You don’t improve by avoiding mistakes. You improve by getting the reps in.
I’m skiing a lot with my kids these days, and it’s amazing how fast they are improving. What’s interesting is that they don’t need a lot of instruction to get better – they just need time on the slopes. They can feel when they get things right, and they know when they get things wrong because they fall.
And I keep reminding them that falling isn’t a big deal. We tried a steep black diamond run over the weekend, and my daughter was doing great, but then fell towards the bottom and slid 20 feet down the hill. She was understandably freaked out and crying, but we took a few deep breaths together until she calmed down enough to ski the rest of the way down. A day later, she was begging to do the same run because she knew she could do it. Her confidence actually went up because she had fallen – now she’d experienced the “worst” outcome, and had recovered.
A mistake I see a lot of rising leaders make is to avoid trying something until they are sure they can do it perfectly without mistakes. But that’s not how learning works. We learn by trying things, seeing what doesn’t work, adjusting and trying again. We learn by making mistakes and recovering, building the confidence that we can try more ambitious things even if something goes wrong.
So take the initiative and try something that feels risky:
— Have that difficult conversation.
— Set that boundary around what you will or won’t do.
— Challenge somebody to do more than they have been doing.
— Let go of the work you know so you can create the space to take on the ambitious project you don’t see how to do.
P.S. Yes, there are work environments without psychological safety, where making a mistake has unrecoverable consequences, particularly if you don’t match the dominant demographic. You know how risky your situation is. But what I’ve seen is that the people who get ahead are the ones who take on greater risk. I was too scared of making mistakes for most of my career, and it slowed me down.