30. Why Embracing Failure is Your Leadership Edge
What if I told you that your fear of failure is actually holding you back from your greatest leadership potential? As high-achieving women, we often believe we should "know better" or "do better," creating a paralyzing fear of making mistakes that keeps us playing small.
I see this pattern all the time in my coaching practice. Women tell me they're scared of failing, of not being good enough, of not measuring up. But here's the truth: failure isn't something to avoid—it's the very path to expanding your leadership capacity.
Join me this week to learn how to reframe failure as capacity-building rather than a verdict on your worth. Through client stories and personal experiences, I'll show you how to use failure as fuel for growth, helping you expand your emotional capacity to lead bigger, bolder initiatives without shrinking when challenges arise.
Whether you're leading a team, making big bold decisions, or tackling tough conversations, confidence is the key to showing up powerfully. That's why I created the Confidence Hack, a simple yet powerful tool that has helped tons of women just like you break free from limiting beliefs and step fully into their potential.
Click here to download the Confidence Hack for free now!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
How to transform failure from a shame trigger into a leadership superpower.
Why emotional capacity is the hidden edge that separates good leaders from exceptional ones.
The neuroscience behind why failure feels threatening and how to rewire your response.
How to trace the upgrade in your leadership skills that each failure offers.
Why expanding your window of discomfort directly correlates to your leadership potential.
How to recognize when imposter syndrome is actually a signal of growth rather than inadequacy.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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The Imposter Phenomenon - International Journal of Behavioural Science
Full Episode Transcript:
If you're a high-achieving woman who's ever thought, I should know this already, what if I mess up? This episode is for you. What if I told you the real leadership breakthrough isn't about being perfect, but about how much discomfort you're willing to hold without shrinking?
Failure isn't a detour. It's the path. Not because it feels good, but because every time you hit your edge and stay with it, you build emotional and mental capacity to lead bigger, bolder, and more powerfully than ever before. Let's talk about how to make failure your superpower, not your shame trigger.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, today's episode is number 30 and it is all about failing forward. Why emotional capacity is your leadership edge and how failure is the greatest teacher of that capacity and building that skillset out. It is also one of the key things that I teach the women that I coach to overcome imposter syndrome. Because oftentimes, when I'm coaching women, they tell me that I'm scared of failing. I'm scared of not being good enough. I am scared that I am not up to this level. And all of those things are really about failure, scared of being a failure.
And here's what I want to offer you in today's episode: that failure is part of the journey. It is actually the growth edge that allows you to do bigger and bigger things and bolder things in your career. Because when we fail, it doesn't feel great, but we also win when we fail. I'm going to say that again. We also win when we fail, because I know a lot of you don't think about it that way.
But when we fail, we actually expand our emotional and mental capacity. We are able to deal with the hurt feelings, the upset, the anger, the sadness, and we're able to work our way through that, which builds our mental capacity because we are building new neural pathways, right? When we fail at something and we get back up and we do it again, we're actually learning to build our emotional resiliency and our capacity to believe beyond this current moment.
So this is not about toxic positivity. This is not about not feeling the feelings and being like, okay, like let's move on. So I failed, let's move on and move forward. Oftentimes what happens is women don't want to feel the feelings. And so if they don't want to feel the feelings, then they won't even try. And they won't even try because they're scared of failing. So failure becomes something that stops them versus something that you can grow from and learn from.
Today's episode is really about how this fear of failure is one of the most crippling things about imposter syndrome. This imposter syndrome that we're so scared of, if we're always scared of failing, then we won't do what we need to do to move ahead, to learn. So, today we're going to talk about and define that imposter syndrome. It's not just doubt. It's the haunting sense that success was a fluke and that you'll be exposed. It's this fear that somebody will find out about you.
And so oftentimes, people don't take risks. They feel like they're one mistake away from being found out, right? And of course, the Journal of Behavioral Science says that 70% of people will experience imposter syndrome at some point in their life. And this is actually a good thing, right? It's not a flaw. It's a signal that you are expanding, that you're on your edge of your comfort zone, that you are feeling uncomfortable because you're learning and growing and expanding.
So reframing it, imposter syndrome is what happens when your identity hasn't caught up with your growth yet. So maybe you have gotten promoted. This happens to people that I coach a lot. They finally get promoted. They feel like they have earned this. They have worked really hard. But then they're at their very first leadership team meeting and something inside them tells them to hide, to shrink down, to watch and wait versus showing up and taking risk.
And that something is often imposter syndrome. And that imposter syndrome is typically saying, don't get caught. And so it's like, don't get caught, don't fail, don't do anything that puts you out in the world. And so your brain starts building this up versus you taking ownership, you taking ownership and control and knowing that this is something that might happen, especially if you are expanding and growing.
And the more that we anticipate this feeling, this fear of failure, the more we anticipate it and understand that this is a natural part of what happens when we are getting out of our comfort zone, when we're making risk, when we're really showing up for life. This aliveness is actually something we want to have in ourselves and as we show up as leaders. Because the thing that attracts people to most people's leadership is that aliveness, that knowing that this person is present and clear, and that this person, which is you, is pushing the comfort zone of themselves. And this is what allows people to expand into greater and greater levels of leadership.
So, I know I've talked about neuroscience before, particularly as it relates to imposter syndrome, but I'm going to reiterate it here again, that failure is typically a threat to our ego, especially the way that we're thinking about it in this career terms. So what happens when our brain says you failed, something has gone terribly wrong. What we notice is a cortisol spike, our rational thinking drops and we retreat to what feels safe.
And that might seem like holding back, that might seem like shrinking down. And I've shared this quote before, but I think it makes sense to talk about again because people don't understand why they react certain ways. And I want you to have some compassion for yourself if you are noticing, yeah, I do shrink down. I do become a lot smaller and I don't speak up and I have a lot of thoughts that I don't belong.
So Dr. Joe Dispenza, who you might have heard from before, talks about by the age of 35, most people operate from a memorized set of emotional reactions, beliefs, and behaviors. That wiring, every time you avoid failure, you reinforce that old wiring, that wiring that says this is not safe, I need to retreat. But to expand, to break through your leadership level, if you're really trying to get to that next leadership level, it is the process of failing, feeling the failure, feeling upset, feeling the emotions, and moving through it.
Growth requires interruption. We need to interrupt ourselves. This discomfort is not danger. It's data for us. We can use this data, we can understand ourselves, we can comfort ourselves, and we can move forward and we can continue building that emotional and mental capacity, which is required for any leader who wants to expand their leadership capacity, who wants to be that next level leader that they know that they're capable of being, but they're just not there yet because they're learning. And learning takes failure, it takes messiness.
So, what we need to do in order to overcome our own brain system of retreating back into those regressive habits is to reframe failure as capacity building. Failure is not a verdict, it's a reveal. It's data. It shows you that we need to strengthen something. Maybe it's our voice, maybe it's your ability to hold boundaries. Maybe it's your trusting in yourself during uncertain times. Maybe it is about being in high stake situations, still being with yourself and moving through that in a way that is more and more empowering for you.
So it might look like for you, being invited to a leadership team meeting where the first meeting you just noticed yourself, wow, I want to hide, I want to go away. And even noticing that allows you to make a different conscious choice. Wow, I noticed myself wanting to hide away. How can I actually dive in? What would it feel like if I actually belonged here?
So you want to be on to yourself and listen to your both unconscious, you know, stories that you're telling yourself about the moment, but also where you want to go and how you want to get there. Instead of using these things and these feelings that you might have when you feel like failure might be here, that you learn to embrace that and you use this as data.
So I want to share about one of my clients who has recently dealt with this. She had a lot of people on her leadership team leaving the company. And they've shared multiple times, it's not you, it's the company. You know, we want more money, we want to be seen, we want to be respected, and it's not you, it's the CEO, it's other people in the company. And she was like, wow, I feel like I failed these people. I mean, I felt like I did what I could. I talked to my boss, but I feel like I failed these people.
And I asked her, if you weren't staying with the failure, if you were just naming the emotions, what would that be like? And so she said, I feel angry and sad. I feel sad that they're leaving because they're really great high star people. I feel angry that I'm not able to influence my boss in such a way that allows that her to hear me and create these different outcomes and these different possibilities for people on my staff.
And I said, great. So you have feelings and you have the reasons around the feelings. And you can either make this mean that this is just the way it is, or you can make this mean, what else should I try? You know, and it's looking at what else can I do? What's the next step? And so she really went to school with herself. And of course, we processed her emotions and she talked about those.
But what happened was after we talked about that this is failure is just learning, it's not, you know, a verdict, she actually had an opportunity where one of her staff came to her and said, listen, I got another opportunity. I have been proving myself and I do want this raise. You know I took a pay cut to come here. And she looked at this guy and she said, I hear you. I know you took a pay cut. I know that we have given you a bonus, but it's not up to where you want to be. And I hear that you've got this job. Let me go talk to the CEO.
And when she went to go talk to the CEO, she talked to her for about 20 minutes, but she was really convicted in herself. She was really clear. She asked her boss clearly what she wanted and needed in order to keep this person. And she kept it very matter of fact, and she kept in mind the purpose of the company. And she really let her boss know, hey, if this person leaves, this is the impact to us. And she's had this conversation multiple times with her boss, but this time something was different. Her emotional capacity to be with this person and their emotions, her belief in herself was stronger because we processed some of the other things that happened in the past.
She used her anger towards influencing in a different way. And she went to bat again, instead of being like, oh, I'm not going to talk to the CEO because I keep getting nos. She said, I'm going to go for it. And she went for it. And guess what? Her CEO said, great idea, let's make it happen. And she made it happen. And she was very happy and excited about this. But what we celebrated together was her ability to digest the failure, reframe it, get back to it, and actually create different outcomes for herself, the company, and this person that she obviously wanted on her team. But if she stayed in her failure mind frame and she stayed stuck in failure, she wouldn't have gotten back to, let me go give it another go. Let me go try, right? But instead, she used the failure of the past to fuel her future actions.
Most clients that I work with, they want to be seen, heard, and respected. And part of this comes back to you learning how to see yourself clearly, hear yourself clearly, and respect yourself. And part of it is to not to overly entertain those imposter syndrome thoughts, but to really think about how it is about holding yourself, you know, even in your failure and being able to see the positives in that and to be able to see the growth in that, that it doesn't come from some perfect recipe. It actually comes from learning to digest, understand that failure, and then going to bat again.
I used to talk about this too because a lot of clients that I talk to, they say, well, I went and asked for money and I got a no. And I'm like, okay, well, that was just round one. Like, you got to think about this in lots of rounds, especially the type of company I came from, which was a big multinational company. You've got to learn the different ways of asking and learning from it and not using the no as a failure.
Usually when I hear no, and I tell my clients this, no just means not right now versus no means no forever, right? And I think one of the big things that I learned being in this corporate structure where you get no a lot is learning how to be resourceful, learning how to get the yes, understanding where my boss was coming from, getting that data and keep going back and keep batting, right? And using this as practice, practice to influence at a greater level, practice of being with that no, but not making it mean that it's no forever and that it's somehow holding me back or I'm somehow flawed.
The other example I wanted to share with you is actually one that comes from my own personal experience. And I want to share this because I think a lot of the women that are listening today have this fear or notice this for themselves. Well, what happened with me is I literally was working my ass off. I have to say this. I was working so hard. I was in London. I was actually in charge from a financial standpoint of a really large infrastructure project that was the biggest of its portfolio in our sort of international portfolio.
And I was traveling a lot. I was living in London, but I was traveling to Australia because that was the first country that we were going to bring on to this new tech stack. I had to work with a lot of Americans in the US because that's where we were gaining the technology and that's where they had started this big infrastructure shift. So I was working super hard and I had this very high visibility, high impact project that was sort of like the jewel of the crown at the time because everybody was talking about it. And I had the privilege of doing this tough hard work on it.
I came to the office after one of these big trips and I learned that my peer, who was male and who I also learned plays a lot of golf with our boss and the CFO of the office, I learned that he got promoted to this director level, which was higher level than where I was at. And I was pretty stunned by it. I was a little shocked by it because I didn't even know that there was a higher level role. I felt angry about it because I felt like I was doing so much work and committing myself to, you know, trying to make the best result of this high impact project. And I felt really sad. And so those were the emotions that I felt.
And what I also learned from this was, wow, where am I not showing up that he is showing up? So instead of, you know, being with the emotions is one thing, but also reframing it as a learning opportunity. And what I learned from that is he advocates for himself. He's overly ambitious about what he can achieve. Another colleague, one of my bosses told me that he's in there always talking about what's next for him. He's always talking to senior leaders about what's next for him.
And I realized, wow, I'm not doing any of that. I'm head down, delivering results. I'm a good soldier, but I was not doing the work of actually influencing people, advocating for myself, and openly being ambitious about what I want next. And there needs to be a balance. And so that's what I took from that. That's what I learned. That was the painful cost of that, the failure of not getting promoted, of not even knowing that there was a promotion available.
And so if you see how you can use this, because I know a lot of you listening, there's probably upset, there's probably disappointment. Maybe you didn't get that promotion, maybe you didn't get that big project. But instead of sticking with this story of that you're a failure, what if you instead just named your emotions and noticed what they were? Actually validating how you're feeling, the disappointment, the upset, the sadness.
When we're able to name our emotions, and I know there's a whole podcast episode on the purpose and power of emotions that we'll link here. But this is again super important because this helps us slow down our nervous system. And when we slow down our nervous system, we're less likely to be in that survival mode thinking where it's like doom and gloom and my career is over.
So when you name your emotions and you can sit with yourself in there, you can also reclaim your agency. What am I learning about myself here? You want to ask yourself that. What are you being invited to? What are you wanting to own for yourself? So instead of the failure happening to you, you actually take ownership of the failure. You reframe it. And you can trace the upgrade.
So when I talk about tracing the upgrade, it's like, what is the skill that you're being invited to develop? What is the emotional and mental capacity that you're being drawn into? Well, in my situation, it was having the feelings, being upset about it, and then learning how to speak up for myself and going and asking my boss about it, and going to learn the skillset to empower myself and going to school on this guy to just see what he's actually doing when I'm head down working super hard. You want to stretch yourself to do these things and to get out of your own way, get out of your comfort zone to learn that this is a skillset.
And you want to be able to track your capacity. Like what am I sitting with here? Where am I expanding? I'm expanding my capacity to feel hurt and angry. And also strategize to get back on it. It's a way where we are noticing ourselves at a greater level that we are able to not only validate our emotions, but also suck the learnings out of it and get that learning and hold on to it and take ownership of it.
Because the more and more you do that, the less likely you are going to allow imposter syndrome that is driven from the fear of failure, hold you back. Keep you from moving forward, keep you from that promotion, keep you from asking your boss for more things. This is part of that expansion strategy, but if we don't have that emotional resiliency and that mental capacity, seeing ourselves going to bat again, seeing ourselves using this failure to fuel us, to help us grow into the leader that we know we're meant to be, then it's a waste.
So this is why this practice is so important. Naming your emotions, reclaiming your agency. What am I learning about myself here? Tracing the upgrade that you need in your own leadership. What skills am I being invited to develop? You know, what is that expansiveness emotionally and mentally here? Is there something that you need to believe about yourself that even if you don't get this promotion, you can still make an impact, you can still learn these skills? And next time you're going to be the one that gets that promotion.
You also want to track your growth. You want to track the discomfort that you're able to be with because when we track that and we can notice, because everybody has this like tolerance or window of discomfort. And as leaders, we want to grow that level of tolerance. The more discomfort we're able to be in, the more we're actually going to lead bigger and bigger things because what happens is if somebody notices you like, wow, Sarah is able to make decisions in high stake situations, there's a lot of emotions happening, a lot of people are upset and she's able to show up. Let's give her that promotion because we know she's ready for that next level.
She's able to be grounded with herself. She's mentally not allowing the setbacks or the obstacles to throw her off the course and we want her to lead even on a bigger scale because we trust her leadership. This is really what's on the line here of your ability to learn how to use failure as fuel, to grow and to reframe it in a way that is actually about your own self-empowerment, that this failure is about you and not about the other person. It's about how you can take more ownership, how you can show up differently, and how you can keep cheering yourself on no matter what.
Like we get that ability to do that, that invitation to do that because we are inviting ourselves into this space and that is empowerment. You going to school on yourself, you taking care of yourself, and you keep bringing yourself back to the game because in the game is where we score. If you sit on the sidelines and you just watch people and you tell yourself stories about why you shouldn't be on the field, you're wasting time, you're wasting your energy, and you are not going to grow into the leader that you have the potential of being. So what we want to do is continually help ourselves, cheer ourselves on, get back on that playing field, get back in the game, and create these results for yourself. Expand your emotional and mental capacity that way.
All right. So that was today's episode. It is all about reframing failure, learning how to expand your emotional and mental capacity. And of course, noticing for yourself how you can take more and more ownership of failure in a way to support you to show up as a next-level leader, as a next-level boss, as a next-level woman in a male dominated space that wants to make an even bigger impact. How do you use that failure to do that?
All right. I'd love to hear what you think about this episode. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on as you think about past failures and how to get the most juice out of them. So, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear that from you. And then of course, leave a review. All right, I will see you next time.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Failure isn't a detour. It's the path. Not because it feels good, but because every time you hit your edge and stay with it, you build emotional and mental capacity to lead bigger, bolder, and more powerfully than ever before. Let's talk about how to make failure your superpower, not your shame trigger.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, today's episode is number 30 and it is all about failing forward. Why emotional capacity is your leadership edge and how failure is the greatest teacher of that capacity and building that skillset out. It is also one of the key things that I teach the women that I coach to overcome imposter syndrome. Because oftentimes, when I'm coaching women, they tell me that I'm scared of failing. I'm scared of not being good enough. I am scared that I am not up to this level. And all of those things are really about failure, scared of being a failure.
And here's what I want to offer you in today's episode: that failure is part of the journey. It is actually the growth edge that allows you to do bigger and bigger things and bolder things in your career. Because when we fail, it doesn't feel great, but we also win when we fail. I'm going to say that again. We also win when we fail, because I know a lot of you don't think about it that way.
But when we fail, we actually expand our emotional and mental capacity. We are able to deal with the hurt feelings, the upset, the anger, the sadness, and we're able to work our way through that, which builds our mental capacity because we are building new neural pathways, right? When we fail at something and we get back up and we do it again, we're actually learning to build our emotional resiliency and our capacity to believe beyond this current moment.
So this is not about toxic positivity. This is not about not feeling the feelings and being like, okay, like let's move on. So I failed, let's move on and move forward. Oftentimes what happens is women don't want to feel the feelings. And so if they don't want to feel the feelings, then they won't even try. And they won't even try because they're scared of failing. So failure becomes something that stops them versus something that you can grow from and learn from.
Today's episode is really about how this fear of failure is one of the most crippling things about imposter syndrome. This imposter syndrome that we're so scared of, if we're always scared of failing, then we won't do what we need to do to move ahead, to learn. So, today we're going to talk about and define that imposter syndrome. It's not just doubt. It's the haunting sense that success was a fluke and that you'll be exposed. It's this fear that somebody will find out about you.
And so oftentimes, people don't take risks. They feel like they're one mistake away from being found out, right? And of course, the Journal of Behavioral Science says that 70% of people will experience imposter syndrome at some point in their life. And this is actually a good thing, right? It's not a flaw. It's a signal that you are expanding, that you're on your edge of your comfort zone, that you are feeling uncomfortable because you're learning and growing and expanding.
So reframing it, imposter syndrome is what happens when your identity hasn't caught up with your growth yet. So maybe you have gotten promoted. This happens to people that I coach a lot. They finally get promoted. They feel like they have earned this. They have worked really hard. But then they're at their very first leadership team meeting and something inside them tells them to hide, to shrink down, to watch and wait versus showing up and taking risk.
And that something is often imposter syndrome. And that imposter syndrome is typically saying, don't get caught. And so it's like, don't get caught, don't fail, don't do anything that puts you out in the world. And so your brain starts building this up versus you taking ownership, you taking ownership and control and knowing that this is something that might happen, especially if you are expanding and growing.
And the more that we anticipate this feeling, this fear of failure, the more we anticipate it and understand that this is a natural part of what happens when we are getting out of our comfort zone, when we're making risk, when we're really showing up for life. This aliveness is actually something we want to have in ourselves and as we show up as leaders. Because the thing that attracts people to most people's leadership is that aliveness, that knowing that this person is present and clear, and that this person, which is you, is pushing the comfort zone of themselves. And this is what allows people to expand into greater and greater levels of leadership.
So, I know I've talked about neuroscience before, particularly as it relates to imposter syndrome, but I'm going to reiterate it here again, that failure is typically a threat to our ego, especially the way that we're thinking about it in this career terms. So what happens when our brain says you failed, something has gone terribly wrong. What we notice is a cortisol spike, our rational thinking drops and we retreat to what feels safe.
And that might seem like holding back, that might seem like shrinking down. And I've shared this quote before, but I think it makes sense to talk about again because people don't understand why they react certain ways. And I want you to have some compassion for yourself if you are noticing, yeah, I do shrink down. I do become a lot smaller and I don't speak up and I have a lot of thoughts that I don't belong.
So Dr. Joe Dispenza, who you might have heard from before, talks about by the age of 35, most people operate from a memorized set of emotional reactions, beliefs, and behaviors. That wiring, every time you avoid failure, you reinforce that old wiring, that wiring that says this is not safe, I need to retreat. But to expand, to break through your leadership level, if you're really trying to get to that next leadership level, it is the process of failing, feeling the failure, feeling upset, feeling the emotions, and moving through it.
Growth requires interruption. We need to interrupt ourselves. This discomfort is not danger. It's data for us. We can use this data, we can understand ourselves, we can comfort ourselves, and we can move forward and we can continue building that emotional and mental capacity, which is required for any leader who wants to expand their leadership capacity, who wants to be that next level leader that they know that they're capable of being, but they're just not there yet because they're learning. And learning takes failure, it takes messiness.
So, what we need to do in order to overcome our own brain system of retreating back into those regressive habits is to reframe failure as capacity building. Failure is not a verdict, it's a reveal. It's data. It shows you that we need to strengthen something. Maybe it's our voice, maybe it's your ability to hold boundaries. Maybe it's your trusting in yourself during uncertain times. Maybe it is about being in high stake situations, still being with yourself and moving through that in a way that is more and more empowering for you.
So it might look like for you, being invited to a leadership team meeting where the first meeting you just noticed yourself, wow, I want to hide, I want to go away. And even noticing that allows you to make a different conscious choice. Wow, I noticed myself wanting to hide away. How can I actually dive in? What would it feel like if I actually belonged here?
So you want to be on to yourself and listen to your both unconscious, you know, stories that you're telling yourself about the moment, but also where you want to go and how you want to get there. Instead of using these things and these feelings that you might have when you feel like failure might be here, that you learn to embrace that and you use this as data.
So I want to share about one of my clients who has recently dealt with this. She had a lot of people on her leadership team leaving the company. And they've shared multiple times, it's not you, it's the company. You know, we want more money, we want to be seen, we want to be respected, and it's not you, it's the CEO, it's other people in the company. And she was like, wow, I feel like I failed these people. I mean, I felt like I did what I could. I talked to my boss, but I feel like I failed these people.
And I asked her, if you weren't staying with the failure, if you were just naming the emotions, what would that be like? And so she said, I feel angry and sad. I feel sad that they're leaving because they're really great high star people. I feel angry that I'm not able to influence my boss in such a way that allows that her to hear me and create these different outcomes and these different possibilities for people on my staff.
And I said, great. So you have feelings and you have the reasons around the feelings. And you can either make this mean that this is just the way it is, or you can make this mean, what else should I try? You know, and it's looking at what else can I do? What's the next step? And so she really went to school with herself. And of course, we processed her emotions and she talked about those.
But what happened was after we talked about that this is failure is just learning, it's not, you know, a verdict, she actually had an opportunity where one of her staff came to her and said, listen, I got another opportunity. I have been proving myself and I do want this raise. You know I took a pay cut to come here. And she looked at this guy and she said, I hear you. I know you took a pay cut. I know that we have given you a bonus, but it's not up to where you want to be. And I hear that you've got this job. Let me go talk to the CEO.
And when she went to go talk to the CEO, she talked to her for about 20 minutes, but she was really convicted in herself. She was really clear. She asked her boss clearly what she wanted and needed in order to keep this person. And she kept it very matter of fact, and she kept in mind the purpose of the company. And she really let her boss know, hey, if this person leaves, this is the impact to us. And she's had this conversation multiple times with her boss, but this time something was different. Her emotional capacity to be with this person and their emotions, her belief in herself was stronger because we processed some of the other things that happened in the past.
She used her anger towards influencing in a different way. And she went to bat again, instead of being like, oh, I'm not going to talk to the CEO because I keep getting nos. She said, I'm going to go for it. And she went for it. And guess what? Her CEO said, great idea, let's make it happen. And she made it happen. And she was very happy and excited about this. But what we celebrated together was her ability to digest the failure, reframe it, get back to it, and actually create different outcomes for herself, the company, and this person that she obviously wanted on her team. But if she stayed in her failure mind frame and she stayed stuck in failure, she wouldn't have gotten back to, let me go give it another go. Let me go try, right? But instead, she used the failure of the past to fuel her future actions.
Most clients that I work with, they want to be seen, heard, and respected. And part of this comes back to you learning how to see yourself clearly, hear yourself clearly, and respect yourself. And part of it is to not to overly entertain those imposter syndrome thoughts, but to really think about how it is about holding yourself, you know, even in your failure and being able to see the positives in that and to be able to see the growth in that, that it doesn't come from some perfect recipe. It actually comes from learning to digest, understand that failure, and then going to bat again.
I used to talk about this too because a lot of clients that I talk to, they say, well, I went and asked for money and I got a no. And I'm like, okay, well, that was just round one. Like, you got to think about this in lots of rounds, especially the type of company I came from, which was a big multinational company. You've got to learn the different ways of asking and learning from it and not using the no as a failure.
Usually when I hear no, and I tell my clients this, no just means not right now versus no means no forever, right? And I think one of the big things that I learned being in this corporate structure where you get no a lot is learning how to be resourceful, learning how to get the yes, understanding where my boss was coming from, getting that data and keep going back and keep batting, right? And using this as practice, practice to influence at a greater level, practice of being with that no, but not making it mean that it's no forever and that it's somehow holding me back or I'm somehow flawed.
The other example I wanted to share with you is actually one that comes from my own personal experience. And I want to share this because I think a lot of the women that are listening today have this fear or notice this for themselves. Well, what happened with me is I literally was working my ass off. I have to say this. I was working so hard. I was in London. I was actually in charge from a financial standpoint of a really large infrastructure project that was the biggest of its portfolio in our sort of international portfolio.
And I was traveling a lot. I was living in London, but I was traveling to Australia because that was the first country that we were going to bring on to this new tech stack. I had to work with a lot of Americans in the US because that's where we were gaining the technology and that's where they had started this big infrastructure shift. So I was working super hard and I had this very high visibility, high impact project that was sort of like the jewel of the crown at the time because everybody was talking about it. And I had the privilege of doing this tough hard work on it.
I came to the office after one of these big trips and I learned that my peer, who was male and who I also learned plays a lot of golf with our boss and the CFO of the office, I learned that he got promoted to this director level, which was higher level than where I was at. And I was pretty stunned by it. I was a little shocked by it because I didn't even know that there was a higher level role. I felt angry about it because I felt like I was doing so much work and committing myself to, you know, trying to make the best result of this high impact project. And I felt really sad. And so those were the emotions that I felt.
And what I also learned from this was, wow, where am I not showing up that he is showing up? So instead of, you know, being with the emotions is one thing, but also reframing it as a learning opportunity. And what I learned from that is he advocates for himself. He's overly ambitious about what he can achieve. Another colleague, one of my bosses told me that he's in there always talking about what's next for him. He's always talking to senior leaders about what's next for him.
And I realized, wow, I'm not doing any of that. I'm head down, delivering results. I'm a good soldier, but I was not doing the work of actually influencing people, advocating for myself, and openly being ambitious about what I want next. And there needs to be a balance. And so that's what I took from that. That's what I learned. That was the painful cost of that, the failure of not getting promoted, of not even knowing that there was a promotion available.
And so if you see how you can use this, because I know a lot of you listening, there's probably upset, there's probably disappointment. Maybe you didn't get that promotion, maybe you didn't get that big project. But instead of sticking with this story of that you're a failure, what if you instead just named your emotions and noticed what they were? Actually validating how you're feeling, the disappointment, the upset, the sadness.
When we're able to name our emotions, and I know there's a whole podcast episode on the purpose and power of emotions that we'll link here. But this is again super important because this helps us slow down our nervous system. And when we slow down our nervous system, we're less likely to be in that survival mode thinking where it's like doom and gloom and my career is over.
So when you name your emotions and you can sit with yourself in there, you can also reclaim your agency. What am I learning about myself here? You want to ask yourself that. What are you being invited to? What are you wanting to own for yourself? So instead of the failure happening to you, you actually take ownership of the failure. You reframe it. And you can trace the upgrade.
So when I talk about tracing the upgrade, it's like, what is the skill that you're being invited to develop? What is the emotional and mental capacity that you're being drawn into? Well, in my situation, it was having the feelings, being upset about it, and then learning how to speak up for myself and going and asking my boss about it, and going to learn the skillset to empower myself and going to school on this guy to just see what he's actually doing when I'm head down working super hard. You want to stretch yourself to do these things and to get out of your own way, get out of your comfort zone to learn that this is a skillset.
And you want to be able to track your capacity. Like what am I sitting with here? Where am I expanding? I'm expanding my capacity to feel hurt and angry. And also strategize to get back on it. It's a way where we are noticing ourselves at a greater level that we are able to not only validate our emotions, but also suck the learnings out of it and get that learning and hold on to it and take ownership of it.
Because the more and more you do that, the less likely you are going to allow imposter syndrome that is driven from the fear of failure, hold you back. Keep you from moving forward, keep you from that promotion, keep you from asking your boss for more things. This is part of that expansion strategy, but if we don't have that emotional resiliency and that mental capacity, seeing ourselves going to bat again, seeing ourselves using this failure to fuel us, to help us grow into the leader that we know we're meant to be, then it's a waste.
So this is why this practice is so important. Naming your emotions, reclaiming your agency. What am I learning about myself here? Tracing the upgrade that you need in your own leadership. What skills am I being invited to develop? You know, what is that expansiveness emotionally and mentally here? Is there something that you need to believe about yourself that even if you don't get this promotion, you can still make an impact, you can still learn these skills? And next time you're going to be the one that gets that promotion.
You also want to track your growth. You want to track the discomfort that you're able to be with because when we track that and we can notice, because everybody has this like tolerance or window of discomfort. And as leaders, we want to grow that level of tolerance. The more discomfort we're able to be in, the more we're actually going to lead bigger and bigger things because what happens is if somebody notices you like, wow, Sarah is able to make decisions in high stake situations, there's a lot of emotions happening, a lot of people are upset and she's able to show up. Let's give her that promotion because we know she's ready for that next level.
She's able to be grounded with herself. She's mentally not allowing the setbacks or the obstacles to throw her off the course and we want her to lead even on a bigger scale because we trust her leadership. This is really what's on the line here of your ability to learn how to use failure as fuel, to grow and to reframe it in a way that is actually about your own self-empowerment, that this failure is about you and not about the other person. It's about how you can take more ownership, how you can show up differently, and how you can keep cheering yourself on no matter what.
Like we get that ability to do that, that invitation to do that because we are inviting ourselves into this space and that is empowerment. You going to school on yourself, you taking care of yourself, and you keep bringing yourself back to the game because in the game is where we score. If you sit on the sidelines and you just watch people and you tell yourself stories about why you shouldn't be on the field, you're wasting time, you're wasting your energy, and you are not going to grow into the leader that you have the potential of being. So what we want to do is continually help ourselves, cheer ourselves on, get back on that playing field, get back in the game, and create these results for yourself. Expand your emotional and mental capacity that way.
All right. So that was today's episode. It is all about reframing failure, learning how to expand your emotional and mental capacity. And of course, noticing for yourself how you can take more and more ownership of failure in a way to support you to show up as a next-level leader, as a next-level boss, as a next-level woman in a male dominated space that wants to make an even bigger impact. How do you use that failure to do that?
All right. I'd love to hear what you think about this episode. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on as you think about past failures and how to get the most juice out of them. So, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear that from you. And then of course, leave a review. All right, I will see you next time.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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