26 Oct Better than you are…
When managing people its inevitable that you have the thought…”Kids these days!” The question is WHY do we say that in our heads. After a lot of personal reflection and a great conversation over lunch today I realized that for me I say it because I believe that they are better than they are today. Success is not the lack of failure but the perseverance through setback.
And by better I mean that we are all better than our excuses. Sure we always need to assign blame or give an explanation. STOP!!! There is simply more potential present at the moment than that. We can all justify and explain away our shortcomings but the fact is that we feel that need because we missed the mark. And that’s OK! Its OK to miss the mark but we have to realize that there is a greater outcome we should be striving to obtain.
Own it when you make a mistake and realize that failed action doesn’t define you as a person. As a manager I’d like to think that I whisper the failures of my team and shout their successes. Even in the hospitality industry, which is notorious for beating down its devoted, it is steadily becoming the norm to focus on the success. I try to avoid failure but the truth is that failure is the path to success. I could give out some BS statistic to prove my point here but I truly believe that in most cases anyone successful at any skill in the long term started with a failure that made them seek a higher understanding and mastery. There are plenty of examples of this…Steve Jobs being fired from Apple…Michael Jordan being cut from his first team.
I would hallucinate that every single success story starts with owning failure. Owning your failure on a level that drives you to dominate. Dissect it, correct it, and overcome it!!! My credo to my staff will be that failure is not a solitary event but a part of eventual success should you choose to learn from it. As my dear friend pointed out today at lunch it was the great Mufasa that said to his son Simba, “Look inside yourself. You are more than what you’ve become.” You are better than you are in this moment and sometimes it takes an outside force to push you to see it. Other times it takes a look in the mirror to figure it out. Either way find something that pushes you to failure. I promise you’ll earn from it and reach into that bit of potential for the future.
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