Thoughts are like drops of water: with our thoughts we can drown in a sea of negativity, or we can float on the ocean of life. - Louise Hay
In a recent coaching session, I shared my biggest failure that also made my engineering career - maybe you find it useful too.
📖 Story time - The day I deleted a production database.
It was late one evening - more than 15 years ago - when the worst happened - I accidentally deleted a critical production database while trying to fix an issue impacting customers. I vividly remember the terror racing through my mind, thinking 😨 "What an idiot...I'm done...It's over...I'll be fired." Many engineers have been publicly shamed or fired for similar mistakes, and I was going to be the next one.
While we were ultimately able to restore from backup, I was traumatized. I felt filled with guilt, embarrassment, shame, and dread over letting my team and our customers down.
Little did I know, that is how we - humans - are hardwired.
🧠 Our brains have evolved to avoid potential threats and pain. This is part of the "fight-or-flight" response - our body's automatic reaction to perceived harmful events or attacks.
When we make a mistake, especially in a professional context, our brain can trigger this fight-or-flight response. We may feel a surge of adrenaline and a strong urge to either confront the "threat" (fight) or avoid it (flight). This manifests as feelings of embarrassment, worry about disappointing others, or concerns about not being good enough. Essentially, our brain is trying to protect us from negative consequences, even though the "threat" in this case is just the mistake itself, not an external danger.
Knowing this evolutionary backstory can help us manage those fears better, instead of letting them hold us back.
🌟 So how can we move past those fears to embrace productive failure?
Here are three strategies I've tried to adopted.
🚧 Yes, I am still work-in-progress! 🚧
1️⃣ Make it cool to fail. Create a journal celebrating your failures and what you learned from them. This reframes them as badges of honor. By doing so, you will start to see them as valuable experiences that have shaped your progress, rather than just embarrassing mistakes.
2️⃣ Become the best at failing fast. It turns out that the more effort you put into something, the harder it is to handle negative feedback or failure. Instead, get feedback early and often before over-investing time and effort. This allows you to learn and adjust course more efficiently, without getting stuck in sunk costs or wasted effort.
3️⃣ Master learning from failure. Ask open-minded "learner" questions to understand what went wrong rather than closed-minded "judger" questions focused on assigning blame. By doing that, you can extract more valuable insights from failures and focus on progress, rather than getting stuck in unproductive cycles of shame or finger-pointing.
What failure made you who you are today?
👇 Lets celebrate our failures in the comment section! 👇
📚 Full story here:
#lessonlearned #growthmindset #growth #career #coaching