Project 52: Week 29 (6/10/24)

Our reflection and invitation ...

“If you really want to make a friend, go to someone’s house and eat with them… The people who give you their food give you their heart.” –?Cesar Chavez.

Work is fundamental to the dignity of a person. Work, to use an image, "anoints" us with dignity, fills us with dignity, makes us similar to God, who has worked and still works, who always acts... ~ Pope Francis, 5/1/13)

“Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.” ~Steve Maraboli

I’ll be honest with you. One of my biggest and longest-standing fears is being rejected. I’m sure many of you can relate to this. In all of my spiritual work, the one lesson that is always hard for me to follow is when I’ve been rejected (or felt as though I were rejected). I recently was in a situation where I felt rejected, and it brought up so many ugly thoughts, feelings, and emotions that I thought I had put to rest long ago. But as Pema Chodron so masterfully says, “Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.” And so, I stayed open to learning what rejection had to teach me this time around.

As we know, life is what we make it, and how we perceive it. We may not be able to control what happens externally, but we can control our reactions to it. In this situation, I decided it was finally time to reframe how I view rejection. What if being “rejected” is just simply a means for me to be redirected to something better? How much better does that feel to think of it this way? It helped me out, for sure.

~ source: Peaceful Mind Peaceful Life

We are delighted to continue with a year-long offering as part of Career Services Initiatives. ~ Gerald Doyle

Career Accompaniment: Week 29

Welcome to Evans & Burnett: Failure Immunity

As readers of this series will know, we are fans, in our Tri Cosain careers work, of Dave Evans and Bill Burnett’s (E&B) Designing Your Life offerings. These are crystallized in their Stanford courses, books, and syndicated workshops. One of the chapters we often recommend is called Failure Immunity.

E&B write, “Unfortunately, there’s no vaccine (against failure), and it’s impossible never to fail. But it is possible to be immune from failure. We don’t mean you’ll be able to avoid the experience of things not working out how you hoped for, but you can become immune to the majority of negative feelings of failure that burden your life needlessly.

“It’s important to think of ourselves as life designers who are curious and action-oriented and who like to make prototypes and ‘build our way forward’ into the future. But when you take this approach to designing your life, you will experience failure. You will ‘fail by design’ more with this approach than with any other. So, it’s important to understand what ‘failure’ means in our process and how to achieve what we call failure immunity.

“Fortunately, if you’re designing your life, you can’t be a failure. You may experience some prototypes and engagements that don’t attain their goals (that ‘fail’ hi), but remember, those were designed so you could learn some things. Once you become a life-designing person and are living the ongoing creative process of life design, you can’t fail; you can only make progress and learn from the different kinds of experiences that failure and success both have to offer.

“We trust that you now understand that prototyping to design your life is a great way to succeed sooner (in the big, important things) by failing more often (at the small, low-exposure learning experiences).

“This is the first level of failure immunity—using a bias to action, failing fast, and being so clear on the learning value of a failure that the sting disappears (and, of course, you learn from the failure quickly and incorporate improvements).

“There’s a whole other level of failure immunity that we call big failure immunity, which comes from understanding the big reframe in design thinking. Are you ready? Designing your life is actually what life is because life is a process, not an outcome. If you can get that, you’ve got it all.

“Dysfunctional belief: We judge our life by the outcome.

“Reframe: Life is a process, not an outcome.

“We are always growing from the present into the future and therefore always changing. With each change comes a new design. Life is not an outcome; it’s more like a dance. Life design is just a really good set of dance moves. Life is never done (until it is), and life design is never done (until you’re done).

“Life designers don’t fight reality. They become tremendously empowered by designing their way forward no matter what. In life design, there are no wrong choices or regrets. There are just prototypes, some that succeed and some that fail. Much of our greatest learning comes from a failed prototype because then we know what to build differently next time. Life is not about winning and losing. It’s about learning and playing the infinite game, and when we approach our lives as designers, we are constantly curious to discover what will happen next. The only question that remains is one we’ve all heard a time or two before: What would you do if you knew you could not fail?”

We find E&B’s framing very helpful, especially when we and our participants feel stuck in the face of a decision - perhaps to take, not take, or resign from a job or vocational pathway, pursue or not pursue a career stream or “market,” pursue or not pursue a learning journey, degree or certification. We can all sometimes be paralyzed by fear or the wrong choice of failing. In this context, it helps to know we can be immunized against failure because we can always learn from our experiments and prototypes and are always on the infinite path of learning and designing our lives forward.

E&B’s perspective is consistent with Fred Kofman’s idea of “success beyond success,” whereby by being true to our values (and we might say to our spiritual grounding), we cannot be failures in the most profound sense, even when our projects sometimes don’t turn out as we had hoped or intended

For people of faith, we can remember that a Divine Source holds all choices and all outcomes and that fundamental failure is impossible. Through discernment, we can get as close as humanly possible to that remembrance and recollection as we make the best choices in service of our Deepest Truth. Then, we learn and grow in faith as our outcomes unfold.

As ever, I'm ready to accompany you on your Tri Cosain journeys of inspiration, learning, and career through moments of choice, the experience of “failure,” and a growing sense of immunity to it, and the continuing unfolding of learning, growth, and “success beyond success.”

Monday, 10 June 2024

Gerald Doyle

Additional Available Resources:

• Project 52: Week 28 (6/3/24) Welcome to Choosing Happiness Through Discernment
• A Career Services Roadmap (Scott Downs and Gerald Doyle)
• Conversations of Inquiry (Scott Downs and Gerald Doyle)

Tri Cosain materials are developed with my colleague and friend of 40+ years, Scott Downs.

Copyright Scott Downs and Gerald Doyle, 2023/24

Residing in Chicago, Gerald Doyle provides ministry placement research and consulting for Career Services at the Catholic Theological Union ( Herbert Quinde and Christina Zaker ), as well as career services and job search coaching to students, families, and community members at Wolcott College Preparatory High School ( Miriam Pike, Kelly Ramos) and through the The Tyree Institute.

He advises several tech companies, including Upkey ( Amir Badr ) and GetSet Learning ( Eva Prokop ); he has also joined TSI - Transforming Solutions, Inc. ( Dan Feely )in their Higher Education and Career Services practice.

Scott? Downs, a former investment banker, management consultant, and entrepreneur, now works as an Agile coach, seeking to call forward great leaders and great organizations based on great cultures. He is a consultant with Expleo Group and is an associate of the TrustTemenos Leadership Academy.

Scott and Gerald are co-founders of Tri Cosain, a practice that weaves inspiration, learning, and career for leadership in life and work. Gerald and Scott co-authored 9 Questions for Leadership in Life and Work, Conversations of Inquiry, and several other volumes in the Tri Cosain series. Their work embraces equity, inclusion, diversity, and well-being as foundations for personal leadership.

Guest Respondent: I am pleased to introduce my colleague, Dr. Sakshi Chhabra, who will join me each week as a respondent, offering her reflections and insights.

Dr. Sakshi Chhabra, currently serving as an Assistant Professor at the School of Management and Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at BML Munjal University, India, holds a Ph.D. from BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus, along with an MBA in Software Enterprise Management and a B.Tech in Electronics and Communication. With over seven years of academic experience, including roles as an Assistant Professor and Programme Coordinator specializing in Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation, she has developed expertise in diverse subjects such as design thinking for entrepreneurs, managing innovation and technology, and social and sustainable entrepreneurship.

As a Senior member of IIC at Atal Thinking Labs at Jain University in Bangalore, she organizes workshops on design thinking, further demonstrating her commitment to fostering innovation and entrepreneurship.

She has secured grants for research, including one from the Indian Council of Social Science & Research, and actively advocates for diversity and entrepreneurship. Her accomplishments include winning awards for best papers and posters at national and international conferences, being a peer reviewer and track chair, and being nominated for the "Future of Work 50" list by UPKEY, USA.? She has completed two Capstone projects applying design thinking principles under the supervision of Harvard and University of Chicago Alumni. She mentors at UPKEY and collaborates on research projects with the Bill Gates Foundation, focusing on women, sustainable, inclusive, and innovative entrepreneurship.?