Resilience: Vulnerability, Failures, Mindset, & Bouncing Back

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Your success in life is massively impacted by your relationship with feedback, failures, vulnerability, and bouncing back. You can’t get through life without a heavy dose of each of them. The heart of these topics really centers around mindset and your own degree of resilience.

I’ll start with what I believe requires the most amount of heavy lifting: vulnerability.

You are imperfect, just like everyone else

Teams are built on relationships, and relationships require connection. In order for a connection between people to be strong and have substance it requires trust and authenticity. There is no quicker path to achieve those things than through vulnerability.

Hands down, vulnerability makes for strong teams.

“Hands down, vulnerability makes for strong teams.”

The strongest place you can come from as a human being is one where you acknowledge that you are imperfect. That there are things you’re not great at, that you don't know everything, and have plenty of areas of opportunity to improve.

This is true for any member of a team and even more so as a leader.

What strength actually looks like.

When it comes to leaders, and any member of a team or relationship, nothing will turn other people away from you faster than trying to uphold a facade of pretending like you know everything and have all the answers, and are never wrong.

The opposite of that is admitting that you don’t have all the answers, and a willingness to be wrong. It also involves being open, receptive to, and actively seeking feedback from others. When we ask for feedback we are acknowledging that we aren’t perfect, and empowering other people to help us improve.

“Truly strong people are willing to admit and acknowledge where they’re weak. Weak people try to convince everyone of how strong they are.”

Being an old-school, command-and-control style, authority-obsessed leader goes hand in hand with sporting an attitude of “How dare you give me feedback as your boss?” This is incredibly destructive to trust and morale and is also unfathomably common.

The reality here is that truly strong people are willing to admit and acknowledge where they're weak. Weak people try to convince everyone of how strong they are.

Great leaders ask for feedback as freely as they give it. Doing this creates a culture of allowing vulnerability, making stronger teams and organizations.

“Great leaders ask for feedback as freely as they give it.”

One example of the benefits of vulnerability is innovation.

If people are constantly worried about saving face, looking good, and appearances, they rarely take chances. As a result, people won't share ideas unless they think they’re perfect because they’re afraid to be shot down and “look bad.”

People on teams like that have brilliant ideas that they keep to themselves, which ultimately hurts the entire organization.

No vulnerability, no trust

Another factor in play here is trust. How can you trust a leader or someone on a team who's more concerned with saving face and upholding appearances than what's true and real?

“When someone has a very challenging time being vulnerable, it’s difficult to trust that person to tell the truth when a lie would make them look better.”

When someone has a very challenging time being vulnerable, it’s difficult to trust that person to tell the truth when a lie would make them look better. That dynamic inside teams and with leaders is giant when it comes to whether or not employees trust leaders and the organization.

Likewise, when someone is willing to be vulnerable, admit that they aren't perfect, and not afraid to fail in front of others, it goes a long way to building trust and better relationships.

Speaking of, let’s get into your relationship with failure

Failure truly is your greatest teacher. Your relationship and mindset around failures and setbacks is tied closely to your success in your personal and professional life. They are inevitable so embrace them, acknowledge that you’ll have them, and let them be a valuable part of your journey and development.

Success does not just look like one thing, it’s different for everyone and unique to every person. Regardless of what success means to you, it will be very hard to achieve without a healthy mindset around failure.

“When you have failures, view them as simply a sentence, page, or chapter in your book as opposed to the title of your entire book.”

When you have failures, view them as simply a sentence, page, or chapter in your book as opposed to the title of your entire book.

We learn more, faster with mistakes and failures than we do with smooth sailing.

For example, you can interact with a hot stove thirty or forty different times but the one time you burn yourself on it, it leaves an huge impression and imprint on you. Yes, it hurts and burns and it sucks, but the failures that you have will give you the greatest, most impressionable lessons of your life if you see them as opportunities to learn and do better.

Mindset, mindset, mindset

Any person that's great at anything has failed many, many times. The reason that they’re great now is because they didn’t allow that to defeat or deflate them, or to not try again.

Bouncing back and being resilient is not easy. To quote the great Lizzo, “I know that it’s hard but you have to try.”

You’ve got to adopt a mindset that says, “I'm gonna get better because of this failure, and I know it won’t be my last.” You will have setbacks and failures, and when you do, you’ll learn from them and leverage them to get better next time.

Fail well, press on. It’s not sexy or glorious but it’ll make the difference in your career and all other aspects of your life.

Want more?

This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop (previously the #shiftyestribe). Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop 

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