When was the last time you failed? I don’t mean a little mistake. When was the last time you experienced a bona-fide, gut-wrenching, FUBAR failure? I used to be afraid to fail. I think I spent much of my twenties and my early thirties trying hard not to fail. Back then, I had serious perfectionist tendencies and worked hard not to make a mistake.  I look back at how naive I was then. As much success as I’ve encountered in my career since those early days, I sometimes wonder how much further I’d be if I’d allowed myself to embrace and learn from my failures earlier in life. I started thinking about failure when the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review arrived in my mailbox. The entire issue is dedicated to the topic of failure -recognizing it, learning from it and recovering from it.

My own turning point with failure finally came when I was working as an expatriate in Shanghai, China  as a PR agency executive nearly 10 years ago. Fresh off a successful career in New York, I took on the daunting task of managing several high-profile multi-national clients expanding their presence in China. My very first assignment was managing a well-known CEO of a European bank’s visit to a prominent Chinese business school. As a expert event planner, I had done my due diligence and thought I had covered off any potential issues that would mar this event. The CEO was scheduled to lecture to the business students (most of whom would be future prominent Chinese business and political leaders) on pension reform.  Less than a day before the CEO was scheduled to arrive the business school staff  intimated that the president of the school might not be able to personally greet the CEO when he arrived on campus – a huge break in protocol.  I also discovered that a competing lecture had been scheduled at the same time as the CEO’s talk, which would greatly diminish attendance  for his lecture. In less than 24 hours things began to quickly spiral downward. While we were able to get the competing lecture cancelled, the business school’s PR team informed me that the president would indeed be attending a fundraising dinner in Europe and therefore would not be able to personally greet the CEO. He would send a lower-ranking surrogate instead. Disaster. While the CEO’s lecture went well, the overall visit was a bust. The CEO was so offended he was not personally greeted by the school president, he withheld a six-figure donation he had intended to make to the school.

To say I was sick to my stomach is an understatement. For a while I even contemplated packing my bags and returning to the States, so upset was I over this failed event. While one could have argued that many of the events that transpired were out of my control, in hindsight there were some warning signs that I clearly ignored. Thankfully,  I didn’t lose my job over that event and the experience actually made me a better professional. I’m glad I experienced that monumental failure because it helped to season and mature me in a way that success couldn’t.  Over the years, I’ve developed my own short list of rules for dealing with failure:

1. Fail early and often. Entrepreneurs are great at this. They know the secret to refining their ideas is to try and try again knowing that each failure helps them to refine their thinking, make new discoveries ultimately leading to success.
2. Admit it when you screw up. There is a reason people say “Success has many parents but failure is an orphan.” It’s true. You have to be able to publicly admit when you’ve taken a wrong turn. This is fundamental for leaders. It’s easy to take the credit when things go well but you gain credibility and respect for a being able to admit a mistake.
3. Always conduct a debrief while the event is fresh in your mind. When you fail it’s tempting to want to put the whole mess behind you. But not so fast. The debrief or post-mortem (especially with the entire team) is especially effective in helping to analyze the event from multiple perspectives to glean lessons learned.
4. Learn to depersonalize your failures. I’ll generalize here and say that men tend to be better at this than women. Resist the urge to flog yourself in perpetuity for your failure. If you can’t learn to move on then you’ll be stuck in a state of constant fear.
5. Dump your perfectionist tendencies to reduce your fear of failure. My own experience is that being a perfectionist early in my career made me more risk-averse and afraid of failure. After much self-reflection (and lots of feedback from friends and colleagues), I’ve gotten over my perfectionist tendencies and am a much more effective leader.
6. Develop a spiritual core to help buffer you from setbacks. I’ve written in other posts about the importance of developing a spiritual life. Having an spiritual anchor helps protect you from the ups and downs of life’s stresses.

These small steps have helped me to manage failure in a much more mature and healthy way. While I’m still a work in progress, it’s made a difference for me thus far. How have you managed failure in your life? What advice do you have for others who wrestle with the fear of failure?

The E! Channel just started re-running Sex and the City, one of my all-time favorite television series. When SATC came out, I was living in New York and working as an  account executive at a big PR agency.  The story of four working women pursuing successful careers, romance and the ultimate pair of shoes, resonated deeply with me at the time. What I especially loved was the deep friendship among Miranda, Carrie, Samantha and Charlotte.  Those friendships mirrored my own experience of having a group of girlfriends with whom I spent many a night drinking cocktails, celebrating career promotions and challenges, shopping and sharing relationship advice. Last night I re-watched a particularly poignant episode that got me thinking again about friendships and how they evolve as our lives evolve.  In that episode, the four friends are invited to the baby shower of a former party-girl friend, known for her wild antics, turned Connecticut housewife. They grudgingly go to the baby shower which is filled with, to their dismay, highly-educated, formerly high-powered career women who traded in their Manolos and Coach brief cases for strollers and play dates. At a post-shower debrief at a local bar the four friends wonder if giving up one’s identity and lifestyle comes with having children. Later the former party girl-turned housewife calls Carrie to express how much she misses “the old days” and how much she wants to reconnect with Carrie and the girls. Carrie makes a half-hearted promise to “definitely” call her. Ouch.

That episode got me thinking about how my own life has changed so dramatically over the last few years: I got married, quit my agency PR job in Chicago, moved to the South, started a new career and had baby.  Just a few weeks ago Dr. D. and I celebrated our five year wedding anniversary. Life is great… and it’s different. I think back. After I got married my friendships took a turn I didn’t expect. The girl (and guy) friends that I was so close to seemed to fade away. It was a subtle transition that caught me off guard.  As a single-career woman, I somehow thought that my friendships were immutable. That the friends I had would always play a central role in my life and I in theirs. I believed that major life events like marriage and babies couldn’t fundamentally change a friendship. For a period of time I was very saddened by this change as I’ve always relied upon the support of my friendships. As I reflect on that period of my life, I think I felt abandoned because I was going through so much personally and missed the closeness of those earlier days.

Years later here’s what I’ve come to accept: life circumstances often dictate the kind of friends you have at any given time in your life. Some friendships are a result of proximity and others are a result of sharing similar life circumstances. Today at 41 I have a much more grown up attitude towards friendship. As I evolve, my friendships evolve. I’ve learned that the friends you need as a single, career-driven professional are often quite different than the friends you need as married couple with children or a working mother. It’s not just question of lifestyle and time (or lack thereof) but of priorities and common interests.

I’ve also learned that you need all kinds of friends; the friend who pumps you up and convinces you to try that entrepreneurial venture you’ve been talking about for years; the friend who gives you advice about negotiating for that new piece of real estate and the friend who gives you motherhood advice when your toddler has thrown yet another remote control into the toilet. Some of those friends will be there for life, while others will be there for just a short time. It’s not good or bad it just is.

Here’s what I know for sure. I feel blessed to have the friends who are in my life today and I cherish those friendships that are still there but perhaps are more distant. What about you? How have your friendships changed over the years?