Confidence

"Confidence comes from not always being right but from not fearing to be wrong."

The above quote popped up on my social media.  It is unattributed, but I don't mind.  The origination doesn't always add to the value and my social media isn't known for its factual content anyhow.  

There is a large part of me that responds to the idea of no longer fearing "wrong".  Spend any amount of time with me and you will hear a version of the following concept "There is no big green check mark or red X that appears over you when you make a decision.  You will never know if you made the right decision or the wrong decision.  So make the decision and work from that." 

Of course, some things are wrong.  There is no argument for getting inebriated and driving a vehicle or hurting another intentionally.  My remarks aren't meant to be an all encompassing holy book, I'll leave that to others who are much more all-knowing than myself, so I can be a little laissez-fair about my metaphors.

<insert here random google search on whether that is actually a metaphor, idiom, analogy, or something else and coming back to this blog post with no true answerand more confused than before>

This particular remark of mine is meant to encourage purposeful decision making.  My remark is meant to encourage challenge and movement.  My remark is meant to break decision paralysis and encourage ownership.  

Stop fearing wrong.  A recent trainee I had liked to repeat "We win or we learn!".  True dat.  

Long ago I read an article, that I no longer remember from who or where from, that discussed that the English language was riddled with blame language and how negative that was.  The article might have been full of nonsense but the concept remained me with.  Blame language was negative.  It kept us trapped in the past.  It made others defensive.  It made team members fear being wrong.  It did not encourage innovation and growth because those require experimenting and learning.  Both things filled to the brim with wrongness.  

I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work. -Thomas Edison

  When discussing developing employees we discuss building competence AND confidence.  Things like set clear goals and expectations, be supportive of the learning process, recognize effort more than results, and all the lovely things that boil down to make them stop being scared of getting it wrong.

Ultimately wrong is where growth happens.  We've never seen an infant learn to walk without tumbling a few times. Why are we so scared of being wrong anyhow? It gets us closer to right.

In my typical snarky humor I joke I am not useless as I can always serve as a bad example.  I'm filled to the brim with hilarious antidotes of my failures.  The serious side of me is going to acknowledge those failures taught me a lot and I am somehow still here, still moving forward, still just being me...when I have managed to handle 100% of the times I have been wrong (to date) it makes me wonder why I am so scared to be wrong again.  The lesson might not always be a pleasant journey but I have always made it through it.  So far, I have made it out better on the other side.

When we don't believe we can handle the wrong, we walk the surest steps or we don't walk at all.  Often when coaching or training and leaders talk about "lazy" team members I have wondered if the employee lacks initiative or if the employee lacks confidence.  The symptoms can often be the same, but the cure is different.  Either way, getting away from the fear of wrong will start to show you the answer.

All of us have "failed our way to success" (pretty sure that is also Edison) to where we are now...so why not be confident that we can fail our way to a greater and better one?