Ep 25 - How to Never Fail at Anything You Do!

Hello and welcome back. This is episode 25 of Power Up Your Team podcast.  I like to share an important insight I had a few years ago that literally changed my life.  

A business plan can look great on paper but conquering milestone after milestone is not a straight line. It is a messy experience peppered with setbacks and costly turnarounds.  

Things don’t always happen and people don’t react the way we want them to. Small steps along the way can seem daunting because we have never taken them before. 

Examples:

• A larger firm we want to do business with but don’t have enough confidence to reach out
• An important client we want to attract but procrastinate making an appointment 
• A speaking engagement we contemplate but never muster up the courage to take it on

 We postpone because a fear of failing has taken residence in our head.  Self-doubt creeps in and a little voice asks if we are good enough. Can we really do this? 

 Time goes by without us taking the important next step. Because we assume that any outcome other than what we want is a reflection on us. And that is a dead-end road with no way out. 

 Over the years, I created a thought pattern by which I always considered a set of scenarios. That helped me to be more accepting of other outcomes than the one I had forecasted or thought I needed to reach my goals. 

I found that defining a best-case and worst-case scenario helped me feel less stressed and show up with more confidence.  That made me a calmer person and better leader. 

But still all hell would break lose when even my anticipated worst-case scenario did not pan out. Times when I had to go back to the drawing board and try completely new approaches just sucked the energy out of me. 

I judged my abilities and I heard the little voice in my head “see you aren’t good enough”. I was so execution and results oriented that everything that didn’t work out as planed was reason to doubt my abilities. 

But here’s the point: Who can control all these outside influences? Stuff just happens. The world is changing around us every second.

And now, I want to share something that I learned. 

I learned that while getting my professional coach certification at iPEC, which is the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching.

They taught me a way of setting goals so that I can never fail. And the trick is to define the

minimal outcome of anything I set out to do as learning. Isn’t that genius?

So I started to define three outcomes for any challenging plan I wanted to take on: 

• Optimal outcome
• Expected outcome 
• Minimal outcome – instead of making the minimal outcome depending on outside circumstance, I defined it as something I want to learn from the situation 

Let me give you one example:

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to speak in front of a large audience via video conference.  I was worried that my speaking and presentation abilities had become a bit rusty.  I also know that I am more comfortable speaking in front of an in-person audience than online

My optimal outcome: Presentation will flow perfectly and I can engage the audience as I was able to do in the past.  I will feel at ease and deliver a powerful message within the permitted time. People will remember me based on my talk.

Expected outcome: I can get my message across without really connecting to the audience. I might rush a bit through the slides. But I will do ok and be in line with everyone else who presented.

Minimal outcome: No matter how it goes, I will learn how to tweak my approach so that I can be more comfortable speaking to a large online

Find out at www.PowerUpYourTeam.com/25 how I did!&a