F-Words

English is a funny language.

Sometimes it tricks us on purpose, in delightful ways. Sometimes it tricks us by accident. That can be charming too... although occasionally, it can do real harm.

One of the entrepreneurs in our current UNBLOCK Yourself™ group is launching his mediation business. He shared it as his intention in our group chat, and a few days later, in our live session, he started talking about mediation as a practice. A few people looked genuinely lost.

Then it clicked.

He’d said MEDIATION. As in conflict resolution.
They’d read MEDITATION. Just one letter different, but an entirely different context.

English really is a funny language.

Two words come up constantly in our work that get mixed up in a similar way: FEAR and FAILURE.

While they don’t look as similar on the page, they often get confused in our perceptions. We treat the fear of failure as if it were failure itself. So, we wanted to try to reframe these two words in an effort to make them more distinct. Here's where we landed:

Fear lives in the future. It’s a feeling that shows up before anything has happened, and it shapes our behaviour to keep us from getting hurt.

Failure lives in the present and the past. It shows up while we’re trying something, or after we’ve tried it, when we realize it didn’t work. You can fail by NOT doing something, too, but even then, something real happened.

To summarize: Fear is imagined. Failure is real.

Now, failures absolutely can result in catastrophic consequences. The sinking of the Titanic and the Challenger explosion are two human disasters among countless others. Blockbuster passing on streaming and BlackBerry, right here in our backyard in Waterloo, losing its grip on the smartphone market to the iPhone are catastrophes in business. All of them are failures resulting from the actions (or inactions) of a small number of people. No one wants to be responsible for anything like that.

Examples like these loom large, and as a result, the word “failure” carries a lot of weight in our culture and context. Just thinking about the potential for failure can trigger fear, and that fear can stop us from trying at all. We get convinced the downside of a failure could be something we’d never recover from. Or so we think.

The reality is that failure isn’t binary. When we try something new, the outcomes aren’t limited to overwhelming success or total catastrophe. We know this intuitively, but when something feels big, scary or new, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking they are. As a result, fear of catastrophe either stops us in our tracks, or it follows us into the room and we perform from fear instead of from our potential.

Eric Silverberg and Eli Gladstone have been friends of ours for a long time. We met them in 2019 when we both went through their program, Speaker Labs (you should check them out). On paper, it’s a public speaking program, but what they actually deliver is much bigger than that.

Greg has always enjoyed public speaking, whereas Whitney has always hated it, in spite of actually being quite good at it. It turns out that Whitney's experience is much more in line with how people generally feel about it.

Public speaking is one of the most common human fears. When you’re the one holding the microphone, you might fail, and a whole room will watch it happen. You might say the wrong thing, or a joke might not land. For most people, that’s so terrifying they’d rather not do it at all.

Because this is what they teach, Eric and Eli have become experts in failure, and in how it turns into fear. Their trick to unlocking someone’s ability to speak is to make failure less scary. They do that by making failure and success less binary by breaking failure into three types:

• Moment failures: fumbling a word, or getting something tiny wrong.

• Message failures: a joke doesn’t land, or your closing line doesn’t get the reaction you hoped for.

• Major failures: something life-changingly bad (think Michael Richards’ racist tirade on stage in 2006).

Moment failures happen all the time. Usually nobody notices but you, but they can throw you off in the moment. For us, a number of behind-the-scenes things happened at Waypoint Retreat that fell below the expectations we had for them in our planning. While they were a miss for us, based on the feedback we've received, they went almost entirely unnoticed. We are our own worst critics, after all.

Message failures are the ones we’d rather avoid, and they happen more often than we’d like, but are intermittent. When they happen, we get up, dust ourselves off and learn something. Message failures are uncomfortable, but ultimately, they're how we grow.

Major failures, on the other hand, are the catastrophes. They’re the genuinely life-changing ones, and unfortunately for all of us, these are the ones that get a LOT of our attention in the press.

Eric and Eli explain these three types of failure, and then they ask a question:

“Have you ever experienced a MAJOR failure yourself? Do you know anyone personally who has?”

After 10 years in their programs, no one has ever said “yes.” As you contemplate this question yourself, we suspect the same is true for you.

The implications of this go far beyond public speaking.

We have moment failures all the time. We learn and grow from message failures. Most of us will never experience a major failure in our whole lives, and even if we do, it’s unlikely we’ll have more than one. In our WHOLE lives.

But fear isn’t rational about this. It braces us for catastrophe and stops us from trying, or from bringing our best when we do.

For both of us, fear of failure held us back from starting down the entrepreneurial path for decades, and still holds us back from taking bigger swings when a good opportunity presents itself. It’s there all the time.

We enjoy tossing the f-word around between us (when appropriate, and the kids are out of earshot, of course). Turns out fear and failure are f-words too. So we thought we’d use that as a jumping-off point for a reframe.

Failure? We want to go FIND it. Failure can only come from trying. When we've tried things, we've found failure from time to time, but we've also learned and grown when this happens.

Fear, on the other hand? Well...FUCK fear. That seems like a better F-word for it. It only stops us from trying, and we’d like less of that in our lives.

If there is something you've been thinking about doing, trying or exploring, but haven't yet, we'd ask you this: have you been stopping yourself from starting because you think you might fail?

If so, we'd invite you to share this reframe with us. Fuck Fear. FIND Failure.