It's a popular opinion that you can stay in your strengths, play to your preferences, and still have everything you want. I haven't found that opinion to be true. It's a nice fairy tale, though, and works nicely with our human tendencies to stay mostly the same and keep doing more of what we are doing (because it's familiar and new feels...." bad," "risky," or even "not aligned" at the start).
I'm going to play straight with you:
What got you here, to your current level, will not get you there, to your next one. Period. If you want to do something you've yet to do, it'll require you to become someone you have yet to be. It will take guts to say out loud what you want — and choose— for yourself. Your growth will also require you to take an honest look at your gaps, current life paradigm, and your blindspots.
When attempting something new, only playing to your strengths and preferences will eventually become your liability.
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As Fierce Creators:
My people are called to create the map while they also walk it.
So, in our community, we practice our potential rather than our personality.
In this way, your VISION must determine the development required, not your current preferences.
This way of living is how we expand beyond our current capabilities.
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Think about this for a second: The things you are good at now were built from experiencing past failures and learning. Nothing wrong with that; just don't get stuck. We get stuck by becoming unwilling to be bad at something new in order to get better. Especially publically.
Avoiding failure as a core life aim is what will keep you safe (meaning the same) and small (meaning not fully expressed). You can live your whole life aiming to avoid failure, or you can use (and seek) targeted failure to approach success.
Growth requires something new. It requires developing a mindset that doesn't always feel like "you," it requires building skills that you might be bad at today, and it requires habits that take some time and attention to nurture. Transformation and growth ask that you be uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable doesn't have to mean excruciating. Yes, at times, the deep kind of transformation will ask you to look at your most closely guarded fear and shame and sit vulnerably with it until it gives you the wisdom it has for you to move through it. But it might mean also that you feel embarrassed, feel frustrated, feel impatient, and feel discouraged sometimes.
Those feelings can be paradoxical signs of progress and good indicators of growth as long as you know how to work with them beneficially as empowering allies versus another feeling to beat yourself up over.
Take meditation:
If you have a "bad" (meaning distracted) meditation session where you had to bring yourself back again and again to your focus...it's ironically a GOOD meditation session. Meaning you trained.
Take working out:
If you have a "bad" workout, meaning, you struggled to complete your sets because you were lifting heavier or sprinting faster...the irony is that was actually a GOOD workout session. Meaning you trained.
Training asks that you go beyond your initial opinion of good and bad.
This is why I game film with my clients. We slow down in a session and discuss their actions, connections, and leadership moments from the week, play-by-play. Together, we identify pivotal moments, invisible choices they made "on the field," and nuanced options they can work with as they progress. We also role-play. Making sure that they train hard where it counts and are prepared to go again as they step out into the arena of their art, their businesses, and their soul's mission.
You fail in training so that you can fail more productively in your life ventures SO THAT you can actually succeed.
The difference between failing in training and on purpose versus waiting for life to hand you the hard stuff, is that in life, the variables are complex, and the fallout can be beyond healthy capacity sometimes. In life, you don't always get to choose scalability and proactive support. But, when you self-select to enter a training environment and process, you get to fail in a place that is engineered and scaffolded appropriately for you. You prepare (yes, you can prepare even for VUCA environments). And you get support and immediate, useable feedback even on the messy stuff.
Purposeful training allows you the chance to see and measure growth so that you know what to do next. Then, you get to apply that focused growth and increased capability to your life's work.
In doing so, you expand what you are capable of. Over time, when you work this way, your life gets easier. Not because you watered down the game but because YOU are enhanced.
In my circle, we honor failure and applied adjustments as part of the sacred path.
Getting things wrong or wonky allows us to accurately assess the adjustments to make— even if those adjustments are 1% increments. When my clients leave a session with me, my aim is to see them 1% more liberated, 1% clearer, 1% more activated, and 1% more capable than when they came in because I know that as high performers, courageous creatives, and transformational leaders, my clients can do a LOT with a 1%. 1% doesn’t mean slow growth. It means axis-shifting alignment which leads to explosive growth.
1% adjustments, when applied by someone who understands mastery, can change everything.
As we wrap, here are the big ideas I hope you’ll take away:
Never weaponize your failure against yourself. Use it.
Get in an environment that both challenges and supports you.
Find the 1% edge each time to lean into and go again.
Do not limit yourself to your personality preferences and your current strengths. Go beyond them.
Learn to practice your POTENTIAL, not your PERSONALITY.
P.S. If you already feel beat up by life, have been working as hard as you know to do, and the idea of finding ANOTHER place to fail makes you want to scrape your own skin off.... this is NOT the kind of failure I'm referencing. You are likely encountering STRAIN and self-torture, not high performance. This happens when we are trying to go it alone, trying to improve in all areas at once, don't really know what we need to do to improve, and are losing sight of the forest for the trees. Alone, we aren't always taking into account the brick walls we can't see, the invisible weight we are carrying, and the levers we don't know we could pull. Hear me here. I will be direct. If this is you, your "high-performance engine" will blow itself up. Invest in support from someone qualified-- me or someone like me. Learn to train differently. It's not about doing more (quantitative); it's about doing better (qualitative).