How You Found Love, Life and Leadership in Being Wrong

It started shortly after our first conversation together. You kept being right about things, and I kept pointing out how right I noticed you were.

It was a weird conversation, and you were frustrated. I wasn’t arguing with you the way people normally would. There was nothing for you to push back against. Every time you would start to justify, rationalize, or explain why things had to be this way, I would listen, and then share what I noticed.

I simply kept pointing to the evidence you had amassed, the brilliant argument you had constructed, the corroborating premises and irrefutable data that proved how right you were. And then I asked if you were interested in a different approach.

We talked for a while, but there was a point where you made a courageous decision. You decided to practice trusting what I was pointing to, in spite of the fact that you had no evidence to back it up yet. You were willing to let me make a difference.

You went off and started practising what we had put together as the way out.

You started leaning in, making choices before you knew the answer. You were willing to give up, for a time, the safety that comes from being certain about the path ahead before you start to walk it.

Maybe you were only doing it to prove me and this thing I kept talking about called possibility wrong. You knew that this was going to slow things down and waste more of your time, rather than free you up.

But still, you were courageous. Still, you practised.

And at first, you were right. You leaned in, and it turns out you did go in the wrong directions.

You thought you were making the right choice, and instead, you wound up with a week of wasted work.

You said yes to things without yet knowing if they were what you wanted, and it turned out, you didn’t always want them.

You were slowly building evidence that proved you should go back to the old way of being. The world you had created was steadily justifying your previous approaches, just like we knew it would. We actually predicted this earlier on though, and so it didn’t blindside us the way it might otherwise. It still sucked, but you were willing to lean in — to keep *recreating* your commitment to something different.

And while, at first, you hated this feeling of being wrong — this feeling of wasting time, energy, and looking stupid — a funny thing started to happen.

You started to notice that the paths you did walk down somehow fed back in to your journey. Even when you had made the wrong choice, you learned something new, and you discovered how resilient you were to those mistakes.

You started to uncover long forgotten muscles. In your willingness to set aside your hypertrophied muscle in planning and researching, you realized that you’re actually quite gifted at improvising (and as long as no one else is watching, you notice that it’s kind of fun to do so).

You started to hear the voice of your intuition, and to check in with it (rather than your pre-set plan) moment to moment. Realizing you were on the wrong path stopped being a disaster, and instead became an opportunity for course correction — an opportunity to better know yourself. Your mistakes started to become paths to deeper intimacy with self.

These moments began to shift away from an experience of embarrassment and shame about not already knowing the answer, and instead towards moments of sheer delight.

The people you lead started to notice a few things too. At first, they were terrified of this new practice of yours. They had been around you when you’d made mistakes before — you had no ability to be with it, and it was typically accompanied by you lashing out or pointing to the mistakes others had made. Ways to compensate for your own embarrassment at having made a mistake.

But this time things went differently. You just let yourself make mistakes. You owned them, acknowledged them, and then took the next step. Skeptical at first, they kept an eye on you, but what they noticed caught them off-guard. This wasn’t a fad — you were actually transforming the way you showed up.

Over time, your ability to allow for and make your own mistakes created the space for them to do the same. As you got more creative, innovative and improvisational, your team started to do the same. Mistakes were no longer so costly, because no one was relating to them that way.

Your team started to outperform the others around them, and having a lot of fun while doing so.

People around you started to ask what you were doing with your team.

“How did you create this? What are you doing, they’re showing up totally differently? Can you tell me what you did?”

And you notice something every time you sit down to help them with their own teams: they’re trying to figure out the right answer. They’re trying to figure out what to do with their teams so that they can avoid wasting time pursuing the wrong direction. You smile, and point to how right you notice they’re being. It’s okay — you’re here to help them on the same journey you’ve been on.

You know the truth: they’re going to need to make a courageous decision of their own.