How often do we really learn from our mistakes? During a child’s life they will learn from pleasure and pain:

“Ouch the stove is hot, I won’t touch that again!”

“That got lots of laughs, I will say that again!”

As adults the pleasure and the pain can be blurred, and life can be just too busy to adequately assess our wins and our losses. Years go by where we just follow the same patterns, with mediocre results, and even when things go terribly, we tend to “grin and bear it” rather than analyse them.

Are we doing the same in business?

Professional sporting teams and individuals clearly analyse their wins and their losses. However painful it might be, they watch the replays to see what worked and what didn’t. They own their mistakes and they know that to be successful they need to constantly improve their performance.

In business the pleasure and the pain are not always so obvious. We win a contract and we celebrate. Do we analyse what we did right to win it? We work hard, finish a contract and we celebrate. Do we analyse how well we really delivered on it?

Leaders who seek to learn from both success and failure have a growth mindset. They don’t seek to blame, they seek to understand. They encourage others to learn from their experiences and provide opportunities to share the lessons across their team or organization.

Failure is the hardest to analyse. Many of us would like to put it behind us and forget it happened. I recommend putting it behind us, but only after we have learned from it. Tony Robbins defines failure a little differently to many of us. He says “There are no failures, only outcomes. As long as you learn, you are succeeding”.

Next time things go wrong, take the time to learn from them and perhaps you can reframe it as a success!