Episode 124: How to Fail Successfully

When working with coaching clients, we often come from a place of trying to help them avoid failure. What if we shift that thinking? It’s not our job to help our clients eliminate failure. It's to help them redefine their relationship with it and leverage that failure for success. Today we’re talking about navigating failure in a way that leverages our experiences into future success.

124: How to Fail Successfully

Failure can be an extraordinary teacher if we are open to its lessons. I'm convinced it's the secret to our success. It may seem counterintuitive to talk about helping our clients learn to fail, but failure is a part of life.

Subscribe:  Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Android Devices  |  Stitcher  |  RSS

Show Notes

Failure can be an extraordinary teacher if we are open to its lessons. I'm convinced it's the secret to our success.

It may seem counterintuitive to talk about helping our clients learn to fail, but failure is a part of life. As coaches, we can explore how our language, offers, and programs can help our clients leverage their failures for success. Since none of us can eliminate failure, we can best help our clients by guiding them through the process of navigating it.

Looking back at my experiences, I’ve found that every failure I've had in my life has been a crucial step in my evolution. Today I’m sharing one of my recent failures, and I’ll use that as an example of how we can leverage failure for future success. Enjoy the episode!

Topics covered

  • The many opportunities we can find in failure
  • Why it was important for me to find a creative activity outside of my business
  • What I learned about myself from a recent public failure that threw me for a loop
  • The lessons that come from leaning into our discomfort
  • How failure shows up in our lives as coaches
  • What happens when you stay in the room
  • Tools you can use to be present with yourself
  • Give yourself time to feel your emotions
  • The problem with rushing into action
  • Integrating the wisdom we gain from our failures

Resources mentioned

Now it’s time for you to show the world what it means to be a Coach with Clarity! Screenshot this episode and tag me on Instagram @coachwithclarity and let me know what you’re more excited to explore in future podcast episodes!

* * * * * *

Discover Your Coaching Style! Take the FREE quiz and find out what makes you an extraordinary coach!

Want to connect further? Follow me on Instagram and Threads, and send me a DM!

Want to work together? Learn about Coach with Clarity here!

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

Well, hello, my friend. Welcome to the Coach with Clarity Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. My name is Lee Chaix McDonough, I'm your host, and today we are going to talk about a topic that many of us want to avoid. And yet, I'm convinced it's actually the secret to our success. That's right, we are diving into failure, and what it means not simply to fail, but to fail successfully. I realized talking about failing “successfully” is a bit of an oxymoron. After all, success and failure seem to be opposites. And yet what I have found not just in my 6 plus years of owning a coaching business, and not just in my 20 plus years of being a social worker, and therapist and public health professional, but really, when I look back on my entire life, all 43 years of it, I realize that every single failure I've had has been a crucial step in my evolution. And I would dare say it's been necessary to the success that I've achieved so far. A lot of times in coaching, when we're working with our clients, we are talking about failure, specifically how our fear of failure can get in our way. And then when we're working with our clients, whether it's helping them create a vision, or developing a strategy or implementing all of the tactics they need to achieve success, we are doing so from a place of trying to help them avoid failure. And what I might suggest to you today is that, as coaches, perhaps our job is not to help our clients avoid failure. Instead, it's to help them redefine their relationship with it, so that they can see how their own failures lead to success. So that means really embracing this idea that failure is a necessary component of success. We are not going to succeed unless we first fail. So let me just say that if you're finding it hard to embrace that idea, that's okay. All I ask today is that you create some space to explore the relationship between failure and success. And to recognize that when we fail, it is an opportunity to learn something about ourselves, about others, about the world around us and how we operate in it. It's also an opportunity for us to get stronger, to build our resilience. And then I think failure is also an opportunity for us to develop a greater sense of empathy for others. And to heighten our own self awareness. Failure can be an extraordinary teacher, if we are open to its lessons. And so that's what I want to explore today. 

 

* * * * * * * 

Click to read the entire transcript

Subscribe!
Recent Episodes

What's your coaching superpower?

I’ve uncovered five primary coaching styles — which one are you?