Latest / Church Staff Book Club / Building Resilience Through Failure Makes You Irreplaceable
Transcript
- Jonathan Malm: What are doing at this conference if everything's going so wonderfully? Hey, welcome back to the Church Staff Book Club. My name is Jonathan Mall. And I'm Jason Young. And we are now in chapter four of our book, How to Get a Return on Failure by John Maxwell. it's been good so far. I'm a firm believer that failure is a valuable asset in our lives. And this book just confirms what I a lot of the stuff that I believe. But our goal with this podcast is that we would be able to contextualize it for you working at a church. ⁓ hopefully that we can read together and get more from the book than we would if we would have just read alone. That's CDS. So whether you're working through this as a staff, watching these videos, or listening, or you're just doing it alone, we hope that you get more from this just by joining us in this process. So, Jason, this chapter. Yeah. ⁓ it was just kind of a continuation. It was sort of some of the benefits that you get from failure. What did you get out of this? I don't know if this is the right read on it, but I feel like kind of turning this corner a little bit more that he's talking about the tools, like how failure can lead to transformation. But I think in summary, what I would say on this chapter, and this is a cliche phrase to say, but there are a lot of people they go through failure, they get bitter about it. There are other people who go through failure, they get better. So I think it's a little bit of that. And I think the maybe the key is like how do you reflect on it? How do you respond to it? Yeah, that's really good. The the first kind of section of this chapter was talking about how failure can lead to resilience. And I was watching ⁓ right now as we're recording this, we're in the middle of the finals, the NBA finals, and I was watching last night the Knicks game. This will tell you when we recorded this. ⁓ Donald Trump was there. And it they showed him during the national anthem, and the whole stadium booed. Not the whole stadium, but there was a large number of people that were booing. And he just smiled. And I'm like, Man, I'm just putting myself in his shoes, having a whole stadium booing you. How much, whether you like the guy or not, the guy is resilient. ⁓ and I think that comes from, you know, if you're in business, especially in New York real estate business, you've probably had a lot of failure under your belt. In the presidency, he has a lot of a lot of failure under his belt. And I just think, man, how many of us could handle a whole stadium booing us? And not just go home and cry that evening. I think I would totally cry. and so kind of it talk it talks in this chapter about how to how to get resilience from failure, right? It talks about self-compassion, basically just having compassion for yourself. We we've talked about this some a little bit, ⁓ recognition, recognizing what was actually happening in that situation, ⁓ active learning, cognitive agility, problem solving, finding meaning. Did any of those really particularly stick out to you? I think all of ⁓ sh when I look into each of them, kinda ha I've thought about like scenarios where maybe they have shown up and areas where I'm like, ⁓ you know, ⁓ because I think failure exposes things about ourselves. And I think kind of reading through, I'm like, ⁓ I feel strong in that one. ⁓ I remember scenario in that one. ⁓ that one, you know, I've got a lot of work to do. And so it was more of l I I tried to I tried to read this and hold it up like a mirror and and ask myself, okay, Jason, like where are you with blank? And trying to do this kind of, I don't know, self a ⁓ assessment on you know, each of those areas and what it what it reveals and what maybe I let success hide and not give enough attention to failure. I don't know if that makes sense. No, yeah. ⁓ I think for me, a lot of a lot of the times, I don't know, one of this like really cathartic things that I do in life is I do a lot of puzzles. And sometimes I'll get lost 30, 45 minutes doing a puzzle. And I just have this inner dialogue in my head while I'm doing the puzzle where I'm thinking about past failures of my life or past mistakes I've made. And I think through like either how would I make them right, how would I have done things differently. And that's kind of one of the things that he talks about in this book is kind of How when you have a failure, it's so important the questions that you ask after it. Yeah. I think a lot of people fail to ask questions and they don't learn because of those lack of questions. So I think, you know, that person that I, you know, that that kind of that that that that strife that we had, what would I have done differently? How would I approach them if I saw them today? You know, not that there's any need to necessarily resolve that, but how how would a, you know, if that that Issue came up again, how would I talk to them differently? And I find for me, having those times of working on a puzzle, or for some people it's going on a walk, or for some people it's, you know, getting away on a retreat and just unpacking it. ⁓ I think a lot of us don't do that. A lot of us, you know, that's one of the values of having a Sabbath, or one of the values of, you know, having downtime, which not a lot of us have. And so I think that's a critical element for learning from failure is how do you actually have time to process. what you experience. You know, if you if you get fired, that's a big failure, right? Like you have a lot of time, right? You like you really think through, like you have this like, okay, suddenly everything was taken from me. But what about whenever it's a failure that like, okay, it was a failure, but I'm still having to just lead forward with the charge. And I think I don't know, for me that was one of those that like I need to remember to keep in my life is the opportunity to just like really unpack what happened. Yeah, I I I love what you said. Because you're you're talking about kind of that reflection response moment. And I I think this is true, but your response, including reflection to the failure, says more about you than the failure itself. But let me let me let me illustrate this confession time. This past week I I built a leadership experience ⁓ over the last, I don't know, sixty, ninety days. What is a leadership experience? What does that mean? Yeah. So imagine like an eight-hour immersive, ⁓ some people would call it a workshop, you know, experience. This particular one was focused on one subject, the subject of feedback. So how do you as a leader deliver feedback? What's the biology and psychology around feedback? How do you ask for it? How do you receive it? Right. So it kind of just takes this end-to-end feedback experience. And there are there's a there's a lot of connotations around just you say the word feedback and people have ⁓ usually an emotion around it, right? So I delivered this experience. I I, in full transparency, I wasn't feeling great about it. Rolling it out. I knew some people in the room were not there to experience it from a learner's perspective, but from an evaluative perspective. Evaluating you or and the content, yes, both. And so Because they're your bosses or because they just don't like you? Just because they have a stake, they're a stakeholder in its success across an organization. Gotcha. And there was also an individual in there that I was doing I was gonna be speaking at a big leadership conference for that wanted on the same subject that wanted to see what the content was like and what I was like. Cause they had never seen me. So I have all this swirling in my head. I'm already not feeling great about the content. It's like it's good. Yeah. But it's like rolling it out and you gotta like work out the wrinkles and all this kind of stuff. Anyways, and you're looking for that maybe that one hook that like, whoa, that made it like amazing, right? Yeah, yeah. And so fast forward to the end of the day. I just beat myself up terribly about it. Like, you weren't great. It wasn't great. You know, I'm just going through this whole thing. And I I got on a flight about two hours later. And I was like, man, that was just like an epic failure. And you should be embarrassed. I mean, I just, you know, I know some of you are like listening to this and you're like, you shouldn't be telling yourself, see, that's the thing in leadership. We know these things, but we often still do these things. So I'm like trying to give you like real time. This is literally like four days ago. And and so I gotten some great feedback and on feedback on the on the day. And then there was some, you know, other stuff. And like I knew it was coming and that's okay. And I thought I was like ready and tough for it, but I beat myself up so much so that like I just it's kind of like your your NBA finals game. You know, and this is actually what helped me put Yes. Yes, it did. And I thought about it from a sports perspective. You show up in the next game and you do your best. Uh-huh. And they're not talking about the game before. Yeah. They're they're talking about this game, right? And so for me, I started reflecting on, and this was the question that was very helpful to me. Jason, what what are you most like afraid of when you think about that as a failure? Like, What do think about the most, or what are you most afraid of when you think about as a failure? And it was like, it really had it was about like being embarrassed or thinking, well, people don't think I'm competent or that I can do it, or that I'm and then and this is this was the this was it, that I'm a bat a thousand or I'm perfect in every single situation that I'm in. Yeah. And so There is this aspect of when I I reflected, I thought, nobody expects that. That's just me. Yeah. Everybody knew it was a pilot. version two is gonna be better than version one, show up in version two, kick butt. Nobody remembers version one because they're like, dude, that version two is awesome. Right. Yeah. And so I kind of worked through, but I had to take the time to reflect and actually ask myself helpful questions to get out of a funky spot that I was in and come to find out I was the only person that was there. Yeah. And so when we think about leadership and we think about this chapter, I really was at this crossroads and it surprised me. Cause I don't normally find myself at this exact moment and it consuming me so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. About, all right, Jason, are you going to get bitter about this? Or are you going to like reflect, take some things, extrapolate and get better with it moving forward? So, anyways, I I kind of lid this out. It wasn't just a book and it wasn't just a chapter. It was literally four days ago, me navigating the very thing that we are talking about on reflecting and figuring out ways how to get better and move forward. Yeah, I think that comes to comes from ⁓ I mean, we talked about this, I think, a little bit last time, but the idea that, you know, when you're when you're young in your career, when you're young in ministry, when you're young in anything, right? Like there's there's this element of like you are untested. And so failures don't sting as much. But once you've had a series of successes, once you have some approval, you know, this this role, you know, you I know you have an NDA, but like ⁓ this role is like You have someone that has like put a stamp of approval on you. Like they're like, we are hiring you because we believe you are a, you know, a a an amazing basketball player. You know, you're an all-star or whatever, right? ⁓ and so it feels like the pressure to always be perfect grows as you get. That's right. And I think because of that, you can either believe the lie that I am perfect, or you can just kind of try to, you know, deny that you're not perfect. But then that leads to one of the other ⁓ Other elements of this, the idea of humility. ⁓ Failure should lead us to be humble. And if we don't regularly experience failure, we start believing the lie about ourselves that we are perfect, that we always bat a hundred or a thousand. I don't know. I'm not a I always use sports metaphors and I don't even watch sports that much, but love sports. They're great metaphors, but ⁓ you know, you also have to know sports. But and so I think about that with humility, like really realizing that. This could not work. ⁓ this might not work rather. And I need to be prepared to pivot quickly or to ask the right questions or to ask someone, you know, what went wrong here. ⁓ and just really observe failure for insights. So that's what he talks about. G get humble, but then get humble enough to actually be able to ask questions of other people. And he lists some of the things that He got from, you know, some of these insights that he looks for whenever he talks to people about the about the failure. One of the ones in particular I loved is the idea of cutting your losses quickly. And I think about that for you. Yeah. So okay, you felt like it was a loss, you cut it quickly, and then you figure out, okay, what's the next thing? What's the next iteration? What's the what was the missing piece? What was the thing? Yeah. And if we don't cut those losses, again to that sports analogy of of the of the team, right? Like the Spurs won last night. They had lost the two previous games. They cut the losses. They did, they didn't. They didn't completely leave the failure in the past. They said, okay, what do we need to change? Now let's not assume it's going to be a failure again because it we failed two times. Like let's make those changes and now let's move forward. And I think that's another hard part is like, okay, yes, you you you you see the failure, you evaluate it, but then actually acting on that evaluation is a hard part for a lot of people. It is. And it's hard because I think sometimes people could take failures and setbacks. And it can make them hard, right? Or we let it make us hard versus, you know, the the opposite of that. And, you know, how do you not stay stuck in it? because you're saying some people kind of get rigid from those failures. Kind of reminds me of that, like Yeah. You know, you know that like there's like this kind of theological complicated idea of like God hardened Pharaoh's heart. You remember that in the Bible in Exodus where it says God hardened Pharaoh's heart? And then the I think it's Erasmus, his like, His explanation of that is that the same sun that hardens the clay softens the wax, right? So like we have the same situation, but depending on our heart, we either get rigid or we get softened and more pliable. And so that is like we need to respond correctly to it. Yeah. And sorry, I interrupted you, but I just I just love that. I love that explanation of like how two the same the same thing can happen to two people and it'll either soften you or it'll harden you. Yeah. And and when you think about it, you know, failure. And I think the the a key portal or a key bridgeway to this ⁓ of using it to your advantage is are you gonna let failure deepen you or harden you? And really so much comes in the reflection and the response. And so, yeah, I mean, I I rarely get myself into the headspace I was in on Friday, but and I did I told my wife, I'm like, something caught me s by surprise. And so it was a humbling moment. But I I knew come today, I had to lead something else in front of people. And so if I stayed there, then it would show up today. And guess what today is? Another opportunity to step in to have a great at bat or to shoot the shot or to, you know, whatever sports analogy we want to Whatever sports analogy, I don't understand. That's right. Insert, insert, you know, your next golf shot, whatever it is. Yeah. So, but but here's the thing. Pain and failure by itself or by themselves, they don't produce growth. I think it's pausing enough to reflect and respond, like that creates the growth. And there has to be an aspect of ownership. Because when I think about, you know, mm-hmm this situation I'm in, and really there are other situations. Sometimes it is related to something we did, but then other times we're on teams where maybe a project was a failure. Yeah. You know. Because of somebody else. And then that's where it's easy to kind of do the blame and pointing and all that. So it's like, all right, what is yours to own? especially as it relates to a failure. And I think, you know, working in church world for so long on staff, but also as a as a coach, a consultant, one of the things that I see, but I see this actually, I see this on the corporate side too. We want people to see us a certain way. We want people to believe the story that we're. giving to them. And so if anything disrupts that story, that was that that was my mess up on Friday. People had an image of Jason. People already were talking about Jason. And then Jason did this thing. And again, got great feedback from it. A lot of it was me, but my number one question really was well, does it change the way they already think about me? Like I'm like, God, how did I get into that trap? Yeah. So I had to own that and I had to ask some questions and talk to somebody, kind of work my way out of it, because guess what? I'm gonna get another opportunity soon. And I don't wanna bring that negative stuff into this, you know, opportunity next. And I think sometimes what we don't do is we don't use failure as a leadership developer when I think that's what leader when I think that's what failure can be. Yeah. And I think so often there's this, I mean, you you you said it. We are so worried about what people think about us that we create this delusion, especially in ministry. I've seen this so much. We create this delusional, we call it faith, but it's this delusion around ourselves. ⁓ I love conferences, but from the first conference that I attended, I saw this situation where there was just this posturing that happened around us. You know, we're waiting for a main session and someone's like, ⁓ yeah, you know, we're running. We're running six services and three campuses and we, you know, we have so many volunteers. And, you know, I was, I think the first conference I went to, I was maybe 20 years old and all of my team were like, you know, under sixteen years old. I was a worship leader and, you know, they were getting grounded regularly so they couldn't come to rehearsal because they were like doing things they shouldn't be doing. And I was dealing with this, like these inexperienced musicians, inexperienced volunteers. And I was like, you know, we had 500 people in our church. And I'm like, I don't I am not I and I felt so beneath everyone because they were posturing themselves. At the same time, I'm like, what are you doing at this conference if everything's going so wonderfully? Like why are you going to a conference, right? Like what do you like, you don't need help? And so what they got from that conference was probably nothing because they were trying to buy into their lie that everything was wonderful. They were growing so rapidly. Their volunteer teams were killing it. And whereas I was I felt desperate. I'm like, I need some help here. And so I feel like I grew more from those conferences than from the people that were like posturing themselves a certain way. Again, that was me as a twenty year old. I was trying to figure it out in ministry. I didn't know what I was doing. I still probably don't know what I'm doing, but I feel like I've had some success. So I must know what I'm doing, right? But I do think that we learn more whenever we n acknowledge that we don't know what we're doing. and I think we just buy into this trap, either delusion or because we've had past success and we start thinking we know what we're doing. And both of those are really harmful. Yeah. It it really is. ⁓ When I think about okay, let me let me ask you a question. When you look back over your life, would you say most of your lessons and growth came through difficulty? Yeah. I think I think about that a lot. Resiliency, right? Like ⁓ I think about that as a parent, and we've talked about this. The idea that, you know, we we tend to shield our kids from any negative experience. But then you look at, you know, I I I see the story of like a Dwayne Wade, again an athlete. We're really hitting those those athlete. Yeah, you go. I am. I don't know why. My my wife's really into sports and she loves Dwayne Wade. ⁓ she's from Miami. So but like you see his experience growing up without a father and his mom was like pretty hardcore on him. He developed resiliency and obviously getting to the NBA, becoming a finals, you know, becoming a a champion. All of these things came from him having to deal with difficult problems, him having to deal with the in ideal situation. And we we don't want that. We live in a really plush world. And he talked about this in the chapter that like we live in a Western society where like, for the most part, everything's good. We have access to anything immediately. I think about, you know, everything is drive-thru. Like I don't have to go into a store anymore. I just have it brought out to my car. Like there's zero resilience in my life because Everything is easy for me. But whenever we have to face those difficulties, so I do feel like I face difficulties when it comes to business. You know, I have an idea, I don't have money for it. ⁓ I don't want to spend money on it because I feel like it's irresponsible. ⁓ you know, I try something and it feels like I'm just like trying to push a push a rock up a muddy hill and it's not working. And so I try something different and I try something different. And, you know, the pe the things that people see that I've tried. Are the successes, but the things that people don't see, it's because they've been a failure and they don't even see that. ⁓ and I think that's the thing. Like we, we, we don't show people failure or people don't see the failure. And that's kind of a benefit. It's kind of a grace, honestly. Like most people don't see my failures. Thank God. Whereas once you get to a level of success of success that makes you more afraid to fail because people will see the failure. Yeah. And you know it's interesting on the failure front, when I think about people that I enjoy being around people that have failed because it generates and creates this maturity, this empathy, this ⁓ like human part to them. In fact, they f and again, this is not every single person that experiences failures, but but there there's a lot. It just makes them feel real. So if you're around those people, you're like, they feel normal to you and they feel, you know, and then there's this tension, like if If we enjoy that, then why can't we become that? And there's this like there's this gap in between and and maybe, just maybe, the maybe we can reframe failure from something that's always about how people see us or judge us or you know, whatever that maybe we can kind of reframe it to, you know, what if failure actually allowed you to, especially the reflection and response to it, allowed you to better connect with people, allowed you to prioritize relationships, allowed you to ⁓ it gave you permission to ⁓ engage with people in conversations you wouldn't have before. It actually served as like fuel and momentum to do the next thing because the more you do it, the more comfortable you become with it. The more people are willing to trust you because they see you as human and willing to take a risk, having failure, reflecting and responding to it. So there's this aspect of like, if we could change maybe how we see it, I'm not saying it's easy. Yeah. Me too. I wonder if we would allow it to do work in us so that we could look at it a little bit differently. So that way it could affect people differently in a way that It could be positive and allow us to be better going forward, allow us as a team to be better going forward versus avoiding it, hiding it, disguising it, excusing it, ⁓ you know, defending it. There's all these things we we kind of posture, like you said, we posture in jockey for certain things because we try to control the narrative versus. I wonder if we changed the way we looked at it, more transparent about it, sit in the discomfort of it, and allow it to br produce things like empathy and care and courage and better relationships. And just maybe that helps us to move forward. Yeah. I I think the the benefit, the byproduct of doing that is something, and this is a Big idea to put at the end of a podcast, but ⁓ is you can become irreplaceable in your role. Meaning, I think about, you know, I was a designer and I was so worried that I was no longer gonna be the cool designer. I was a worship leader, I was worried I was gonna no longer be the cool worship leader. I was whatever, whatever it is in our society, there's this value placed on youth where you are it in this certain age range. And it's terrifying for people because once you lose that, you have nothing unless you go from being the person doing all the cool things to being the person coaching all the people doing all the cool things. That's good. You can be the person equipping, the person encouraging the per the person that's ⁓ helping them navigate that. And I think whenever we respond properly to failure, we get that humility that makes the younger generation actually want to listen to us. Yeah. We have enough wisdom and experience to actually have something to offer that's not just like, well, this is what I did. You need to do that. Hey, this is the thing I did. I would stay away from that. But you could probably really do this, right? Like we go from being the people that are doing the cool things to being the people that are equipping the people doing the cool things. And that is where we have longevity. I think about like a John Maxwell. Like he's he's writing books, he's he's doing this coaching stuff. He's older, he's older in years, right? Like he's he's on in years. But he's been able to shift from being the person always doing the things to being the person that's empowering the the people doing the things. And I think that's a result of whenever we do this correctly, we get to be able to be in that role. We get to shift into that role. And I think for pastors, I think there are a lot of pastors that are like am I aging out? Is my congregation eventually going to age out? Am I no longer gonna be the cool pastor or again, designers, worship leaders, whatever it is on staff that you do. There's that fear that I'm not going to be it. Someone is going to replace me in my role. But if you can make this shift of becoming the coach, of becoming the empowerer, of becoming the person who creates the structure for the people who need to create, you can have longevity. So as you think about your role, and we head to the finish line of this this podcast episode, you're probably thinking about a recent failure, disappointment in your life. And maybe you're like that. That is true. That that is very true. But just pretend you're trying to find one, okay? Yeah. Dig deep. ⁓ imagine if you have one, a disappointment, a failure, and maybe. Man, maybe that thing is just tripping you up. And maybe people know, maybe they don't know. I think my question to you as you think about this is: what disappointment, what failure might actually be trying to develop something in you so that you can have the permission to invest and lead other people and to expand your impact and to have that longevity? Because you're not gonna try to survive a failure. Like that's not that's not what leaders do, but what leaders do is how can I become wiser because of it? And the only way to do that is to slow down enough to reflect and respond in a way it makes you human. We all fail. We don't have to hide it. It's what do we do with it? And I think John is a great example, ⁓ not only just in this book, but you know, in other books of failing. And living to tell about it because you know what? That's exactly what we can happen. So don't waste a disappointment, don't waste a failure. Let it develop something in you and watch your impact and influence expand. That was good. Hey, this is the end of the episode. ⁓ hope you liked it. If you did like it, make sure you're subscribed if you're not already. Find us on social media, talk to us. We love to chat with people. But we'll see you next week for chapter five. Whether you read it, whether you don't, we know you'll get something good out of it.