Leadership
Failure is a beautiful thing!!
10:15 AM
I HATE failure!! I am still at the point in my life where I
take it very personally. I know I know I shouldn’t, but nonetheless I do. I
have learned however that it is a necessary part leading with risk and leading to
win big. At times some of the biggest wins come from lessons learned from a
failure!
Last year at oneChurch.tv we decided we wanted to do an
event for married Couples. We used an idea from North Point Community Church
called Married Life Live! We wanted to create a fun event for our couples to
come to and be a part of. The goal was to pack down one idea for couples to
have a conversation about after the event!
Now with our best intentions we set out to put this event on
over a year ago. We had a great turnout, but something was missing. Something
just wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t a bad experience and we definitely learned
some things to help us with the next event, but i definitely didn't accomplish what we would have liked!
Well then we did another one and something still wasn’t
quite right. There were some parts of it that were really really good, but we
were still missing something. Still felt like it wasn’t a win, or at least it
didn’t seem like the win we were going for.
This last Friday we just did another one and it was a
HOMERUN!! It accomplished what we
wanted it was a great production and I slept wonderfully that night. We still
learned some things from it to tweak it and make it better. All the feedback we received was positive and we really felt like we encouraged our couples to have a conversation about one main thought that was packed down through the entire evening.
I can honestly say that without those failures we would not
have made the progress that helped us get a huge step closer to where we wanted
to be.
Now don’t misunderstand me. Failure is never the goal! If I
had it my way I would get it right the first time. But seeing at that isn’t a
reasonable expectation unless you plan to lead without risk, I have
learned to see the beauty of failure and see the advantages of it.
Here are 3 beautiful things about failure in my life.
It pushes me – I
am a perfectionist by nature. So when something doesn’t go right or accomplish
what I want it to it really drives me to dig in and see what needs to happen to
make it better.
It’s a fantastic
Barometer – It can be a great gauge of where you are and what needs to
happen in the future. I am a visual learner. Some times I think something will
work well and it doesn’t. Seeing this in action allows me to make changes for
the future and see in real time what will work.
It’s a reminder – It’s
a great reminder that in our pursuit to create relevant and engaging
environments that we are going to try some crazy things and some difficult
things and that we need to continually remind our leadership of this vision of
why we do what we do. Remind them that risk is part of it and we continually
mold what we do to press our vision and mission forward. Even though it may not
always work, it always matters!!
These are 3 things it does in my life. What would you add to
the list??
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