From Failure to Unstoppable Growth

What if your greatest setback was the seed of your greatest comeback? In this episode, Erin gets real about what failure actually means—and why it's often the doorway to the growth we crave most. From leading a senior living community to 100% occupancy just months after COVID, to being fired to , Erin shares her personal story of transformation, breaking down how mistakes, when reflected on intentionally, become our most powerful leadership assets.

Erin introduces the concept of Return on Failure (R.O.F.) and explores how leaders can flip failure from shame into strategy. If you’ve ever felt like you're behind, burnt out, or bouncing back from a loss, this episode is the roadmap to rise.

🔑 Key Topics Covered:

• Why failure and success aren’t opposites—they’re on the same path
• The mindset shift that turns mistakes into momentum
• Erin’s personal story of leadership loss—and bounce-back success
• How to own your leadership narrative (especially when it’s messy)
• Using failure to build confidence, emotional intelligence, and trust
• Why perfectionism is the enemy of growth in leadership

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Transcript

1:05

Did you know that the same year that I was asked to leave my community that I dedicated 10 years of my life to, I also led that same community. From 67% to 100% in just 13 months, and that was literally right after the lockdowns were lifted. In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on how the best leaders don't just survive their mistakes. They invest in them. We are gonna talk about why failure is never final unless you stop learning from it. The difference between a good miss and a bad miss and how your biggest face plants, your flops or your failures can become the foundation for your success. I believe the Firmest Foundation. Is rock bottom. You're gonna walk away with real tools to help you debrief your mistakes, to build resilience and create unstoppable momentum, especially if you're leading in the high stakes emotional world of senior living. If you've ever felt like you've failed too hard to bounce back, listen here, honey, this episode is for you. So let's dive in and dissect. My biggest failures in my career and maybe even my life. Let's go. All right, here we go. I'm talking to you. Sometimes I talk to this podcast and I feel like I'm talking to a lot of people and I don't know if that makes it depersonalized or personalized, but I just want you to know that I'm talking to you. I am talking to you, the person who feels like they're in the gutter the person who feels like maybe they're not even enough, the person who's managing somebody who is stuck in the gutter and can't get'em out, or the one who feels like, no matter what I do, it's not working. I've been there, done that, and I still visit. Here in this place. What can we call this? the island of doom? Is that what we can call it? I don't know. But don't stay there. Just be a visitor and let's learn how to leave whenever we want to because that's the thing we can truly make a choice. To stay on the island of doom where we don't belong, or to say, I don't belong here. I'm gonna pack my luggage that serves me and I'm gonna leave the rest behind. That is the goal of this episode. So walk with me here. Think about the last time you failed at something big. Maybe you took a risk on a team member that didn't work out. Check. Maybe you rolled out a new program that flopped check. in our line of work, these type of mistakes can feel like personal verdicts, like guilty, I'm a failure. Guilty, right? But what if there actually deposits? Into your leadership resiliency account. Here I go again talking about emotional bank accounts. I love that analogy. But what if we looked at my failures or deposits into my leadership resiliency account? Because you know, you need to have multiple accounts. I've led communities where occupancy was on the line, like where we had to grow. We were at 55% occupancy, or we were at 67% occupancy, or, we weren't making any money, right? I've led those communities. I've led the communities where surveys destroyed us, where they didn't go as planned, and families were unhappy. And I've also led communities where the surveys went brilliantly and I was so proud. But in those moments of failure, in the rawest most vulnerable moments, it felt like the failure was something to hide. And you just feel so naked out in front of everybody and your heart is sinking and your mind is saying. Here I go again, or I can't believe this happened, or I'm about to get fired, or I want to throw up, or am I ever gonna be able to do anything right? Over time, I have learned that leaders who grow the fastest are the ones who get the highest return on their failures because failures. Are the quickest way to become a success. And I think too often we have this great divide where failure's over here and success is over here and we're either going to one side or the other. We're not staying in the middle and we're not bringing the failure over. Closer to the success or the success closer to the failure, we're allowing a failure to define us, but a failure doesn't define us. think about it. How many times does it take to get something right? A lot. You know, I tell leaders all the time to embrace the suck of the first year because you're gonna get a lot of things wrong because you don't know the patterns, you don't know the routines, you don't know the people, you don't know what drives your people. these are big things you have to fail in order to get them right. My husband has this saying you gotta go through the bad to get to the good. How true is that? How true is you have to go through the bad to get to the good. So when most people separate the success and the failure, they think I'll succeed by avoiding mistakes. But that's false narrative. That's false. Success doesn't teach you anything. success will grow your ego. And I have learned that your ego is not your friend. Unless you're in a moment like the final seconds of a game and you know that you can make the shot, or you're solving problems and you know you've done it, and you can pull from that success, right? That's when ego is your friend. Ego is not your friend when all you see is your success, because without failure, there is no success. Without success, you're defeated. And that's important. That's why you need'em together. Too much success is gonna make you cocky, arrogant and untouchable. Unrelatable, right? Too much failure is gonna keep you down in the gutter, in the ditch, not knowing how to get up. But when you keep them close and you don't judge yourself too harshly for the failure, and you don't think you're so good, because of this success, you create humility. Resiliency and tenacity. that's grit. That's grit. I used to think that humility was living in my weaknesses, I didn't wanna be cocky and arrogant. So I decided that I'm going to be very aware of my weaknesses and really focus on them and pot and sometimes try to make them my strengths. There are a lot of my, a lot of my weaknesses that are never gonna become strengths. And if I continue to work on weaknesses, I'm just going to be average at something and I don't wanna be average. I wanna be good. True humility requires you to understand your weaknesses and your strengths. And to live in the middle. You can't live up top on your strengths. You can be aware of them and you can be confident in them, But you have to be aware of your weaknesses and know to hire for them and know to delegate them and know to value the people that you do. True humility. Allows you to live in a balance. if you're living too far in your weaknesses, you are not confident, and if you're living too high in your strengths, you're too arrogant. True humility is understanding the balance of weaknesses and strengths, and knowing that success is going to be if I spend more time in my strengths, strengthening them, and less time in my weaknesses. Because that's where momentum is built. And so if you're feeling like a failure constantly, it's probably because you're only looking at yourself through your weaknesses and you're struggling So start looking at yourself from what you're able to do right? And stay there for a little while and keep the failures close, because more than likely, you're able to do very well in those strength areas because you failed in them and you got better. So what is the biggest failure that defined me? I think at this moment, the biggest failure is that I was asked to leave the same community twice by the same company. Now I don't think I've ever said that out loud for the world to hear, and let me give you some context'cause I've worked through the shame, but it makes me a little nauseous when I just said that. I worked for a nonprofit community, a 64 apartment memory care community. And they sold, and at the same time they sold, I was pregnant actually with twins and right before the cell date, I went into early labor, like at 28 weeks, and I lost our son Tucker. And our other son, Eli, was born at 28 weeks, in two days. Now, this was three weeks before the sale went through. I knew weeks before that this new company wasn't gonna transfer me over. I knew it. I could tell. I knew it by the regional director that they brought in, and I knew it by some of the most. Placating and patronizing comments. They talked to me about having a baby and I promised them that I would be by the phone and still be able to do this, and they were like, no, no, no. You take care of your family and we'll make sure that everything's taken care of. I knew that wasn't the case. I knew it wasn't the case and I was right. They did not transfer me over and that was devastating in that time. That was an adult trauma that triggered a lot of things that spiraled that the next 10 years of my life turned into amazing miracles. The highest of highs and the lowest of lows. So from 2012 to 2022, seriously, I was surviving. My life fell apart. Why? They, didn't choose me. I don't know, but I know that. Defining moment in my life was supposed to happen for me. It was because I wasn't able to work the way that my son's life started. He had to trach his first two years of life. I wasn't gonna be able to work. And so it benefited me because I was able to, to have unemployment and, you know, get a little severance check. when you look back at these defining moments in your life, did they help you? Yes. Is that a failure? no, but it felt like one, right? Fast forward two years later, my son, his trach is out. He's able to go into daycare. He's doing well, and I get a call. They need an executive director. They fly me out to their home office. They apologize to me, which is. in my opinion, very, very big. Like, thank you, I appreciate that. And at that point in my life, I needed money and I didn't wanna go back into senior living if you want the God's honest truth. But I needed money and I had this other job interview, and I wasn't promised a job. I was promised a second interview, and here in senior living, I almost promised the job. So I just took the job. And they said to me, we don't want. What happened in the past, them not choosing me, you know, in like life's worst time losing a child and watching the other child clinging to life, they don't want that to affect the future. And at the time I wasn't very aware. I was still surviving and I just said, yes, absolutely. I look back now and I had the biggest chip on my shoulder folks. I'm gonna prove you wrong. I'm gonna prove that you made a bad choice. That was my mentality and that was my mentality for the next eight years. Vulnerable point in a human being's life, and then the identity that you have for your life is taken away for no reason that they didn't, except for they didn't want you. That affects you. And my core trauma was never being enough anyways, and that community. It went from 55% to a hundred percent with a horrific state survey score and in 18 months or less, and we ran a tight ship and it was a excellent community. And now all of a sudden a new owner comes in and they don't want me, like I was just. Devastated. Okay, now I go back to work and we turn the community around in 18 months or less. Hard work, but I'm proving a point. Lemme tell you something. And I go in and I make my point known. We grow the occupancy back up. You know, we're in the 90 percentile in 18 months or less. I can't exactly remember. I don't, obviously life was hectic at that time anyways. We're doing good. I win some big fancy award. The community's doing great, everything's fine. But eight years later, they do the same thing to me. They tell me they can't. They don't know how to support me anymore How did we get there? Like how did we get there? I think about this all the time. If you wanna know the truth. How did I get to that point? And it's because I allowed my mind to sit in the failure of being let go. I allowed my mind to stay in the sentence. I'm not enough. And that was the energy that was inside of my body. Now, just so you know, inside the community was nothing but love rainbows and Skittles because I loved my job. I loved the people. I loved feeling the love. I loved solving the problems. I loved being people's hero. I am passionate about it. So when I talk about myself in these moments. It is strictly internal and up to the corporate office. It is not inside the community because if there's one thing in my life that I'm proud of, it is being an executive director and I was a good one. I was not perfect. And I have made that very known. I have popped off on people. I have made bad decisions. I have not had surveys that were good. the list is long. I'm not perfect. But I was the version of myself that I love the most inside of the community. I kept success and failure very close, and I was very balanced, and I genuinely and passionately loved working inside of a community. But I projected my own negative stories, my own hurt, my own childhood, traumatic stories that started there and then the adult trauma. I projected that on to the home office and I defended myself. And when I wasn't seen with them. I got angry. There was a lot of resentments. There was A big divide. And for a long time, because some of the surveys in Alabama for that company wasn't great. I was able to run that community like my own, like I owned it and so some of that is my fault because. I didn't connect with them that way. And They allowed it. But then as the company got bigger, they were trying to scale. I didn't know what that meant. I found a way to survive in a big community that did not have the managerial support that it needed. Like it really needed an executive director and an assistant executive director. And all I had was me the executive director. I found a way to run it for it to make sense, but it wasn't the way that the home office wanted it ran. And so when they started coming in and trying to change everything, that's when the end began. And I look back at that now and I'm like, what were my driving forces to resist such change? I resisted change. It was they had to term, they had to ask me to leave. They had to do that because I refused to give in. I refused it. So what were the three areas? Like I think back and I'm just like, okay, what caused me to be so resistant to change the fear of failure, number one. The fear of getting fired again for doing something wrong because I didn't, I didn't feel safe. I didn't feel comfortable with them. I didn't trust them. And so if I had a hundred percent occupancy, if I had a good survey, my NOI was good. Like all these things. And I knew how to do that, and I did it consistently. So if I could just have those numbers high enough, I would be safe. But that's not true. That's not true more than anything. Companies want alignment. And I think from a personal standpoint, more than anything, you need alignment. And I'm gonna tell you something. I was not aligned with the company, and the company was not aligned with me. So what you had was a gap of misery that could not move forward. Now, could we have had a conversation and tried? Yes. Could they have hired a coach like I am? Yes. I hired a coach for me and my life changed. Because I realized it was the fear of failure that drove me. The fear of judgment that drove me, the fear of rejection that drove me, and those were my problems. Mine, there was no one else's problems. the fear of failure. What if I mess up the fear of judgment? What will people think about me? Because I worked really hard. For my reputation, for all those things. Like I worked hard for that, and then they're just gonna take it away, and then I'm gonna fail, and then I'm not gonna be able to live up to the expectations. I mean, I had a good community. We were one of the best in the area. And then the fear of rejection, which is the core wound. But see, when you have all that energy inside of you, you attract it. So I attracted a company who wasn't going to see me. And because I attracted that, I fought against it and I tried to prove my worth, which doesn't work. Okay, so projection was the problem. It wasn't performance, it was my own pain projected on to people. I thought they were thinking what I was thinking. They were thinking about me. There's so many people, even people I coach right now who are struggling with occupancy, and I ask them this question, when a tour comes in, are you automatically thinking that they know that your occupancy's low and that you're having all these struggles? And the person looks at me like, I'm like these big eyes, and they say yes. And I'm like, that's not true. They're not. They don't know. I mean, maybe some people know, but if they knew they wouldn't be there. So you have to be aware of what you're believing that other people are thinking about you, but you're not a mind reader. That's why awareness is so important When you are aware of your own thoughts, of your own stories, of what you are telling yourself, and you can change those, then the lens that you look through becomes completely clear. I don't care about failure anymore. I have worked through all the shame. Anything you wanna know about what I did right or what I did wrong, I have no problem telling you because I learned from it. I learned from it, and therefore I'm stronger because of it, and I am humble and I have grit, and I'm resilient, and I know that I can do anything I want. And the other thing is, is I have spent, and let me tell you this, if you've been terminated or you're looking for a job right now, I have spent so much time crafting a sentence about why I was asked to leave. That would be honest and affirming and true, and other people not to judge me the fear of judgment. And how many times have I had to use that sentence? I once, twice, three times, 10 times, 15 times zero. Nobody cares. And actually when they find out, they're impressed. Because I can tell them what I learned from it. Failure is your biggest teacher, and is it failure if it worked out in your favor? I call it failure because I felt like a failure. Even though I wasn't a failure, I had a hundred percent community. I had three near perfect surveys. I have turned four communities around from underperforming, 75% to a hundred percent in four months as a sales director, 67% to 90 something percent as a sales director, and then I became the executive director. 55% to a hundred percent with a state survey score of 57 and 18 months or less with amazing teams. And then this last community after COVID, we were at 67% and we went to a hundred percent in one year. That's not a failure. That is a success story, but it wasn't enough. And I think what I want you to know more than anything. Is that 100% is not enough. Your growth, your mentality, your alignment, that's enough. How you handle the hard problems, how you have the hard conversations, how you're able to communicate, how you receive people when they walk in, like that's important. How you protect yourself. Bring this wall of defense up. When people walk in and how you fight change, like these things they matter more than a hundred percent. So a hundred percent isn't enough, and your growth is more valuable than the growth of your community. Who cares what people think about you? if you're learning, you're growing, and if you're growing, you're living and that's important. Who cares if you fail? What did you learn? I thought in my small community, like showing my face again, was I would much rather, I don't know. It was nauseating, I'll just say that, but showing my face again and putting myself out there and growing was more inspiring and earning respect from people than I really thought. And really all I was doing was healing me, showing up for myself. And that's the point, like how do you turn? This experience, a failure, a mistake, a learning lesson from a failure to a good miss, right? A good miss versus bad miss, because not all failures are created equal, So someone who's not willing to learn from a mistake is never going to be able to look at a failure and make it a good miss versus a bad miss. Not all failure is equal. A good miss moves you forward, you adjust and you learn. And a bad miss means that you're excuse. You have all these excuses that you're not changing, you're not growing, and you're just blaming other people and you're defending yourself, right? So a goodness is, I lost the sale. And here is why, and you learn. I didn't follow up. I didn't get down to the key reason. I didn't ask what success was to them, and I didn't paint the picture. I didn't connect fully, but a bad miss would be they chose the, the other community because it had a swimming pool or because it had, better activities. Something that you don't have, that's a bad miss. What did you learn when you communicate a failure to someone? I was asked to leave a community that I poured my heart and soul into. But here's why. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. It stripped away everything that kept me stuck in some very bad thought patterns and negative energy, and it allowed me to heal myself and make myself the biggest puzzle to put back together. And my life is better because of that. I learned from it. That is the biggest return on failure. if you're trying to get to a hundred percent and you have a few good months, and then you have a few bad months, and you realize. These patterns are telling me something and you realize that it's a very simple fix because you looked at all the failures. Who are we missing? Why are we losing these particular prospects? When you can realize that and make adjustments that failure taught you so. My sales and marketing director wasn't asking better questions. If I'm not retaining top talent, I'm not asking better questions. I'm not asking them. I'm not connecting with them. I'm not supporting them the way they need to, or in the interview, I'm not putting my best self forward to try to understand who in the interview I actually need to hire and who I don't need to hire. And those failures teach you. How to interview better, how to sell better, that I need to introduce people on the tour because it connects the community to the prospect because it adds value to the people that are working. It makes them feel a part of the process, like that's a good miss when you study what's going wrong and you learn from it and you look for the patterns. That's important. Right, because you can continue to walk down the same street with the same hole in it and fall in it every time. Or you can choose to see the hole to walk around the hole or go on another street altogether, right? You have to be aware of the problem that you keep hitting over and over again because these patterns. You're either missing it and the universe, God, a higher power, whatever it is to you, keeps giving you the same problem over and over again until you get the point. Sometimes it's you. Sometimes you have to get out of your own way. Sometimes you have to identify the story, become aware of how it's harming you, and rewrite it. And sometimes you just have to work for more knowing that you're enough. And when you do that, everything changes and you start attracting the people who are enough and want to make you better. And that is where momentum is built. And it all starts with you. It all starts on learning from your failures, and it all starts in understanding just how important failure is in your life. What is a good miss? What is a bad miss? You make that decision a bad miss is if you blame everything and you never, ever reflect on how you got there. And how you can avoid that ever happening again. Life is difficult. Working inside senior living is difficult, but if you want to be good at it, you have to realize everything worthwhile is uphill. Everything, every success is hard earned and hard learned. and that is part of the process. Nothing comes easy in this industry, so when you expect it to be easy, you get discouraged and discouragement will stop you from doing the right things to bring that momentum. You do not create change if you stop planting the seeds of momentum. If you stop because you don't see any results, you are not going to see the results immediately. Seeds grow in seasons, not in seconds. Keep doing the right thing even when you don't see the results, because the results will come and lemme tell you something. Be ready. Because when the results come, it's gonna be a lot. And that's why the foundation that you have is so important. So embrace the hard, embrace, the heart of why rising after a failure is so worth it. Doing the deep work, doing the hard work, doing the personal work because you influence your community. Your energy influences your community, your thought presses, influences your community. Your communication influences your community. And if you feel like it's not worth it, if you feel like it's not valuable, if you feel like you're not valuable, no one else is going to, you are important, and I don't care if you're the executive director and the director of nursing, the sales and marketing director, you affect the team. You affect the community. A failure should never sit you down and get you off the team. You should think about it. You should reflect about it, and then you should learn from it. That's the greatest return on failure. Embrace the suck, folks. It makes the journey less overwhelming. Stop fighting the discomfort and just allow it. Because there is so much hope on the other side of it. I promise the dip, right? We talked about the dip before. The dip is worth the climb. It's where the treasure is. So don't lay there and get defensive and feel sorry for yourself. Learn from it. Take stock in it. It is worth it. Okay? We're gonna talk about. Failure, obviously this episode and next episode, I'm gonna actually go through the tactical ways that you can learn from your failure. Actually someone that used to work on my team who was put in a position of an interim regional director or district director,'cause this person was an executive director of another community. Anyways, details the sentence that stuck out the most was they don't know how to support you anymore. And that sentence has, I mean, just lived in my head, rent free. Most companies don't know how to support the leaders who don't feel like they're enough or lack confidence in their own personal selves or have a professional and a personal growth gap. That's so big'cause they're two different people. And when I invested in coaching for myself, I invested$5,000. So, you know, that was nauseating for me, and it changed my life. It was the best money I ever spent. No one invested in me. I did that myself, and I learned just how valuable coaching is. A mentor slash coach, somebody who. Has no shame and we'll talk about it all. Somebody who allow creates this growth environment and says to you, you can say whatever you want to mean. I don't care. I'm not gonna judge you. I'm gonna help walk you through it. I'm gonna give you steps on what to do to get you out of this hole that you're in, whether it's a operational thing, whether it's a mindset thing. What I am learning with my clients is that it's both. The mindset is keeping them stuck in the operation piece. It's confidence. There is so much going on inside of your communities, you are being pulled in so many different ways that you can't see straight. That's what coaching and mentoring does, and that's why I'm uniquely qualified to do it because I can speak your language. Both from the personal standpoint and the professional standpoint. That's why I built the mentoring company. That's why we created the course. That's why we have the ED launch lab, and that's why I take one-on-one clients for that person who wants to succeed, who loves their job, but is stuck and doesn't know how to get out. That's my specialty. It's what I love to do. And that's why you should invest in yourself. And now I do work with companies and they pay for coaching for their, for their associates. And maybe your company will do that too, but if they don't invest in yourselves,'cause your life can get so much easier. the clients that I have are succeeding whenever they were feeling like they were failing before and it wasn't true. They just needed somebody else to look at them and say. You've got this. Let me help you get out of your own way. Let me help you rewrite the story that you're telling yourself with the truth. And then let's operate from earning and being more right, being more when you already know that you're enough. That's called growth. That's what I do and I love it, and I would love. To be part of your journey too. You can buy a course to earn 5.25 NAB approved CEUs. If you need administrator's license, you can join the new ED Launch Lab, which is gonna start in September. And I'm always available for one-on-one coaching. And I am a keynote speaker at the national Center for Assisted Living, AKA in Cal Day in October. And that in itself is enough for you to say, if she can fail and get back up, then I can fail and get back up. It's taken a lot of hard work, but I'm so proud. I'm proud to be on that stage and to talk about my failures and to help leaders get out of their own way. That's my new mission. You. Me and growing together. we're gonna learn next week. I'm gonna talk to you about real tactical ways to learn from failure, right? To make every failure a good miss and not a bad miss. Every day you are balancing families, regulations, emotions, and operations. You are going to fail, but failure does not define you. It's how you respond to the failure that does. So if you can learn, improve and reenter with a new perspective, nothing is going to stop you. Growth is the goal, influences the outcome. With being enough as the foundation, you've got this and you are worth it. So own your story so you can create your future. See you next time.