Have you ever watched a sporting event where one team is really playing it safe. Perhaps they have the lead, maybe they need a tie, maybe they can’t lose by too much. Whatever the reason, they are not playing to succeed, they are playing to not fail. All this talent that has brought them to this game and here they are afraid that someone could make a mistake and they’d fail.
Trying a new move or breakout is too much risk, the cost of failure to high.
Sure sometimes you need to play it safe – but when you start to do it more often then not – you’re not playing it safe anymore, you’ve simply become to afraid to fail.
Think back to a project you’ve been involved in, where the processes were way over the top, the paperwork to do anything had all common sense removed from it and yes the people had lost all investment in the project many, many months ago.
All afraid to fail.
When we’re all afraid, we stop trying to succeed and instead focus on checking the next box that says – “you haven’t failed”.
Failures don’t need to be shouted from the mountains, but they do make us succeed and if anyone on your team feels this way, then you really need to work with them to work through it so you can plow through and start achieving success through your failures.
