1.3. Owning Your Past: The Sting of Failure

Most of us in leadership positions live by the credo "Failure is not an option." Yet every successful business titan I've ever known has failed in his or her career at least once, usually miserably. But whereas mediocre leaders often spend their entire lives running from some past catastrophe, great leaders embrace those failures, carry the lessons with them, and continue to learn from them as they go. If self-reflection seems difficult, acceptance of failure will feel nearly impossible. There is a significant and natural resistance to including in your self-image the failures and shortcomings in your past. Executives who achieve great success are often, paradoxically, experts at marshalling the defenses required to avoid or resist the analysis of their failures and disappointments. They tend to ignore, deny, rationalize, or justify those events as something other than their responsibility. And they certainly don't want to talk about any of it publicly. Why? Simply because at many levels within their psyche, it serves them to avoid seeing the harsh truth. Because they'd have to admit to subordinates that they aren't perfect. Because they will disappoint some people in this moment in time—even though, in the long run, they are helping others form a more authentic understanding of the true person they are. Because, most of all, they will no longer have an excuse to offer themselves—that the failure really belongs not to them at the core of who they are, but to that other public persona that poorly represents them.

Success in this effort is measured by the degree to which you can accept what is really true about your history and the wins and losses contained therein. It requires a declaration to yourself that your past—all of it—is actually, legitimately OK. You accept who you are, what you've done, and the disappointments that come with life. You have forgiven yourself and others as necessary and left your resentments and anger at the door, and you have captured those lessons and included them in your current view of the world.