Leadership

 To overcome the fear of making mistakes, aim for success, not perfection. Is the fear of making a mistake preventing you from taking action? If so, the way to move beyond this fear and gain the courage to follow through on your action plan is to aim for success, not perfection. As a “recovering” perfectionist, I understand that if you have perfectionistic tendencies, you may equate success with perfection. After all, if you make a mistake, it means you have failed, right? Wrong. A mistake is not a failure. A mistake is simply the outcome of an action. Read More

In his book For One More Day, Mitch Albom writes, “I met a man once who did a lot of mountain climbing. I asked him which was harder, ascending or descending? He said without a doubt descending, because ascending you were so focused on reaching the top, you avoided mistakes. ‘The backside of a mountain is a fight against human nature,’ he said. ‘You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.’” That’s good advice to remember. It’s easy to value, accept, and care about yourself “on the way up,”… Read More

I was jetting around the waters of Key West, Florida in a two-seat mini race-boat on my way to check out a marine sanctuary, when the boat came upon a sandbar and the boat’s propeller got stuck. The guide, whom I’d been following, called over to the man driving my boat and told him to turn off the motor and walk to the front of the boat. That way, the propeller would be lifted out of the sand. As instructed, the six-foot tall and roughly 240-pound driver of my boat got out of his seat and… Read More