A while ago, I attended a continuing education workshop. The leader, a brilliant man in his 60’s, used the group to simulate real life scenarios to teach us new coaching techniques. He then encouraged us all to fail. “Fail and fail again” he said. No pressure, right?
For two days, our failures became our lessons. We looked at how we engaged. Dissected what we did well and what we could have done better. We pushed through our own experience and imagined the impact our actions had on others. We looked at where our fears got in the way of our best intentions, and what had emerged in the dynamic that taught us something we didn’t expect.
Through the process, the workshop leader helped us turn our mistakes into what he called “quality failures.” We failed, we learned, and we installed the corrective experience in our minds to help us become more proficient in the future. At the end of the workshop, our failures created our success. Lack of engagement was never an option.