I worked really hard for over a year, sitting behind my computer, writing, editing, and working on my first-ever talk that I was going to deliver. It was going to be for executive women, on how they could beat burnout without quitting their job. I rehearsed it, I refined it, until I got it to this place where I felt okay, this is it. I finally got it, it’s ready to go.
So I book my first gig, I’m on stage about 45 minutes in and I’m thinking, this is going really well. I’m getting the head nods and the smiles from the audience, and I’m feeling really confident about what it is I’m delivering. So at about minute 45, I’m in the middle of training my third and kind of final section, the last piece that I’m going to leave them.
And while I’m saying out loud the actual content that I had written and I had rehearsed, simultaneously while live on stage in front of an audience, I am thinking in my head, this is so stupid. This is dumb. This is not what you should be talking about right here.
Of course I just finished, then I went back to the drawing board, re-did it, found a new third section that felt good and delivered it that way for probably another year, until I finally landed on something that felt even better. But that’s how it goes, that’s how we end up. I remember when I was a corporate executive, I was in sales, and I would spend so much time sitting behind the monitor, doing all of my research and putting together my presentations, all of this time – but almost all of the learnings happened once I was in it.
Once I was in the experience, whether it was speaking to colleagues at a team meeting or delivering the presentation to a client, most of my discovery and the real truth about what success would look like or what was supposed to be there didn’t happen behind my monitor. It happened out there in the real world, in the experience of it.
And for a lot of people, that can be really scary because you’re thinking, oh my gosh, if I don’t have this perfect, when I get out there I might fail. And public failure for most people is extremely scary, but failure is where we want to go. I’ll never forget hearing a story from Sara Blakely, who was the creator of Spanx. She has also launched a new line of shoes, but she shared how after school, her dad would ask her and her brother how they failed at school that day, and it was his way of encouraging them to just continue to fail.
And isn’t that the truth? That really is where we gain our insights, our expertise, our true learning, is by putting ourselves in those experiences where we could potentially fail. And it is a little bit of a mindset to be thinking, I’ve got to be okay with some public failure. I trust that you are such a high performer that it’s not very likely that you’re going to fall super flat on your face and have public humiliation, right?
I trust in you that you’re going to do your due diligence.
So I want to encourage you to take that step out and go out there, even if it means you may have some failure. Because it’s not until we get out there that we really learn what it is that is going to make the difference – again, in whatever capacity – a project, a presentation.
Think about what that looks like for you today, this week, this month. Where have you maybe been sitting behind your monitor in this kind of safety zone, thinking that you still need to do some work and get things ready? I’m going to encourage you to take that step out there!