WHAT HAPPENED WHEN A GROUP OF YOUNG LEADERS ELIMINATED 'FAIL' FROM THEIR DICTIONARY?

I am sitting with a hot chocolate by my PC as I reflect on what I have been up to this evening. It is rare that something impacts me so much that I feel the need to write about it straightaway, but here I find myself doing so and it feels like it is a session that needs to be written about.

I have spent two hours delivering a personal leadership development session with thirty young leaders, no older than 20 years of age, many of whom are in their mid-teens and might view an evening of group coaching with me as not the most thrilling prospect. However, I asked them to bring their openness, respect, and enthusiasm, and I wasn’t disappointed.

We started our journey by answering the question: ‘What one thing would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail?’ Put simply, the range of answers I received blew me away. From the big and audacious, through to the personal and poignant, it became clear that when they were given permission to not consider failure and its associated limiting beliefs, that they became filled with positivity, hope, and possibility. Visualising what their achievement would look like, they began to move from an unobtainable dream, to a reachable goal. Talking about their average life expectancy in weeks, rather than years (and calculating how many weeks they had already burnt through) gave a sense of urgency and reminded them that time relentlessly marches on, whether you make a difference or not.

The session included many activities, questions, and reflections, and they concluded by agreeing to remove the concept of failure from the things they want to try to do. Seeing them resonate with their wildest dreams and aspirations, watching them begin to believe that they had a purpose and importance to the world, and hearing them state firmly their belief that what they initially thought couldn’t be done because of the risk of failure was something to be attempted with practice, systems, and time reminded me that a generation of young leaders are wanting to be inspired. Their hopes for a better world and the role that they could play within it left me feeling that we have a moral imperative to consider how we encourage this generation to experience the fullness of a life well lived by working towards their potential, rather than a ‘that’s all I can hope to do’ mentality.

Hopefully for these leaders of the future, tonight’s session gave them a taster of what is possible with a winning mindset, and left them feeling that they are individuals who have an important role to play in making their family network, their communities, and the world better places for everyone.

I am excited to see their progress and am already planning how to take these messages to a wider audience, as I passionately believe that we have a duty to liberate the leader in as many young people as we can in the time that we have.