I recently spent several hours creating a failure resume. It helped clear away a lot of cobwebs from my past and firm up my ideas on good work, good leadership, and good living.
I had no idea what a failure resume was until Kristen Hadeed recommended it during her two-day #HumanLeadershipProgram. Essentially, you make a list of important failed attempts, regrettable decisions, rejections, flopped projects, and embarrassing moments during your career. You learn by reflecting on lessons learned from each situation, and from common themes.
Wanting to get the maximum return for my time spent, I dug deeper. For my failure resume, I included my personal life, but only included the most deeply embarrassing, emotionally painful, cringe-worthy decisions of my life. I wrote details: what happened, the names of those involved, and dates (or at least years) when each situation arose.
At first, it was hard. I broke an heirloom and lied like crazy about it when I was a boy. I made fun of a girlfriend’s family members out of earshot (or so I thought). Two really bad interviews. That time I showed up completely unprepared to teach.
You get the idea.
What did I learn?
- Writing it all down made it easier to see where I’ve already made progress and where I’ve neglected being honest with myself and need to make the progress.
- Burying the mistakes along with the shame surrounding them just helped the shame and self-loathing/self-doubt grow.
- Exposing the shame to the light helped me clarify my learnings and helped kill the shame.
- I was able to forgive others when I saw the broader context.
- I was able to forgive myself.
How did I maximize the impact (and make it okay to reveal even the hardest truths)?
- Combing through my lessons learned item by item helped me create a cumulative list of learnings.
- Repeated learnings across items led to unearthing my motivations, my emotional states, and my limiting beliefs. Now I can address those head-on.
- I wrote the situational details on the left on loose pages. On the right, I wrote a summary line plus the related learnings in a bound journal.
- This allowed me to preserve the value gained in one central location (the journal).
- I preserved my privacy by keeping the incident details separate to preserve or destroy as I choose. (It’s not like I could ever forget what the headlines in the journal mean, so why keep the details for someone else to find when a bus hits me?)
If you’ve never done it, I recommend it. Make it all work-focused, make it all-inclusive, or do one like mine where you insist on including all situations tied to the biggest feelings of shame. Regardless, you can learn from it and maybe even heal some old wounds along the way.
Thank you to Kristen Hadeed for inspiring this exercise. It has helped me gain perspective on my growth and helped me properly contextualize parts of my past I didn’t have courage to look at before.