Welcome to the New Manager Podcast.
I'm your host, Kim Nicol. Hello and welcome.
I'm glad you're here, and I hope you're doing well.
The inspiration for today's episode comes from something
that happened a week or so ago, and if you follow me on
LinkedIn, you might already know this story.
You might have been a part of this story because earlier this
month I decided to host an audio event on LinkedIn, and I
scheduled the event. I invited a bunch of people, you
know, RSVP D that they would come.
I planned the content. I had everything ready to go.
And on the day of the event, I, you know, I started, I turned on
the the microphone. I opened up the audio room, and
I started giving my talk. And about 20 minutes in, I
realized that no one could hear me.
I had been talking to myself the entire time.
And I felt this sinking feeling, this feeling of Oh my gosh,
people have been waiting. People have been coming and
leaving and coming and leaving and I finally understood why
people were trying to figure out how to get the audio on.
Because the of the how the platform works, you can't
communicate to the host. Like it's really tricky to
communicate to the host when the event is happening.
So people were commenting on this other section of the page
that I didn't see until I clicked out and refresh the page
and then started to see all of these comments.
I can't hear can anybody hear her It you know the green light
said that I was going live, but there was one other setting that
I had overlooked that I didn't realize it was the one where you
select your audio source and it was set to a default and I had I
needed to change that to the actual microphone I was using
and I didn't know that because it was the first time using the
platform. So the 1st 20 minutes of this
one hour, you know, talk. I was really doing a great job.
I had so much to share. I was doing such a great job and
I was feeling really good. And when I realized that in fact
no one could hear me, it felt terrible.
And I wanted to share this story with you for a couple of
reasons. Because there are going to be
times where you feel like you have failed.
In that moment, I felt like a failure.
I thought I totally failed this. This was the one thing is that
people needed to hear me and they can't hear me like, oh,
this is not, this is not working.
And this. The other hard part about it was
it felt really public. It was in front of a bunch of
people, some of whom I knew but some of whom I didn't or whom I
didn't know very well. So there was also this feeling
of being seen not doing a great job at something and not doing a
great job at something that I really care about.
And the point is and the big kind of aha that came from that
experience that I want to share with you is that you are going
to have these fails, you are going to mess up sometimes,
especially when you're doing something new.
And the point is not to avoid failure at all costs.
The point of your career and your work life is not to avoid
messing up all the time. In fact, you want to realize
that sometimes you will mess up, sometimes you will overlook
something. Sometimes you will not know how
a system works or how a tool works, and you won't figure that
out until you're in front of other people.
And it's a lot. You know, a live situation and
then the thing breaks. Or then the thing you know, the
the the overlook reveals itself in that moment.
And the reason why you want to expect, you want to anticipate.
OK, Even if I prepare, even if I care a lot, even if I think I've
thought of everything, sometimes I'm going to mess up.
When you understand that is a part of the process, especially
when you're doing something new, you will still feel bad, right?
'cause I'm not, you know, it just feels bad when you realize,
Oh my gosh, this is not what I wanted.
And yet it is happening right now and I feel kind of
embarrassed or I just, I feel bad about this.
You'll still have that feeling, that sense of I feel bad about
this, but it won't hold you back from continuing to learn and
grow. Because the scary thing, the
worst thing, is if you have this bad experience and you think,
well, I messed up or I failed at that, therefore I will never try
something new again. I will never extend myself
again. I will say no to new
opportunities. I will say no to new tools.
I will say no to anything that is new or different because I'm
afraid that I will fail at it. I'm afraid of what people will
think if they see me being bad at something or not having it
all together. The worst thing you can do is
make yourself smaller, make your career smaller and make your
your work life smaller from a place of fear, right?
Like, it's really different to choose something small because
you're like, oh, that's cozy. You know, like, I don't want
this really big thing. I actually want this small, cozy
thing. Like when we do it from that
place of intention and comfort and security and confidence,
that's really different. But when we choose to stay small
because we are afraid that we will not be capable or we are
afraid of messing up in front of other people, that's totally
optional. And why I want to invite you to
is to notice, you know what the effect of that is, especially
long term. So instead of making yourself
smaller to avoid the possibility of failure or the possibility of
messing up, instead take this perspective of yes, sometimes I
will mess up, sometimes it will feel like I'm failing.
You know, learning feels like failing sometimes, you know.
That's how we learn. It is iterative.
We try things, and then we learn from what works and we learn
from what doesn't. If everything worked perfectly
all the time, number one, that would get really boring really
fast, and #2 the learning would go down.
There's less to learn when everything goes right all of the
time. So, you know, consider the
possibility that messing up, making mistakes, having fails is
not a problem. It's part of the process.
The scary part, the hard part, is that the further you go in
your career, the more visible you become.
Especially as a leader. There are more people looking to
you that can feel like pressure. And sometimes the type of fails
that we are worried about are not just for ourselves but for
those who depend upon us. So it's important to build your
recovery ability when you know when you have a misstep or when
you have a fail to feel the discomfort and then as quickly
as you can get to the place of OK.
Was this a worthy fail? Was this a quality mistake?
For me personally, careless mistakes drive me nuts because
they seem so avoidable. Like, I don't like careless
mistakes. I like to bring care and
attention and tend to things. If it's something that happens
because it's something that was outside of your control or you
were new and so you just didn't know what you didn't know.
It wasn't carelessness. It was just like, oh, I
actually, I didn't know. That's how it worked.
That's the kind of feel that we can really learn a lot from and
even with, I will say even with the careless fails, when it's
something that goes off and it's from this place of being
careless, there can also be great learning in that it's
like, why did I make this careless mistake?
Is it because I am completely exhausted?
Have I been overworking and under resourced?
Is that what's going on? Is it careless because my
priority and attention was focused on this other thing
instead? Was it careless?
You know, a careless mistake? Because I just don't like,
literally don't care about this thing?
And does that mean, is that a sign that I actually need to
divest myself from this project or delegate it or really be
honest with myself and what I am agreeing to do?
I don't want to say yes to something and then be careless
about it. So even then, the ones that feel
most frustrating to me, there's still levels of learning.
There's still information that is valuable to have even in
those moments. So holding this perspective of
the fails themselves are not the problem.
And messing up is not a problem. It's part of the process of
learning and growth. There's a lot of value when we
take the time to learn from them.
There's no need to beat up on yourself about it, and that's
really hard. If you have kind of a
perfectionism standard or if you are underrepresented in your
workplace or in your industry. There can be extra pressure to
feel like there's not as much grace given to you, like you're
under greater scrutiny. The standard is higher for you
because you are the only one like you in your current
workplace or in your industry, so it can be difficult.
It can be really uncomfortable to make the space and to have
the compassion for yourself. To say, OK, this was a worthy
fail, this was a quality mistake.
There is something here that I can learn and I'm not going to
further punish myself by making myself smaller, by shrinking
myself away from opportunities to grow or from, you know,
holding myself back from new opportunities.
We want to acknowledge what's going on and then use it to
continue forward. And this brings me to this other
kind of related topic, which is in the workplace and throughout
your career, there will be times when you will really question,
you know, how am I doing. This is really hard.
Is this worth it? Am I doing a good job?
There will be times that come up and sometimes, you know, we we
tend to take that really personally.
Like, oh, not just I failed at this, but like I am a failure.
And now everybody knows. But instead of going down that
path, I want you to ask yourself, like, how much of this
is about me as a person versus how much of this is a process
issue? Is there something that we need
to change or something that's happening in the in the process
of this work that contributed to this outcome?
Right. Let's look at this not just as a
personal issue, but what can we learn if we look at it as a
process issue? That's one perspective shift and
then the other perspective is we pull back even more and we look
at the environment and the systems that are influencing all
the other aspects here. Because sometimes what's
actually going on, it's like you as an individual are simply a
symptom like you're demonstrating or kind of showing
what the the missing, you know, component is or it it's kind of
like the failure exhibits itself through individual people.
But the real issue is actually an environmental issue or a
systems level issue. And that becomes really helpful
because it allows us to place our attention and effort in a
more accurate way. It's kind of like if you know
the outcome isn't working because actually let me think of
it this way. It's like, so if I went live on
this audio platform and the audio didn't work, but I didn't
understand that because the only signal I got was I got the green
light on the screen That said, hey, all is good, you're
streaming, then we can look at that as like a process or
systems level. When we look at it as, oh if
someone is going live for the first time, what do they need to
know? Maybe we need to create a better
explainer or a better host checklist so that whoever is
hosting knows, hey, you know, check your audio source that's
going to be here under this unmarked carrot and you wouldn't
even know that you could choose an audio source if you've never
done this before. It's kind of like that
difference between, oh, you know, I like I failed to do the
thing versus oh, we can make it easier for new folks to
understand. Here are all the things you want
to check before you go live. So it's helpful to take that
bigger perspective. And the last kind of note on
this is I want you to consider that every job you have, even if
you're self-employed, even if you run your own, you know
agency or your own business, every job you have is temporary.
You won't be in it forever. At some point, you'll leave.
Whether you choose to leave or whether something happens and
you leave, you know, because of a layoff or a workforce
reduction or maybe you get fired, that could happen.
But if we keep in mind that every job is temporary, if every
job is temporary, if we're only here for a limited time, then
the question that becomes really important is how do I want to
use the time that I have while I am here?
How can I make good use of the time I have while I'm here,
while I'm here in this seat, while I'm here in this role,
working with these people, serving these people?
What do I want to do with the time that I have while I am
here? What do I want to make this
about? And I want to invite you to make
this about learning about growth, about being willing to
do new things to stretch, to try.
I want to invite you to consider that you know while you're
there, make it good and be willing to make mistakes.
Be willing to fail sometimes. Make the best and the most of
what you can while you can, and don't beat yourself up about it.
That's totally optional. I hereby release you from any
requirement of beating up on yourself.
You don't have to do that. As long as we're here, Let's
make it good, OK? And sometimes it might feel
scary. Sometimes we might fail in in a
public way or we might feel like, you know, oh, this
shouldn't be happening. Instead of trying to resist it
or avoid it, just acknowledge. Yeah, sometimes this is going to
happen and I'm not going to beat myself up about it.
I am going to learn from it. I'm going to learn from it so
hard. It's going to be great.
We take a breath and we remember.
As long as I'm here, I want to make good use of my time.
I want to make this as good as I can.
Let's keep going. So that is what I wanted to
share with you today and I want to also invite you to come work
with me in the new year. I have a group program that's
going to be kicking off in February, so make sure that you
get on the wait list to get invited to apply to that.
And you can also work with me one-on-one which you can find
out about from my website kimnickel.com.
I'll put links to both of those in the show notes below, but I
want to thank you again so much for being here for being part of
my listening community. I hope you have a really great
day and I will talk to you next time.
When you're more effective at work, you're happier in your
life, and when you're happier in your life, you're more effective
at work. I can help.
Go to my website kimnickel.com and sign up for a coaching
consult. It can get better.