Fiona Macaulay: The Bold Comeback- Turning Failure Into Strategy

 Content Warning: description of panic attack 

About This Episode

In this powerful conversation, award-winning social entrepreneur and women’s leadership expert Fiona Macaulay reframes failure as strategic data, not personal defeat. From leading a global network of 25,000 purpose-driven leaders to serving as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Georgetown University, Fiona shares practical tools to tame perfectionism, navigate the messy middle, and turn setbacks into momentum. We explore her five failure types, the neuroscience behind small steps and confidence rebuilding, and her 3G Framework (Ground, Gather, Go) to help leaders re-enter the arena with clarity and courage. Whether you are recalibrating, recovering, or simply ready for more, this episode will help you move forward with intention, strategy, and true boldness.

About Fiona Macaulay

Fiona M. Macaulay is an award-winning social entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and author who helps Fortune 500 and social impact leaders transform failure into competitive advantage through resilience and strategic risk-taking.

A women's leadership expert, she is founder and CEO of the Women for Impactful Leadership Development Network (WILD), connecting 25,000 leaders across 100 countries, and serves as Professor and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business.

She has advised JP Morgan, McKinsey, and Microsoft. Recognized among the top 1 percent of U.S. women entrepreneurs, her work has been featured in The New York Times and O, The Oprah Magazine. Fiona lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and daughters.

Additional Resources 

LinkedIn: @FionaMacaulay 

X: @F_Macaulay 

Instagram: @wildinnovators 

Transcript

Meet Fiona And Her Work

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to the Bold Lounge Podcast. My name is Lee Burgess and I will be your host. If you're anything like me, you love hearing inspiring stories of people who have gone on bold journeys and made a positive impact in the world. This podcast is all about those kinds of stories. Every week we'll hear from someone who has taken a leap or embarked on an extraordinary journey. In addition to hearing their stories, we'll also learn about their bold growth mindset that they used to make things happen. Whether they faced challenges or doubts along the way, they persisted and ultimately achieved their goals. These impactful stories will leave you feeling motivated and inspired to pursue your own bold journey. I believe everyone has a bold story waiting to be free. Tune in and get ready to be inspired. Welcome to the Bold Lounge. Today we have Fiona Macaulay. She is an award-winning social entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and author who helps Fortune 500 and social impact leaders transform failure into competitive advantage through resilience and strategic risk taking. A women's leadership expert, she is the founder and CEO of the Women for Impactful Leadership Development Network, connecting over 25,000 leaders across 100 countries and serves as the professor and entrepreneur in residence at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. She has advised JP Morgan, McKinsey, and Microsoft. Recognized among the top 1% of U.S. women entrepreneurs, her work has been featured in the New York Times and O magazine. Fiona lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and her daughters, and she has a new book, Aim High and Bounce Back. Welcome to the Bold Lounge. So excited to have you, Fiona, and talk about being bold and bouncing back.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

I'm so excited to be here. I um admire the questions that you ask, the responses your listeners give. So I'm ready for this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Okay. Well, let's start off with being bold. What does it look like in your life? What's your definition?

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Bold is not the absence of fear. It's deciding that your vision matters more than your comfort. And the women I've spent my career studying, bold is often quieter than people expect. It's often the woman who walks back into the room, back onto the playing field after being knocked flat, dust herself off and tries again, maybe tries again differently because she's learned things from that setback that she experienced.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Right. She has the wherewithal to get back up, to understand maybe what happened. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't, but you learn something from it for sure. And then you keep going because your vision is bigger, right? It's bigger than your fear, it's bigger than maybe what you don't know, it's bigger than maybe someone else's judgment or you know, comments. You know, sometimes we get misunderstood. So it's bigger than all that. So you choose it, which I love that definition. So when you think about your life and where you chose it and you did it anyway, and maybe fear was present. What was something that comes to mind for you with regard to your experience with being bold?

Building WILD And Entrepreneurial Roots

SPEAKER_01 3:18

I'm inherently entrepreneurial. I am that 10% of the population who's just like driven to be entrepreneurial. So has a vision, believes deeply that I can accomplish it and goes for it. I can't stop myself. It's a form of creativity on my side. And so about every seven years, I've noticed, I launch a bold new initiative. Okay. Most recently, I launched the Wild Network, which is Women for Impactful Leadership in Development. And this has grown to be a global network of 25,000 people in over a hundred countries who are committed to being even more impactful leaders than they are. And I was drawn to do this for purpose-driven women, because in my previous career chapter, I had worked in the global development industry, working actually on issues of linking low-income people to economic opportunities. And while I knew that industry very well, I didn't know the leadership development industry. But as someone who had founded and then grown a business over 18 years, in fact, I was fortunate to be one of the top 1% of women entrepreneurs in America in terms of annual revenue. However, I had never taken a formal leadership course before. Okay. Right. So minor miracle, right? That I managed to achieve like that.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

No, I don't think that's a miracle at all. I think like letters are important if they're important to you. I do think that a lot of people know a lot of things without certain letters. Like, you know, I always give my mom as an example. She has no letters, but she's got a doctorate in life and like there's a lot she knows and she doesn't need them. But I I do think for you, like in the sense of being an entrepreneur, that in itself is a bold move, right? But you're a multi-business entrepreneur, right? And then you start things that maybe never existed, or maybe there was never that type of like your network in the the wild network that you created, and and look at what it's doing now. So like your vision is bigger, and also your creativity is probably on a higher level in the sense of I think we all potentially have it, but how we use it or what we do with it when it sprouts, I think is interesting for entrepreneurs.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Yes, I think it's interesting too. And again, just to underline, it's not that I haven't had fear doing this, but the vision has been so clear to me. How exactly to achieve the vision is always a squiggly route, right? Right. And what I have learned is that you have to hold two ideas at the same time. Like this vision is critically important and needs to be achieved. I can do it. And how I think now I'm gonna achieve that vision is probably 80 to 99% wrong, right? And you've got to stay humble, learning from partners, from customers, from stakeholders about what they care most about in order to like figure out the squiggly path for how to achieve that vision.

SPEAKER_00 6:04

Right. I love squiggly paths. That's a great way to describe it. You think potentially when you start off, things will be linear, but it is no such thing.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

No such thing. And that's what people don't learn from their setbacks and failures, right? When they think, no, no, this is the way to do it. It's like, no, life is gonna teach you, it's gonna knock you off course. And as long as you can keep failing forward, no problem. You will be successful and reach that destination. It does require a kind of humility and flexibility.

Squiggly Paths And Humble Learning

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Yeah. Humility, flexibility, I think also belief in yourself. And I think that's one of the bigger things that I, you know, I've talked about since I left the corporate world in 2020. Six years later, here I am. And I think, you know, from the perspective of a whole lot of belief uh in myself to figure it out and fail and apply and learn and keep going. And so I love your definition because it really does fit nicely into one, not only the bold framework, but also being bold in your actions. I love something you just said because it's something I've been talking about uh for a while. But when you have that vision, it becomes that filter, right, for your decisions. And it also creates clarity, which you use that word, but it's clarity in what your priorities are and how you'll measure success too in that. So when you think about where you started, and the book actually starts with you in in the hospital. So that's not where you started, obviously. You had already done some incredible things, but bring us to that moment where the book starts. And why did you choose that moment?

SPEAKER_01 7:33

So the story that I start with in our book, Aim High Bounce Back, the successful woman's guide to rethinking and rising up from failure, is that Lee, I'm in the hospital, right? My heart is beating like this, and I think, oh my God, like, am I dying? And the doctor walks in and looks at me and says sort of nonchalantly, like, you're having a panic attack. And, you know, is something wrong? So I was in my late 20s and I had started a global professional services firm, having not worked in a global professional services firm and had this really ambition of helping low-income people be able to get ahead economically. And I was not a multimillionaire, but I was generating like over a million dollars in annual revenue. So, you know, all you entrepreneurs out there, you're like, oh yeah, revenue not the same as profit. But, you know, we were, we were in the black, but I always felt like I was, you know, one misstep away from my business failing. And it was complex business. I had consultants working in Afghanistan. I had like multiple projects on the go. We were at that stage where you had a lot of work, but not yet the cash flow to like staff up. Yep. So there was like things that I could legitimately be stressed about. But really at that time, even though I was like drawn to this risk taking complex business, I had faced a lot of discrimination for my age and for being a female. So I'm just scraping five two. Okay. And when I started a business in this industry at age 26, as a young, extra young looking female that was dominated by older women and men, I felt like I got like talked down to a lot. People were quite rude to me sometimes. I mean, there was also a whole host of people who gave me a chance and supported me.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Sure. It's usually fewer. Honestly, I do think the world has a lot of good, but to be honest, like when you're in this position and we all experience it differently, but my experience is similar to yours, is there are people that will help, but it's a smaller number than potentially the people that don't understand, possibly judge, talk down to you, you know, those types of things, which aren't helpful.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Yeah, yeah. I was well said, you know, you take your lumps and you take your nicks. And I had, I didn't intentionally decide this, but I had basically decided I would be perfect. And that way I couldn't be criticized, people would believe in me, right? So what was actually had landed me in the emergency room was my perfectionism. I would call it entrepreneur onset perfectionism. Like I hadn't been a perfectionist before I started this business and started like taking all these hits. But I was like, I'm gonna be perfect, right? I'm gonna do everything at 110%. And so I now call myself a recovering perfectionist. And, you know, I'm curious like if that's resonant with you. But basically, you know, it was just having an over quality orientation, trying to be over quality oriented on everything, thinking that perfectionism was gonna protect me, but actually it was pulling me down to the point where, you know, I thought I was dying.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

So major, obviously, impact on you, your health and wellness. And just to answer your question, I think for me, I think my enoughness, which is a kind of ongoing thing for me, it isn't like you check the box, oh, I'm over that. You know, is it enough? Am I giving enough value? I think that leads me to, I think, more perfectionism tendencies. And I think for you too, you know, you doing something even halfway is probably enough. And so that for me was one of the biggest things. So you use the word failure. How do you define it? And that's really we start your book as you walk us through that really helps us understand how our relationship with it, right? But how do you define it and why does it hurt or feel like it's such a negative thing for some people? Like no one likes it. I don't like it, but I know it's gonna happen sometimes. I just don't want to happen all the time.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

So, number one, I feel like a big takeaway I would like for for all of us is that failing does not make you a failure.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Failure does not make you a failure. So whoever needs to hear that in the back, we said it again.

unknown 11:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Lee, I love what you just said about, you know, about like starting an entrepreneurial endeavor. I just think like, wow, what a what a bold move.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Yeah, definitely some people didn't understand it. They didn't understand, I think, the connection to, you know, what I needed at that point too. And I think that's where you realize, you know, not everybody needs to hear it. Not everyone needs to hear your vision or what you're doing. They might not understand it, and sometimes it can impede you from moving forward. So sometimes people see when you're succeeding, they may think you're failing, but you're not, and vice versa. Sometimes you think you're failing and other people see you as succeeding. And it's probably more often than not that one happens.

Redefining Failure And Identity

SPEAKER_01 12:13

Yes, to all of the above, you know, and that's something that we talk about in the book is about perceived failure, where that can be a challenging kind of failure where you feel that you're succeeding or you know that you're making decisions for a certain reason that you may not necessarily want to broadcast, but other people question you or giving you that kind of questioning vibe, like, you know, asking questions around the way because they're concerned about you failing. One of the stories that I think about is one of the women who rose to like one of the highest positions at Goldman Sachs, like successful by anyone's measure, very desirable position. Right. She just felt like that was not the job she wanted to be doing at that time in her career. And she wanted her next career chapter to be more deeply involved with technology. So she left Goldman to figure out how to make that move. Other people would like have killed to be in that position that she had risen to, but she knew in her mind that she was like taking these steps to get to the next chapter, looked like failure to some people, like, oh, what's the real story? Whereas in her mind, she's like, no, I need to leave from this one opportunity in order to make space to really make the right move to the next opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

Right. So when you think you're failing, how do you check yourself to even know am I truly failing, or is this something internal that I'm dealing with? Like, how do you check yourself?

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Yeah, I think a good way to check it, but is like, as you say, is to really investigate that feeling. Like, what is it that you feel like you are failing at? And also to reframe as like, what are you failing at? To what am I learning? Like, what am I learning from this experience? And this is something you've also got to really hold and own because women, I believe, and the a lot of the social science research backs this up, to socialize, to take failure personally, often in a different way than men. So, you know, when a man's project fails, like when a man's entrepreneurial endeavor fails, the cultural default is like bad timing, bad luck, try again. When a woman's project fails, the cultural question becomes, was she ready? Right. So there's this phenomenon of prove it again, show it again, show it again. Not like she has this track record or success. Oh, that was a setback. It was like she's only as good as her like most recent success or as bad as her more recent failure.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Is that at any age or when does that kick in? Because I feel like I didn't feel that when I was younger, but I definitely felt that probably most, you know, the pressurization around that in the corporate setting, probably in my late 30s, early 40s. So, like when does that kick in?

SPEAKER_01 14:42

Yeah, I think for a lot of people it's earlier. You know, you end up with more force field around you, the more power and authority you have, right? So the more power and authority you have, the more control you have typically in the workplace. Now you may have more visibility, but your power and authority can help protect you and help give you more license to make bolder moves because you're setting the tone, like you're more likely to be the thermostat in the room and like setting the tone for what the acceptable risk is. And you have like that track record and you've got social capital. So something that I think we can be thinking about also if you're in a manager role is how can you create environments where it's safe for people to experiment, have setbacks, learn from those, frame them as learning opportunities, and then be able to set someone up to be able to move forward again. Because you want yourself and also the people around you to be able to safely and smartly experiment. But if there's such a punishment for any kind of setback, then why would anyone take a risk? Right. So the opportunity not only to coach ourselves to think about in quotes failures as through the lens of what am I learning from this, but also the possibility to create that culture of what am I learning? What are we learning together when things don't go exactly as planned?

Perceived Vs Concrete Failure

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Yeah, which happens a lot. I think I don't know about you, but you know, I aim for things to work out, but they may not work out maybe in the same order or maybe in the rate and pace that I want them to work out. But I think sometimes we even think when we succeed, we're failing. And you do say, and your research has shown that women experience it differently than men. And I think that's just something to realize that as we even talk to ourselves or think, you know, our mindset, you particularly talk about the, you know, resetting your mindset around this. And one of the things you say is if you think you failed, you have, which is somewhat similar to that quote if you think you can succeed or you you will, you're halfway there, right? So when we start thinking like something's not going to go, or start thinking about the worst case scenario, are we setting ourselves up potentially to not be successful in some form or fashion because we're worst case scenarioing everything?

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Well, actually, it can be helpful to think what is the worst that could happen in this scenario, because often what factually is the worst is not nearly as bad as our catastrophic thinking about what is the worst. And the only way you're gonna like move towards success and achievement of like your ambitious vision and goals is by looking at those setbacks and in quotes failures as learning opportunities. To say to yourself, what am I learning from this? Or with your team, what are we learning from this? In my experience, it's a kind of Teflon because it allows you to take the best of that setback, right? And shake off what could be the debilitating shame, right? Or like to resist what could be the fear.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

Yeah, yeah, because there's a whole host of emotions, right, that can come up when you don't succeed. And you know, shame is one, you might be embarrassed or you might feel not as smart, or you didn't give it enough time, so you're hard on yourself. Like you don't give yourself a lot of grace, you know, from that. But you talk about just expanding your definition of failure. And I love that because it just makes it, as you say, more manageable, but I like it because it's expandable. So like I think there's like this continuum of potential, what failure means too for you. But the the idea is that it's manageable and your definition may also change over time, too.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Absolutely. So one of the chapters I most enjoyed writingly is when we talk about the messy middle.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Okay, let's talk about that because you see a lot of people say it. I'm not sure they know what it means, but what does it look like for you and how does it connect with obviously failure?

Culture, Risk, And Psychological Safety

SPEAKER_01 18:33

Yeah. So it connects in this way. So, you know, when you start like a new project, so let's talk about like entrepreneurial endeavors, like vision is so clear, like you're so excited at the beginning. Yeah. And then you start moving forward and you're like, oh, this is not going exactly as planned, or I'm getting like mixed signals from potential customers, like maybe I've got the wrong customer segment. But in the meantime, you've got like 15 meetings scheduled in four different parts of the country, and you're just like, this feels like a mess. And I think sometimes the sensation is like, I feel like I'm drowning, the path forward is unclear, I feel unfocused. And the only way out of the messy middle is through, right? Right. And it's taking small steps. So one of the things I would offer is just like a very concrete tactic is that when you feel like you're experiencing a failure, and I'd say especially if you're like partway into a new undertaking, whatever that is, think is this the messy middle? And just what is within my control? And what are the small steps that I can take to keep moving forward?

SPEAKER_00 19:36

Right. So start small is one. So like know that progress is progress. And sometimes progress is via and through failure. A lot of it is honestly. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

And action builds confidence, right? So there's no worse feeling than like this is going badly, this is failing, like this is a disaster, sitting there frozen.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

As soon as you start to take action, and I love Lee how you underlined small steps, right? As soon as you start taking small steps, immediately like you're controlling what you can control. You're like making progress on things, right? You're having conversations that are necessary, you're taking actions that are necessary, you know, and it usually takes longer than we want, but you just got to take, you got to keep, you know, moving forward.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Yeah, what I like about the small steps is this incremental progress. It's also incremental agency because ultimately I think agency is born from higher confidence levels. And beyond that, you know, what I've learned is you're actually retraining your brain to know that it's okay because it's constantly scanning for that risk, right? So your cortisol will go down and your dopamine will go up when you're moving forward because you're taking action and you're almost proving to yourself and to your brain that it's okay, we're safe. We got this. And so you start to separate, and I think this is an important piece that you talk about is separating failure from your identity. We take it personal, right? It's all fraud, it's our fault. It's, you know, our team, you know, I got to protect my team. I have to protect image or ego or those types of things. If someone's feeling that way or recently felt that way, what's a step that they can do, like a whether it's a reframe or a step forward for them to separate it from who they are, their identity.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

I think it can be really useful to write down your different identities.

SPEAKER_00 21:19

Okay.

The Messy Middle And Small Steps

SPEAKER_01 21:20

So all just like mine, like wife, mother, cat owner, right? Loyal friend, author, CEO, tennis team member. These are all different like identities that I have. So let's say maybe I lost in a maybe I was playing women's tennis singles and I lost to someone who I should have beaten. Like, yeah, I lost. Like, what can I learn from that game I just played? It doesn't mean that I am a failure as a CEO or like a failure as an author. It means I lost that tennis game. And hey, I should really like ask a friend who is watching me like, hey, what mistakes did you see me making? Or like, do Do a debrief with my coach. Like, what can I learn from that? So I can come back stronger and like do better in my next match. But it helps me to actually envision myself being successful in those other roles.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Yeah, I like that. So it's visioning again, which I think is also recircuiting or giving your brain a new way to look at the potential of what could happen good, as well as how you'll plan for things that don't go as well or maybe as as well as you had thought. You talk about specifically types of failure patterns and realizing and looking at those, like what type of failures? And you have five failure types. So concrete, circumstantial, perceived, identity, or paralysis. But do any one of those take over or happen more often in your experience in all the work that you've done in research?

SPEAKER_01 22:48

I think it really depends on the person. So one of the reasons that we wanted to lay those out was so that people could see themselves in what kind of failure is this is. So we already talk about perceived failure, for example, like other you're getting the feedback, the vibes, the small comments, the big comments from people like that they think there's something you're doing that leaves you to be a failure, versus like concrete failure, which is like, you know, your goal was$200,000 in sales this month and you came in at$150. Well, that's kind of like a concrete failure. You know what? Like I had a sales goal and I didn't meet it. Like the data is kind of right there. And it's helpful to identify what kind of failure is this, so you can think about how to address it in the appropriate way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Use it as data.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Yeah, it's data. So that person's like, oh, you know, like when I sold my first company, it was thriving, like it was really at its peak. You know, I had a very financially we were doing really well, growth potential was really significant, you know, great partnerships. I had a very sort of prestigious role in my industry. And yet I was like so tired of that particular industry. And I was just really ready to go down a gear because I had smaller kids at home. The best I could say to it to people is I wanted to think new things and do new things and meet new people. I think most people looked at where I was and they were like, why is she stepping away? You know what I mean? Like they felt like that was a bad move where I was like, I can't keep going at this gear anymore. And I'm just like really, I've been doing this for like I started when I was 26 years old. I'm now 44. You know, I wanted to teach at a leading university. Teaching entrepreneurship was was very far from what I was doing at that moment. You know, I didn't know exactly what form it would take, but I had a global women's leadership network in me that I wanted to start. And I had to take this, I feel like it was a pretty bold step. A lot of people thought it was like a strange step that they would never take. But I needed to make the right step that I knew inside for me, which was the right bold move for me at that time.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

Yeah, I think that's again, I think owning what you own, and then also realizing that everybody's opinion doesn't matter or doesn't need to be taken into account. So I think certainly misunderstanding or not understanding was something I experienced. And even some, I honestly now I think some people in my industry don't get it. And they've almost like said, you know, you don't even know how to be a healthcare executive anymore, which they've said it by their actions more so than anything else. But it's it's like that didn't fall out of me. I still, you know, have the degrees, I still have the 20 plus years experience. But it's interesting of the misunderstanding of what even an entrepreneur is because and what you're doing, because there's a sense of maybe a stereotype or maybe how it operates uh potentially. And they and they see it as a failure. I mean, you couldn't, you couldn't do it, you couldn't make it work. Like you said, success on paper, absolutely, but success in real life, like it it was taking a toll. And you wanted, you know, wanted a break, take a beat, you know, take a rest, do something new.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Yeah, a hundred percent. And then, you know, circumstantial failure, which when we did our survey of over a thousand women across like more than 50 countries, circumstantial failure came up a lot, people had faced. And this is like when you get caught up in a mess that is not of your making.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

So we've talked about perfectionism a little bit around that, but what does confidence have to do with it? And we constantly are inundated with that word. Where does it come into play when it comes to failure? What's the relationship between confidence and failure?

Five Failure Types Explained

SPEAKER_01 26:22

So I'm glad you bring up confidence, Lee, because um, my co-author and I, we spent a lot of time on this at the beginning because you know, there's a lot of talk about like if women were more confident, right, they we just need to like them to go self-assertiveness training. And when you look deeply at the research around women and confidence, our take is that what you see is that women are very savvy about what they are supported to do and how they are supported. So, for example, in the most recent McKinsey Women in the Workforce report that came out, what it was saying was that women have made a calculated assessment that it's not worth them being ambitious and making that investment and setting like a certain goal because of the cost to it, because they're being thwarted by structural barriers and like the cost is not worth it. So it's not that they're not ambitious, it's that they have made a calculated assessment that going for that next echelon, going for that next in quotes ambitious move, it's just the calculus is that they're not worth it. At the same time, we see that women are starting at higher rates like than we've ever seen in America. Well, in my experience, it's a lot riskier. It takes a lot more confidence to go and start your own business than go for the promotion, right? But women have made that calculus that that's going to better serve them. So I don't think there is a confidence gap between women and men either. I think that women understand that they face like what's called the double bind, where being ambitious, but being very confident, it can often work better for men, specifically like middle class white men, than it can for other people. And the further you move you move away from being a middle class white man, the less support society allows you to be very confident. So are women not as confident as men, or are they tempering those stereotypical confident behaviors because they know that women have a higher requirement to show like caring for others, caring for the group rather than their male counterparts? Like, are they just navigating the way that they have learned and picked up the signals for how confident women actually best navigate to get ahead?

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Yeah, you talk about not being a confidence gap, but a consequence gap, right? So it's the consequences they're placed in or the consequences that they have to deal with as a woman leader or someone managing a team or those types of things versus a male, correct? Correct. So when you think about how to use that when we're rethinking, you know, so this is kind of we understand our relationship with fear, we understand how to look at patterns and to get feedback. And then we get to the place where, you know, how do we rethink if we're scared of failing again, or how do we pick ourselves back up, this aim high moment that we have?

SPEAKER_01 29:14

So there are times when we are going to experience some kind of like a big failure, like a big F failure. And the framework that uh Deb Grayson Regal and I developed to offer to people who aim high, bounce back is what we call the 3G framework. Ground, gather, go. And this is like when you've just objectively like experienced a very difficult failure. And it could be like, you know, you getting a divorce and you feel like you failed at marriage. It could be that you had, you know, really put in the the hours, the hard work, the networking, you know, to go for big promotion and you get passed over and you realize like I had a vision for myself and that role. Like I can't stay at this company anymore because I feel like I failed at getting that promotion. And so I want to talk about it because whether you have experienced it already, maybe you're sort of recovering, working to recover from a significant failure at the moment, or you do in the in the future, the three Gs are ground. So really ground yourself. And this can include grieving, right? Like there's loss around failure. It can be financial loss, there can be reputational loss, right? There's like often a real sense of loss around failure. So that's okay to like grieve that failure and to like ground yourself. Sometimes it's time with close friends, time with your family, time with your dog. You know, you need to do things to ground yourself. And a big thing here at this time is no sudden moves.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

Or big decisions, right? I think that's probably what you mean by that. But I know, like for me, no decisions in the highs of the highs or the lows are the lows. Like I'm asleep on it, you know, type of person. So, but it sounds like that's what you're saying in general is like as you're grounding, don't don't make any sudden moves. Don't don't quit, don't start, just you know, continue through the grounding process. A hundred percent.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

And then there is a time to gather. So we've talked about learning being a kind of intelligence, right? Learning from your failures, failing forward. Great. Gather is the time that you're like, okay, what am I learning from that? What are my options here? You know, what advice might I listen to or inputs take from not only my closest friends, but you know, from one layer out, you know, that other layer in your network. Take your time to like gather, which is really about getting information together, looking at options and deciding the way forward. And then our third G, which is go, right? And that's really one of the main takeaways that I want to have for women and really all leaders out there at different stages of their lives, is for you to make the greatest contribution that you can to your family, to your community, right? To the broader world. We need you to keep aiming high. So ground, gather, go, because the world needs your greatest contribution. And you are not a failure just because you failed. Right.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

Yeah. So that separation again, reminding yourself, is there any way that you know when it's time to go again? Is there an indicator or, you know, a message you receive from someone? Like, where does that come from? Or is it intuition or a combination of, you know, gut plus data plus your your vision?

SPEAKER_01 32:22

I love how you said that. Yeah, I love how you said that. I think that's going to be personal for everybody.

SPEAKER_00 32:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

But you know, something about high-achieving women is that they may skip straight from like the fall, right? The failure to like go and kind of white knuckle their way into action before they've actually processed what happened and are able to really thoughtfully think about how to position themselves to go. And there is a risk of repeating the same patterns. I just kind of want to with a yellow sharpie, like highlight the importance of looking at your failure as data, right? Like, how do you turn that professional setback into a strategic advantage? The strategic advantage meaning that was a hard one lesson. Take the learning to make sure that I am doing something in ways that is better, right? New, better, refined, all those things.

SPEAKER_00 33:10

What happens when we don't, I think, get honest about our failures? So so much out there is just, I did this, I'm speaking there, I got a TEDx, I'm awesome. I wrote a book, I wrote 10 books. Like it's even I'm getting sick of myself sometimes in the sense of like what I write about. But there is this sense, and I remember yesterday I just asked my family, I was like, if we're already good enough and we're already enough, why are we spending so much time proving it? You know, so like when we think about our failures, we don't really talk about them very much because I think as women, we'll be judged not only by others, but also by other women. Like that's how it feels to me. I don't know if it feels like that to you and the things that you've you've researched, but what keeps us from talking about and sharing our learnings from our failure?

The 3G Framework: Ground Gather Go

SPEAKER_01 33:56

Yeah, well, I think shame, reputation, right? These are big. Yeah. And in fact, for me was the catalyst to writing this book, Lee, was something called the Leadership Fail Lab. So within Wild Networks, like Global Leadership Forum that we organize every year, we have an in-person event. It's actually coming up May 6th, 2026 in DC. We also do an online one. Over a thousand women from over a hundred countries attend. And for all these women globally, with incredible like top shelf leadership speakers, New York Times best-selling authors, I mean, incredible speakers. All the things, yeah. All the things. The most popular session every year is called the Leadership Fail Lab, where very successful women, by anyone's measure, stand up and talk about a major failure that they had. The hubris that led to it, right? The ego, the moving too fast, the enormity of the failure, all the shame, the isolation, the regret, the fear that came with that. And then how they climbed out of that, right? Essentially how then like they gathered and they go. So imagine you're sitting in a virtual conference, successful women leaders are like sharing these kinds of failures. It's raw, it's honest. What do you think is the most common comment that women put in the chat?

SPEAKER_00 35:12

Uh that happened to me too.

SPEAKER_01 35:14

Exactly. Yes, you got it. Me too. Me too. Me too. Right. So every successful leader, successful person you see out there has had massive failures. Like you are not alone. You are actually an excellent company. Have you failed? You're in great company.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

Yeah, probably today, you know, like in some form or fashion, right? Yes. So we're actually modeling failure. How do we model it well for our teams or for other women or for younger managers or directors as they're coming up? Is there any right way to do it or wrong way to do it?

SPEAKER_01 35:55

You know, I think to speak about your failures from a position of strength is important, right? And I think to talk about it in kind of, I would say like an even keeled way. No drama needed. There's nothing people love more than a successful person talking about their failures, right? Makes you very human. You know, shows that you have a level of humility. And I think talking about it, really sharing your story of, you know, the setup of like what were the mistakes you made that led to the failure, the challenges of the failure, what you learned, and then your go moment. Yeah. And it and when you maybe knew to go, right? Yeah, and when you knew to go. In essence, when you share your own failure, ground gather go story, you are imparting important lessons to your friends, like to your colleagues. And you're also showing how strong you are and confident that you're someone who is sharing this honest and authentic story of failure that has allowed you to supported you to have the successes that you're now having. So it is important to tell the full arc of the story.

SPEAKER_00 37:03

Yeah, I've always thought of like, wow, I should be filming this moment right now because, you know, five weeks from now, it'll be a learning that I'll be able to potentially understand better myself and then be able to hopefully help people not make that same one, which is why I wrote my first book was just to really say, here's what I did that I don't want you to do. You know, when it comes to burnout and pushing yourself and taking on responsibility. I mean, that definitely was a challenge that I had. So I think, you know, as we get there, I think I'll really enjoy seeing more and more of that. And also with myself just feeling more comfortable uh to do that. And I I certainly do that in our collective and in our our network, which is what I love about your network, is like that safe space to have that fail lab and conversation because that's totally where we learn. I mean, you learn success, but you know, nine out of 10 times I'm learning from a failure or something that didn't go quite as planned as I had thought, right?

SPEAKER_01 37:55

Yeah, 100%. And the best kind of failure to learn from is like someone else's failure, right? You're like, thank you for having that failure on all of our Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 38:02

So the more we share, actually, the better we do in the future, not only for ourselves, but for mankind, womankind, everybody. So think about that in in that sense of like, if I don't share it, maybe someone's gonna do this too, and I don't want them to, right?

Turning Setbacks Into Strategic Advantage

SPEAKER_01 38:14

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, in the entrepreneur world, they have these nights and entrepreneurs go and they like tell their war stories about when they like had a major, you know, failure. Oh, like here's the major mistake I made. Like, here's how my I was making all like all this revenue, and then I made this mistake, and now we're like out of business, and people are like, Great, hire that man. He's like learned important things, right? But let's take the best of that, which is in the in the world of entrepreneurship, people expect the best entrepreneurs to be failing forward, to make a series of calculated errors, to learn from those and fail their way into success. Your business, my business. Like the reason we're successful is because we kept experimenting and kept taking the feedback, right? What you learn from customers and vendors. And then you're like, wow, I've actually failed so many times. I'm like now really good at this. So that really that's how life is. And it's actually codified in like entrepreneurship accelerators. And like I teach, you know, entrepreneurship at Georgetown University's business school. And in the the starting your venture class, that's basically what we're teaching is we're teaching a methodology where you're taking a series of experiments, you look at them like they are experiments, you extract the learning each time until you know you have a product or service that the customer is actually wants and is willing to pay for.

SPEAKER_00 39:33

Yeah, I love that. Definitely because an entrepreneur, certainly when I started off, I felt like I didn't know anything, even though I feel like an extremely smart person, I know how to learn if I don't know something, or I have a great network. But I felt like very, very beginner. And there's something about the beginner mindset too of like, okay, I'm gonna do it. And I don't know, that kicked in pretty heavily. And then you realize just like in your fail lab example of like, you're not the only one that maybe thought that when you started off. But you're certainly not, you know, everyone's in the same boat. They're going, you're going to fail if you're if you're actually moving forward, you're going to fail. So as we think about, you know, how to aim high and bounce back, and you know, your book specifically, you know, what if if there's a woman right now listening and she's in the middle of what she would consider a setback, what do you want her to remember? What do you where where do you want her to go next?

SPEAKER_01 40:26

So, you know, if it's like really a massive devastating failure, I've really suggest holding on to those three G's and really thinking about that, right? Like the ground, gather, go framework. And in our book, we have like specific things that we suggest at each phase. If I would say you're having, you know, just more, I'm gonna just kind of call it like at the rut of the mill, like the daily, weekly failure is like, you know, there's like a deal that fell apart, there was like a partnership that's like not going as you had hoped, like somebody let you down, right? That can also like feel so you know like a circumstantial failure that's not yours. Number one, your feelings are valid. Remember that failure does not mean you're a failure. It means it failed, like the thing failed, the thing didn't work. And perhaps most importantly, is extract the learning. Because as soon as you move into extract the learning mode, number one, right? You're taking action and action builds confidence. And number two, you have now made that failure a valuable thing, and it's going to allow you to continue to aim high again with important and hard-earned data. So don't miss the learning opportunity, you know, become like the detective of your own failure.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

I like that. Yeah, get on the case. You know, what's the failure case 101 that we're going to like dig into as a team and as a leader? So as we end, I would love for you to finish this sentence. So failure has taught me what?

SPEAKER_01 41:49

Failure has taught me humility. And I think I am a better leader today from the most devastating failures that I have experienced. There is no devastating failure that I would like to go back and have again. Like, thank you very much. Once was enough. And I think I'm able to have the positive impact that I'm able to have now because I had those failures, because they taught me a kind of humility and they taught me an ability to step back and think, like, you know, what have I learned from this? And even to, you know, ask people for difficult feedback. Because again, I think as soon as you go into investigative learning mode, I think of it as like a cloak. It's like a cloak that of curiosity that protects you. So when you're wearing your cloak of curiosity, right, and you're the investigator, it's completely different from wearing like the cloak of shame or the cloak of wanting to hide, right? You're wearing the cloak of curiosity, and there's a power that comes with that. And when you're curious, it means you can be open to learning. And then that's where you're harvesting that strategic intelligence.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

Yeah, I've visualized that. So like I do a lot of content creation and creating in Canva specifically, and there's an opportunity for you to detach the image from the shape. And so, like when you were saying it's like detaching the failure from the bigger picture of what you're creating, and like that cloak of curiosity really is what you're wearing. So it doesn't feel as personal, it still is, but it's a different way to see the issue or the challenge or the failure through that lens of curiosity. So I love that.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

Yeah, right on. And the final thing I'll say, if I may, Lee, is that what I've learned in our research is that the most successful women, like what separates the successful, like we're all having failures all the time, but what separates the really successful women from others is their ability to like learn from the mistake and then keep going forward.

SPEAKER_00 43:48

Yeah, it's a big component, right? We know so much, we have so much information, we're inundated with so much information now of really understanding how to apply it and design your next step, right? So that's to me, it's about that forward process. Progress that learning just like you said, leading to the next step and higher confidence that you'll figure it out if you have to again. If it fails. So definitely, book is needed. Get it in your hands. If you're listening, aim high and bounce back, a successful women's guide to rethinking and rising up from failure. Thank you so much, Fiona, for sharing your book with us today that you co-wrote, and I am excited to share it with our community. Thank you again.

SPEAKER_01 44:23

Thanks, Lee. It's been great to be in conversation with another entrepreneur and bold innovator. So really enjoyed this. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 44:32

Thank you for listening to the Bold Lounge Podcast. Through the continuum of bold stories, vulnerability to taking the leap, you will meet more extraordinary people making a positive impact for others through their unique and important story. By highlighting these stories, we hope to inspire others and share the journey of those with a bold mindset. We hope you've enjoyed this podcast and look forward to sharing the next bold journey with you.