Flip Side of Failing: How to Recognize and Leverage Greatness in Life and Work

By Sarah McVanel

Make Failure Your Super Power

Not Your Kryptonite!

Who among us has never experienced a failure? We beat ourselves up whether the failure is big or small. And we judge others for their failures. We've been programmed to hide our mistakes, cover up our failures - to be ashamed.

But what if it weren't like that? What if, on the other side of failure, was an awakening, a deeper relationship, an improved process? What might that do for our personal and professional relationships, our businesses and careers, ourselves?

Flip Side of Failing shines a light on failure and provides readers with analyses and strategies to free themselves from "not good enough."

Curious about what made some people exceptionally successful, Sarah McVanel interviewed over 30 amazing Canadians about their greatness. People like:

•    Peter Mansbridge - award-winning journalist
•    Heather Moyse - two-time Olympic gold medalist
•    Jim Ferron - decorated Major-General and executive
•    Orlando Bowen - ex-CFL player and philanthropist
•    Chapman's - Canada's largest independent ice cream manufacturer

Through real-life stories, reflective exercises, wise coaching questions and research findings, you'll be ready to embrace the flip side of failing to leverage and recognize greatness all around you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: GO Publishing
• Release date: May 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780991957248

Sarah McVanel

Sarah McVanel helps individuals leverage the exponential power of recognition to retain top talent, fuel healthy teams and sustain healthy bottom lines. She speaks nationally on the topic, leads workshops, coaches leaders, and conducts organizational recognition program reviews. Sarah specializes in working with service-based organizations and “helping professionals.” Sarah is a Certified Speaker Professional (CSP), Certified Senior Organizational Development Professional (CSODP), Professional Certified Coach (PCC), Certified Human Resources Leader (CHRL), and president of the Toronto Chapter of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers (CAPS). She has a BA in Psychology, MSc in Family Relations, and Diplomas in Human Resources and Healthcare Administration. Sarah has over 18 years’ experience including at a senior leadership level and now owns boutique firm Greatness Magnified. She is an author of peer-reviewed journals, articles and four books.

Book preview

PART ONE: Benefitting from Failure

Who hasn’t experienced that gut-wrenching feeling of doom, watching something in your life or work come crashing down around you? The best laid plans, the best intentions, the highest skill level – it doesn’t matter. You can be on top of your game, at the office and at home, but you can’t control everything. It’s not possible. Success is so very sweet, until you come face-to-face with failure.

The truth is that failing is a fact of life, but it’s one that I have discovered has its own charm. How is that possible you may ask? The appeal is in the insight from failure, the becoming stronger, the growth you usually only see later, sometimes many years later, when you look back on that crisis point, that triggering event.

But what if I could show you a practical way to move from a painful point of failure to renewed and even higher levels of success – and praise what’s working in yourself, in others, in your environment – despite failure. How might your experience be different?

It’s a whole new framework for failure and it works in a very simple way. It starts with developing a failure-resilient mindset that involves specific choices about how you look at disappointment, frustrations and mistakes. I’ve tested it myself and it’s fully backed up in the research too, so once you travel through this book, I know you’ll understand why it works and how to apply it to your career and your life. Life-changing and sweet – a pretty good combination I would say!

Once I explain the sequence to create your own failure-resilient mindset, I’m going to discuss how these choices work in the context of places you might run into failure and the people you are surrounded by. For example, you might feel that you are failing within yourself, having a crisis of faith in your own abilities. You might be struggling with your personal relationships at home, which as we all know can be extremely painful. Or you might find that your education direction or career development are letting you down. And of course, you may encounter failures at work that are playing havoc with everything! The good news is that, regardless of the context, a failure-resilient mindset works to help you reframe the downturns, recognizing yourself and others despite it.

But where does failure come from and how do you know what failure is? The dictionary definition of failure is:

failure / ‘fālyər / noun

lack of success. an economic policy that is doomed to failure

the omission of expected or required action. their failure to comply with the basic rules

It’s not that black and white though. Like most things, failure is in the eye of the beholder. It’s hugely impacted by your socialization growing up (isn’t everything?!) and it all depends on the mindset with which you approach the whole concept of failure or adversity. But in short, there are three main responses that we can have to a failure or triggering event: we might let it deflate us, we might try to mitigate it or we can choose to let it elevate us. If you want to recognize yourself and others, benefit from failure and move forward versus let it be your undoing, let me show you how to elevate through inevitable failures.

This is the cherry in this book. Once you adopt a failure-resilient mindset and you understand how it works in context, and you identify the setback right away, you can react in a way that elevates you and maybe others too. No obsessing, wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth. Who wants to be caught up in all that drama anyway? Or at least, not for long. It’s a colossal waste of energy. Instead, I’m going to introduce three approaches to use in the face of something going wrong, and how some serve you better than others. You have a choice, after all, in how you experience failure. In fact, throughout this book, I’m going to highlight great Canadians who have done just this.1

When you get good at these three techniques, everything changes. Failure is no longer something to dread but something to accept, to learn from, to come to respect.

Chapter 1: Flipping the Failure Fixation

Heather Moyse – When Success Is Sixth Place

At the Olympics, what do you define as success? Coming home with a medal, right?

Not necessarily.

For Heather Moyse going to the Olympics was never one of her dreams growing up despite the fact that she had always been a talented athlete – a track star in high school, a nationally renowned rugby player. In fact, an out-of-the-blue call in 2001 asking her to try out for the Canadian Olympic Bobsleigh Team for the 2002 Olympics was turned down, because it wasn’t what she had dreamed of.

Never having been on a bobsled before (or even having seen one), it seemed like a strange request, and being an Olympian didn’t fit with the vision of where she was headed. She spent the next three years working in Trinidad and Tobago as a Disability Sports Program Officer.

Almost exactly four years after that first recruitment attempt, Heather ran into that recruiter, and he convinced her to join the tryouts. But there was a conflict with the Canadian Rugby National Championships, and so she declined the invitation. The prospective coach became even more intrigued. Someone who would be willing to give up an Olympic spot because they were already committed to their team? This is a champion.

They let her arrive a day late due to the overlap with rugby, and Heather blew them out of the water (they were off their sleds – pick your metaphor). Heather made the National team, trained like she had never trained before, then represented Canada at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino. She came only five hundredths of a second away from a bronze medal. Was Heather upset? No! She had the experience of a lifetime!

Now, just because you almost brought home a medal for your country doesn’t necessarily mean you automatically make the Olympic team again. In tryouts before the 2010 Games, she broke her own testing record and, at the conclusion of the World Cup season, she and her teammate brought home Olympic gold for Canada. If she had given up after Torino, she never would have had her time on the podium.

All of her athletics had taken its toll on her body. She had to have hip labral reconstruction surgery. With only nine months before the tryouts for the next Olympic Games, and with faith in the best surgeon, she went under the knife, recuperated through intense physio, broke her record again at training camp, and was back on the Olympic team.

She won another gold for Canada!

It was time for Heather to retire. She launched her speaking career, wrote a book1 and was looking forward to the next chapter of her life. Then she got a direct message from a young, developing athlete who knew that her chances of achieving her Olympic dream depended on her finding a seasoned teammate and mentor. She said she was a fan and knew Heather was in retirement but asked if she would push her sled.

It made no logical sense. Her former teammate, with whom she had won gold in both Vancouver and Sochi, had asked her to compete again, and she had said no. The coaches had even asked her to return to bobsledding, and she had said no. Heather wasn’t motivated by the idea of returning to competition just to try to win a third Olympic medal. But she realized that she was motivated by the idea of helping someone else get to the Olympics and possibly win their first. The idea of being able to support, mentor and help launch a young Canadian’s sports career made Heather’s decision straightforward. She put her life on hold, including her speaking business and book tour, and headed back to the Olympics.

Not only did Heather help this athlete qualify for the Games, but they placed sixth. Sixth in the world. If you only cared about winning a medal that result would be a disappointment. But Heather had done something virtually unheard of. She’d come out of retirement at 39 years of age, not having trained at all for three-and-a-half years (since the Sochi Olympics), still managed to test as the fastest brakeman on the team and came within a tenth of a second from the podium.

What she was most proud of, however, was that she stood up for what was important to her and, despite the pressures to push with her former teammate again, she knowingly forfeited the best chance to win another medal in exchange for investing in the next generation of athletes. She defined success by the impact she was able to make.2

If you have a rigid, fixed mindset that only the highest honour will do, the failure feels devastating when you don’t reach it. In this chapter, you will see how incredibly accomplished people like Heather have a different mindset of what success and failure look like, and how you can use every experience to either deflate, mitigate or elevate your life.

Writing the Book on Failure

Just as Heather hadn’t dreamt of the Olympics in her youth, I hadn’t thought about having my own business. But three years later, I was running a business that was profitable, provided a good lifestyle and didn’t comprise my family’s well-being. My success brought other entrepreneurs and prospective entrepreneurs to my door and they began to ask me for business coaching.

There was something to my expedited success. It made me curious.

What was it about what some people did – in sports, business, academia, leisure – that made them phenomenally successful, that allowed them to seek out and reach their greatness? What made some people excel despite the odds and others not even get started?

The questions became so juicy (and frankly I felt I needed to understand it if I was going to start coaching and speaking about it), that I started down a new path.

I set out to interview great people and I hired some amazing interns to help me with the legwork. Interestingly, Abraham Maslow took a similar path in the creation of his infamous Hierarchy of Needs – he studied life stories of some of the world’s highest achievers. In my case, I wanted to speak with a range of Canadians that we admire – Olympic medalists, those who’d climbed the tallest peaks in the world, philanthropists, decorated war veterans, 3M scholars, famous journalists, entrepreneurs, as well as people who weren’t famous in the conventionally accepted sense but who overcame seemingly impossible odds. People who recognized themselves and elevated their game despite a failure, setback or obstacle. I was in search of the secrets to their greatness.

I didn’t have a predetermined idea about what I would find and, like Maslow, I found that these great individuals said that their most important learnings came from tragedies, traumas and failures. The new perspective on failure helped them to evolve into what they became.3

I ensured that I didn’t hand-pick examples of people who already had a great start in life. So within these pages, you’ll find the great Canadians I speak about are from every walk of life, every demographic group. If you’re reading this book and you’re not Canadian, you’ll no doubt see the similarities to your own country’s successful role models. (Our greatness lies not in the maple syrup running through our veins!)

Getting Real About Failure

My cause went deeper than to just understand their secrets of greatness, of an abundant life and career. My mission was to help you see yourself in the stories of these great Canadians. Some of the themes surprised me, but there was one theme that overshadowed above the rest – failure. As much as I was open-minded, I didn’t expect this and this finding stood out for me for a few reasons.

Failure was the only theme every one of my 30 interviewees mentioned.

My interviewees did not describe failure the way we usually do in Western society, such as representing it as a lack of success.

Failure was seen as having enhanced my interviewees’ lives; they said they were more successful because of failure.

This concept that failure was the gateway for greatness stuck with me. And the fact they, themselves, recognized the value that failure played in their success resonated with me as a recognition expert. What if we could praise and value ourselves and others even when there is a failure? Imagine how that would create positive, sustainable cultures and relationships.

I decided I wanted to lift the taboo of failure through the eyes of these great Canadians – and explain what it means to our individual and organizational success. Failure is nothing to shy away from or hide with shame. It is, in fact, a gateway to greatness.

Failure can be understood on a cerebral level as expected, needed and opening up better opportunities, but when we are truly honest with ourselves, we admit it’s the last thing we want, need or embrace. Most of us anyway.

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

Napoleon Hill

FROGs Like Failure

FROG – Forever Recognize Others’ Greatness™ – may not seem on the surface to be about failure, but accepting the flaws and the genius within each is accepting the whole of our greatness. And it starts with you.4

The inability to see and recognize your own greatness in times of failure will hold you back. You may not see it in that moment or tomorrow or next month, but your greatness is with you when you suffer, make mistakes and misstep. Your greatness – your talents, passions and virtues that allow you to elevate to your potential – has always been and is still present, even at times when you feel like a failure. Leaning into it, why not choose to harness that failure to connect even more deeply to your inner greatness

I had a coach in high school who said something to me that didn’t resonate until much later. He told me that I had a lot of potential. And I took it as a compliment until he quickly corrected himself and said, Well, just so you know, potential is just talent that you don’t have yet.

Heather Moyse

When you pay attention to what works within you despite the failure, you’re naturally that much more curious and aware of the greatness all around you

– in those you love, work with, report to you, volunteer with and even whole systems you work and play in.

The fascinating thing about failure, as we will get into next, is that when we expect to fail, we can just lean into the learning and get curious why it showed up to serve us. Ask any athlete like Heather and she will tell you – you can never reach the podium without continually setting the bar higher than you ever thought possible. To be the best in the world, you need to train beyond your capabilities time and time again. To keep going, you better recognize the successes along the way. The more you do this, the more failure becomes a less negative force in your life and career. So let’s put the spotlight on your failures ... and in turn discover the possibilities they have created.

Chapter 2: Learning to See Failure in a Whole New Light

Martin Parnell – Winning Is Not About the Finish Line

Martin Parnell never considered himself to be sporty.

Raised in an active household, Martin was willing to try anything even if it meant he wasn’t as good as his parents or siblings, but he never felt he was good at any one sport. This didn’t bother him; he didn’t define sports as how many times you won or being the best, but rather the quest for being active and experiencing new things. When he immigrated to Canada as an adult, he tried many Canadian sports for the first time – for the fun of it.

Martin’s mantra is Give it a go.

As an active, successful professional, loving husband, involved father of two great kids, life was pretty good. Until in 2001 he lost his wife. Around the same time, his kids were launching into the world and leaving home. Suddenly, his whole world shifted on its axis.

For most people, this would be an excuse to wallow in self-pity, lay on the couch and lose hope about a happy future. However, when one of his brothers called to ask if he wanted to run a marathon the following year, despite having never run for sport before, he joined a running club to learn. Martin will be the first one to tell you that it’s never too late to try something new.

He trained and ran a 5k, then a 10K, then a half marathon. Just one year from when the idea was first planted, he ran his first marathon with his brothers. This is an incredible accomplishment for anyone, particularly when it’s mid-life and you’re a non-runner. Completing this event evolved into triathlons and ultras. The goal was not to beat his time or rack up medals. It was the beginning of a new mission.

Martin learned about the charity Right to Play and started his Quests for Kids initiative. His first undertaking was Marathon Quest 250, in which he ran 250 marathons in one year to raise $250,000 for Right to Play. Over the next five years, Martin undertook ten quests and raised $1.3 million for the charity.

A massive blood clot in 2015, however, threatened his philanthropic efforts and almost cost him his life. Again, it would have been very easy to cry why me? but this is not Martin’s style. What caused him to get the energy and focus to run again? A 25-year-old Afghan woman.

Today, Martin is remarried to a wonderful woman, Sue. She brought him an article about a woman in Afghanistan who was committed to running a marathon despite not having a place to train, a coach, proper hydration and, on top of this, endured verbal and physical abuse. As she ran, onlookers yelled obscenities and she was pelted with objects to try to stop her, but she kept on. Martin realized he wanted to run a marathon in Afghanistan and encourage women to pursue sport.

While there, he met Kubra who had been unable to train sufficiently because of a bombing at her school. Martin couldn’t face her giving up on her dream. So he ran with her. They did the marathon using a run-walk method (they ran for nine minutes, then walked for one minute) – and seven hours later, they finished the race. If marathons were all about time, Martin and Kubra would have failed, but it wasn’t and isn’t about that for Martin. It’s about what running can do – for your health, for empowerment, for women’s liberation, for surpassing your limits. You can choose to see failure or choose to see success. Realizing greatness can be unconventional. When you consider it from this vantage point, you can decide what the story of success is and what failure means to you.1 As Martin’s favourite quote goes:

You never lose, you either win or learn.

Nelson Mandela

The Tough Stuff is Worth It

Now, to be clear, this is advice I never thought I’d tell anyone, advice

Reviews for Flip Side of Failing

[Izzy Hamptonstone · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As an Olympic performance consultant, I see how even the most talented athletes underperform when they get hung up on failure. Or the possibility of it. This book is what every amateur or professional athlete, coach, teacher or parent needs to read to understand the value of failing. If you set your bar high enough, you're going to fail, but that's how you succeed. This is a must read.