach out to us on social media or email us at info at evilgeniusleadership.com. Thanks for watching. I really appreciate it. And remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.