Let's Talk Failure - and why you need it!

Let's talk failure Loaded word huh, lot of anxiety. It's a huge fear that a lot of us carry around all the time like, oh my God, am I gonna fail at something? It sounds like the worst thing in the world, and failure can be different things for different people. For some it's losing a job. For others it's their marriage ending. For others it's losing a big client. There are all sorts of different things that we can define. Oh, I failed. And it's important to know what we consider to be failures and to really take a good look at that. I'm Rachel Provan, and in today's episode I'm gonna share with you a new way to think about failure that will change your life if you let it. That's all coming up next right here on Psychology of Customer Success. Stay tuned Humans don't think or behave like computers. You can't just run a command and get them to do what you want them to do, so why are you still basing your CS strategy based solely on logic? I'm Rachel Provan, cs leadership coach, award-winning CS strategist and certified psych nerd. I teach CS leaders how to build and scale world-class CS departments using a combination of strategy, leadership and mindset, using my secret weapon, psychology. Come join me every Wednesday for Psychology of Customer Success, where we'll dive into why people do the things they do, what motivates them and the effect that has on your CS strategy, team dynamics and executive presence. We'll dig into subjects like the helper personality, how thought errors like it's just easier if I do it keep your department stuck in reactive mode, and how cognitive bias can really screw up your customer journey Plus much more. Make sure to subscribe on Apple Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to share it with your CS bestie. Talk soon and here's to your success. So the thing that causes failure is the way you look at the world and yourself. It's not a matter of oh, you screwed up and now you're a failure, this was a failure. It all really comes down to mindset. So just a quick view of mindset, just like a quick one-on-one. What I'm talking about when I talk about mindset because it can be a squishy term it's basically a set of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself in it. It influences how you feel, think and how you behave in any given situation, and it influences what you think is true. Now, carol Dweck wrote a really amazing book on mindset and she proposed that there were two, two different kinds of mindsets. There's a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. With a fixed mindset, things are the way they are, like your IQ is this, so you're a genius, you have fixed abilities, this person's really good at math, this person's bad at math, whereas a growth mindset is that things can change, that failure isn't permanent, it's an opportunity to learn. And it's one of those things where, when you first hear about, you're like oh, I have a growth mindset, and it reminds me of those magazine quizzes that I used to take when I was a teenager or like preteen or whatever, and it was always so obvious what the quote unquote answer was that it was almost laughable that anyone would pick the other options because it makes you seem like an idiot. Who's gonna be like? Yes, I have a fixed mindset, I am very close-minded. It's just not how we think of ourselves, but I tend to believe that we could be a little bit of both. There are areas where we have a fixed mindset and areas where we have a growth mindset, and it's our job to work on the ones where we're fixed, being aware that this is even something you can work on and being aware that having a limiting belief that you can't do something is optional, that it's not a fact. So just knowing that in the first place can be a really great place to start. Now, when I hear about fixed mindset, it's what comes to me and this isn't really part of the book is that it's a mindset that's based in fear, because if you say I'm bad at this, I can't change this is how it is, I'm bad at math, then you're less likely to have to go and do it. You're less likely to disappoint people. You're trying to take the sting out of whatever may happen. So you're basically putting the kibosh, calling the game on. I'm not even going to try that, because it didn't work for me before, or I'm afraid of what's going to happen, or people going to laugh at me is what a lot of it comes down to, unfortunately, a lot of the time. So when you have a fixed mindset, what I'm going to do here is because it's so clear what answer we should pick. I'm going to call out some examples that I see a lot in customer success and customer success leadership that are symptoms of a fixed mindset, and certainly some that I've had as well, because, as much as I'd like to think I am perfect. We know this is not the case. When you have a fixed mindset, you have a tendency to avoid things that you're not certain that you can have a positive outcome on. You might avoid challenges due to a perceived threat. You might not go out for a job where you don't take every single box on the job description because, oh, I'm not qualified, whereas maybe you are. Plenty of people do. Plenty of people are willing to try that. Say what's the worst that could happen. One where I see the avoiding of challenges in customer success just from the personality we like to be nice, et cetera is that of disciplining an employee or giving an employee negative feedback. We really don't like to do this and, rather than seeing it as a chance for the employee to grow, we tend to back into fear and think what's going to happen to me? How is this going to be a bad situation for me? Are they going to get mad? Are they going to yell at me? Are they going to be difficult to work with? Which is going to impact my results? It's very self-focused and, again, it's rooted in fear, and we don't even tend to be that straightforward about it. So, instead of just saying I'm not going to discipline that employee because I don't like it, we say we put it off. We say today is not a good day because they have that really important call and I don't want to throw them off their game. Or today's not a good day for me because I have back-to-back meetings. There's never a good day to discipline an employee. It's the fear of what the results are going to be. Now. That's avoidance of challenges. Fear of failure is just you can't fail if you don't play the game. You can't fail if you don't try. So you tend to avoid risks, but the thing is that prevents innovation. You can't innovate, you can't come up with the great next new thing if you're unwilling to fall on your face now and again. That's something I've definitely had to come to terms with as I've transitioned out of just being in corporate in startups and being in the public eye. More People are going to say things about me and I've had to kind of get over that, but before I had that in such a confronting way, it definitely impacted what I did in Pinesights 2020. But I can see now the opportunities that I missed based on worrying about what people would say, worrying about what people would think. And in these cases you might not speak up in a meeting. If you are the most junior person there, you might not want to try something new in case it doesn't work out. Versus if you hear people say like, oh well, we've always done it this way, don't fix what isn't broken. That is all symptoms of a fixed mindset in that particular situation. The others are resistance to change, which I think we all have to a degree, because it's seen as a threat, as an existential threat to our brains. Oh, I've kept alive so far in these situations that I'm used to. I don't know if I will in another situation. And again, that's our very primitive brain that's primarily concerned with keeping us alive. It's not focused on, oh, the worst that could happen is someone laughs at me. It feels like the worst thing that could happen is, oh, I get fired, I can't find another job, I can't pay my rent and I end up living under a bridge and then we die. Your brain will take it. That could, maybe not to the death point, but your brain goes there quickly, because that's still a holdover from evolution and again served us very well. We're still here, but it is not. It's something that we can continue to evolve in our own minds. It makes us able to do more and live a better life. If we can start to question that resistance to change, you may also find if you have a fixed mindset, you might also limit your willingness to learn and adapt. Let's say, all of a sudden your department has to handle sales. Now you're responsible for upsell cross-sell. There was a lot of resistance when that started happening in CS. It's not my job, I don't like that, I don't want to do that, it's not who I am, and those are a lot of assumptions, whereas really I think sales can be a service, it can be heart-centered. But again, it's that fear, it's that fixed mindset. And finally, taking criticism personally, which I am the queen of, I've gotten better about it, but I definitely. If someone was like feedback is a gift, I would always want to say great, did you keep the receipt? Because I'd like to send it back. I didn't ask for this gift. The fact is, most of the time, people are not meaning to insult you. They're trying to help you. They're trying to help you be better. And you'll never get better if you don't understand the areas where you might need to the next time you get a criticism. What if that piece of information, what if that piece of feedback wasn't about you? What if it didn't mean anything about you? What if it just meant this might be a different way to try something, that there was no value judgment involved, more of a science experiment. Oh, that particular experiment didn't work the way you might have wanted it to. Here's what you might want to try and say, and we'll be getting into that a little bit more in a few minutes. With a fixed mindset, you're never going to get any better and your results will always stay the same or get worse, because the world is always changing and evolving. So you're never going to be able to just keep doing the same old things that have worked and have them continue to work. We've seen that with different levels of the SaaS economy. We're going to see that with AI, that it's going to be important that we're able to roll with the punches and approach it with a growth mindset. Now, growth mindset? It just doesn't sound very relatable to me, same way that fixed mindset doesn't sound relatable to me. What strikes me as more resonant and makes me more open to it is, rather than fear, which is the fixed mindset. How can I approach this with curiosity? So growth mindset is just curious. It's basically the idea that you're always going to be learning, you're going to be eager to learn and improve your strategy and that you're going to persist in the face of difficulties. And this is particularly why I want to talk about this right now, because it's been a tough time for CS in the past year and a half and I see how frustrated people are getting and I am really impressed with the level of stick-to-itiveness that a lot of people have. But this is just, in another way, a reminder of whenever you get one of those things that feels like it just knocks the wind out of you, knocks you down. You can let that be that, you can let that be a failure, or you can say, okay, but what did I learn? What would I do differently next time? If a situation is like that, where you've learned and you know how to do something differently and improve your results, that's not a failure. So if you're feeling stuck, if you're in a fixed mindset the things I brought up at the beginning, what you consider to be failure losing a job, losing a big client, losing an employee, your marriage, breaking up making what you used to make. Those are all just results. They may not be results you like, but that's all they are. They're data points. It's what you're deciding that those data points mean about you as a person. That's the problem that you're deciding that they have any indication of how valuable you are, how lovable you are, how worthy you are. But here's the good news and the bad news. No one gets to decide that but you. No matter what anyone else says, that is all just thoughts and words in their brain. It doesn't mean everyone thinks that about you and it doesn't get to dictate anything about you. Only you get to decide what your worth is, and there is no reason in the world to decide that you're worth nothing. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you decide I'm worthless, I'm the worst, you're not gonna go out there and make your life better and you're not gonna make other people's lives better. If you decide you're worthless because you've done something objectively bad, you've hurt people, you can sit there and be worthless and say, oh whoa is me and I suck. Or you can go out there and start to turn it around and make amends and change things and do better next time. It doesn't have to be set in stone. That's where you can have that growth mindset of well, what now? We all get bad results. Sometimes we're human, we work with the information we have and we make the best decisions we can at the time, and sometimes we choose wrong, oops. Not only is failure extremely normal, but it is a huge asset, if you allow it to be. So what I like to do is and it takes me a second, I'm not perfect here but when something is hard and things don't go the way I want them to and I feel like, wow, I had huge expectations for this. I thought it was gonna go one way and that crashed and burned and I suck. It did not work out. I thought I was gonna do great and now I suck, try and detach and think of everything as a science experiment. Now scientists look at everything as they have a hypothesis which is just hey, I have a thought, I think this might work, and they perform an experiment. Okay, so I'm gonna try it out and see if I'm right or wrong, and then from that they get a result. So what if scientists decided that they were a failure the first time? They didn't get the result they intended? We'd all be stuck back in the house with being scared of COVID or probably would have died from an ear infection when we were nine months old or something. With everything you try, you either get the result you wanted or you get the lesson you needed. Every failure is a data point that says, oh, that experiment didn't work. Let's try and figure out why. And when we figure out why, that's going to give us an idea of what might work better. There's a I think it's EE Cummings saying that's ever tried, ever failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better. And that's all you have to be willing to do to understand that a failure isn't necessarily the end. It's just a what now? What next? What did I learn and how can I try again with this information and not do the exact same thing over and over? Because if you don't take the time to stop and analyze that, you're likely to do the same thing over and over, expecting a different result, and people like to say that's the definition of insanity. It's also a natural way to be, we hear if at first you don't succeed, try again. It should be to try something else, try something slightly different. It's really when you give into fear that you keep making those same mistakes. And look, cs can be a hard job At this moment. A lot of people are out of work. Some have been laid off twice in 12 months, nine months. And I don't care what a great talk I give you. I understand that's not gonna feel great, it's not gonna feel like an opportunity. But if you can look at it more like this is a puzzle for me to solve, rather than all these things are happening to me. It can be a bit of a stretch to say they're happening for you, but I don't quite go that far. But can you look at it that way? Can you say because here's the thing if you keep trying different things, eventually you're gonna hit on the right thing. Your success is inevitable so long as you just keep trying and improving and getting a little bit better each time. It's just science, it's just data, it's throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. And the other way to look at it, the other way to understand how failure is so important, is we don't grow when everything's great. We have a tendency to just keep with the status quo, because why wouldn't we? Things are going great. I don't wanna mess it up. It's when, all of a sudden, what used to work doesn't work anymore that we have to figure something else out. And to do that, you have to do something you've never done before, think a way you've never thought before, and that's growth. Not just a growth mindset, but that's you growing as a person. That's your next evolution. Often, when we keep hitting our head against the same challenge, it's because we've hit upon something that is life's giving us. This thing of this is what's in your way. It's time to reach your next evolution. It's time to level up. This is what you're gonna have to solve. To do that Sometimes I like to. If someone's really having a hard time and they feel like everything is falling apart, I will tell them about something that my friend and I call being in the goo. Basically, if you think about a caterpillar, a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, but they don't just go in for a nice little nap and merge all beautiful. It's not like the very hungry caterpillar like eat some nice snacks, take a nap. Here you are. A caterpillar actually is kind of gross. It digests its own body. So, yeah, basically, at one point it basically bites its own head off. I don't really understand it, but it digests its entire body and at one point inside the chrysalis, it's just this green goo. It completely breaks down in order to be able to reformulate its cells to become what's next? And a caterpillar in that moment doesn't know. Oh cool, I'm becoming a butterfly. Now they're like holy crap, I'm dying. This is the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to anyone. I'm turning into goo. So that's what's happening as you're leveling up. You're in the goo, and sometimes my friend and I will be oh, how's it go? Oh, I'm in the goo today, where it's just everything is a mess. I don't know what to do next. Everything has fallen apart. That's the goo period, because that's when you're figuring out how you have to transform. It's a transformative process and that's why setbacks often act as a slingshot. It's inevitable. There's no way around it. Failure is only a sign that it's time to level up. It's time to try something different. There's this saying that first God throws a rock, then a pebble, then a boulder, and that's basically to indicate that God, universe whatever you want to believe in life, whatever is trying to teach you lessons to get you to your next level. And sometimes you're doing something that isn't serving you, and the first time that happens you get a pebble, so it hurt a little bit Like that wasn't great. But okay, I'm gonna keep going. I'm gonna go on my merry way and continue exactly what I've been doing, and the next time God throws a rock, that hurt more. But if you keep going and keep doing the same thing, that is getting you hit with rocks. Eventually you get a boulder. And for some people, myself included, sometimes you got to get the boulder before you're willing to accept that it's time for a change. And it doesn't have to be like, oh, I'm in the wrong line of work, it might just be. I need help. I need to ask someone who has a different perspective do you see something I'm doing wrong here? Because I just can't see it? And look, I would not have a business without a good, a couple good, solid boulders here. I wouldn't have the marriage and family I do without some tough lessons in my dating life. I did a lot of things wrong and fixed them, started doing different things that worked better, and you know what? I wouldn't be a failure if I didn't have those things either. They happen to be my favorite things in my life right now, but I got it wrong a lot and that's honestly why I teach now, why I teach CS strategy, why I teach mindset. Because if you can take a shortcut, if you can get one shortcut here where you don't have to be hit by all the rocks and can learn things faster than I did, that is my hope for you, because I learned a ton over, you know, 17 years in CS, but it was not an easy climb. There were a lot of mistakes. So it is okay to look at somebody's roadmap and say I'm going to try that you may need to adjust a little for your particular landscape, but you don't always have to figure it out on your own. Growth comes from being so uncomfortable. You have to figure it out and that's why everyone gets to the high points in their life and they say you know what? I wouldn't be here if I didn't go through this, this and this crappy thing. So now I get it. Why I had to go through those things? That is the view from the top of the mountain and you know it's not like there's an end. You don't get to the top of life and, yeah, I win life, but you do level up. It's a continuation of learnings and when you're in that process it sucks, but it also means you're on your way. This is what makes it happen trying something different. And as a final button on this to make this actionable, look at an area at work where you don't like the results you've gotten so far. What can you do differently? Make it a science experiment. It's okay if you don't immediately know what to do differently, but brainstorm, talk to other people, use chat, gpt, ask others what they've done. You don't have to wait until you're at rock bottom to try something new, to change directions, if you know what you're doing isn't working. What's the worst thing that could happen by changing? Actually, don't answer that. Instead of thinking that, think what's the best thing that could happen. It's not a question we ask ourselves often enough. We're always worried about the risks, and that's fair. We need to think critically, but often we don't consider what the benefits of something new or something hard or something scary could be, because we're only concerned with you know the scary parts or what could go wrong. So that's just the other piece of information I'd like to leave you with what's the best that could happen? So thanks so much for joining us today for another episode of Psychology of Customer Success. If you want to level up your CS leadership strategy and mindset, you can go to provansuccesscom To get on the early notification list for Customer Success Leadership Academy, which will be relaunching in February. So it's getting close again Right now. We're in there. We're making progress with our amazing current cohort. They're having all sorts of wins every day, but it'll be time again soon for new people to come in and learn and level up. And if you'd like to work with me on things like this as well as strategy, because when you combine mindset like this with the right strategy, that's when you really get fireworks, that's when you get real change, not when you just have an idea of what you should be doing. Oh, this is a good strategy, but you're not able to put it in action because of your limiting thoughts, you're limiting actions, you're I'm too busy, I'm too stressed. This is more important than my work. Those are all things that we work on and that's why I talk about them here, because I don't think people talk enough about sort of the intangibles that get in the way of our success. Again, thank you for joining us. If you enjoyed this, definitely give us five stars on iTunes. That really helps. And if you want to say hi, come find me on LinkedIn. We have a podcast page so you can search for Psychology of Customer Success page on there. Come say hi to me, network with other people and that's it. So until next time, take care of yourself, get some rest and don't forget to share this episode with your CS Bestie. Talk soon, and here's to your success.