The Courage To Make Mistakes

Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, shares a story from her childhood rooted in the ability to make mistakes – a perspective that helped her build a company with just $5000 and turn it into an international retail powerhouse.

Each weekend, her dad would sit down and ask Sara and her brother one question, a question that helped her learn how to “fall forward” both personally – and later on, as a leader of a multi-billion-dollar company.

 

His question? What have you failed at this week?

If you never extend yourself to the point of failure, you’re never going to amount to much. Tweet This!

If you want your people to innovate and use their imagination – learn to increase your tolerance for some degree of making honest mistakes.

Hear the full story, plus two ways to immediately put this into practice, in this 2-minute video.

Make Mistakes

 

 

Failure is often a necessary path to success and it’s ok to make a mistake. Ask yourself, how have you failed today?

 

Find posts related to your personal courage and the ability to make mistakes here:

 

 

The Three Buckets of Courage

The Courage to Leap – Out of the Comfort Zone

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

You Might Also Like…

Power, Swelling, and the Leadership Killer

Power, Swelling, and the Leadership Killer

Power is a powerful thing. Leadership, to be effective, involves wielding power to produce desired results. Leaders are set apart from the people they are responsible for leading precisely because of the power inherent in leading. Leaders are expected to assert power...

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Risks

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Risks

In the same way you learn leadership from leaders, law from lawyers, and art from artists, you learn most about risk-taking from risk-takers. Emerson once wrote, “The great distinction between teachers, sacred or literary, is that one class speaks from within, or from...

Try Courage

Try Courage

My clients make me brave. That’s because for almost twenty years, I’ve run a courage-building consulting firm, Giant Leap Consulting. For over two decades, I’ve worked with thousands of leaders throughout the world, facilitating Courageous Leadership workshops. For...