How Women Bounce Back from Failure: Deborah Grayson Riegel | Ep 62

Why do high-achieving women shatter when men bounce? After 21 years of coaching across genders and a study of 1,100 women across 60 countries, Deborah Grayson Riegel has the answer — and it's not what you've been told.

In this episode, Aimee Rickabus talks with Deborah Grayson Riegel — Wharton School instructor, Harvard Business Review columnist, and author of Aim High and Bounce Back — about the real reason women fear failure and how to interrupt the loop.

Deborah shares:
- The 5 kinds of failure every woman needs to recognize
- Why the "confidence gap" is actually a consequence gap (and worse for women of color)
- The 3 components of catastrophic thinking — and how to dismantle each one
- How "name it to tame it" pulls you out of the rumination spiral in 30 seconds
- The 3 mindset shifts: verdict to information, crisis to calibration, shame to strategy
- The one sentence every woman should remember in the middle of a setback

Whether you're leading a team, building a business, raising a daughter, or replaying last Tuesday's mistake at 2 a.m., this conversation gives you the language and tools to stop personalizing failure — and start using it as data.

🔗 CONNECT WITH DEBORAH:
Instagram: @debgriegel
Website: https://deborahgraysonriegel.com
Book: Aim High and Bounce Back — https://deborahgraysonriegel.com/books/

🔗 CONNECT WITH THE MANAGE HER®:
Website: https://www.themanageher.com
Instagram: @themanageher

Transcript

0:07

Today's conversation is one that I think every woman, especially high-achieving women, needs to hear. Because we don't actually talk enough about failure. We talk about success, we talk about growth, we talk about resilience, but we don't always unpack what happens in that moment when something doesn't go the way we planned. And more importantly, how we internalize it. Today, I'm sitting down with Deborah Reigel, executive coach, leadership communication expert, and the author of 10 books, including her newest release, Aim High and Bounce Back. Deborah has spent over two decades working with leaders at the highest levels teaching communication, leadership, and performance at top institutions like Wharton and Columbia. But what really stood out to me about her latest work is the research. She and her co-author studied over 1,100 women across 60 countries, and what they found is something I think so many of us will recognize instantly, that women don't just experience failure, we personalize it, we ruminate on it, and we often turn it into a a system failure, but we turn it into a story about our own worth. And in a world where women are stepping into leadership, entrepreneurship, and even shaping the future of AI, that pattern becomes incredibly important to understand and to shift. So today we're talking about failure, but more than that, We're talking about how to bounce instead of shatter. Deborah, I'd love to start here. You've spent over 20 years working in leadership communication and coaching. Yes. Yes. It's amazing. So what originally drew you into this work and what have you observed about how women show up differently in leadership conversations? So what originally brought my attention to the topic of failure and in particular failure in women is that I've been coaching a cross genders for 21 years. And I was noticing that when I was speaking to leaders who were men, more often than not, they would experience a setback or a failure or a mistake or a misstep and they would deal with it and then they would move on. What I found was in many cases for the women that I was coaching, they would have a failure and they would ruminate personalize, catastrophize, and then get stuck there. And it was much harder to get them to move beyond a failure and to bounce back from it than it was with the men that I was coaching. And so I was really curious about this phenomenon, about why this happens, what's going on from the time, you know, a woman is a girl, what's happening early on in her life to have her feel so differently about failure that she gets stuck. And as you so artfully put it, you know, shatters instead of bounces back. And so that was really the question we were looking to answer. Yeah, I love it. I think it's such an important question. I'm glad you guys did this research. So you guys researched women and failure. Your new book is rooted in research. And so you guys looked at 1,100 different women in 60 different countries? 1,100 women across 60 countries. So this is not North American research. This is global research where we surveyed women across socioeconomic strata of across countries, across, you know, education levels, you name it. And we found that women, like we experienced maybe in our own lives, that women were much more likely to internalize and say, you know, I wasn't enough than they were to externalize and say, the system didn't set me up for failure. They were more likely to stay stuck than to catalyze. And they were less likely to treat failure as data and more treat failure as a part of their identity rather than an event. Oh, that's so interesting. So what were some of the most surprising or even confronting findings from that research? Anything specific? Yeah, I would say some of the things that were most confronting to us was how early we are conditioned, the women are conditioned to have this really fraught relationship with failure. So we found that it typically starts around age five or six when you're in a classroom. And what we found is that girls are more likely to be recognized and rewarded for perfect behavior than whereas boys are rewarded for taking bold risks in the classroom. So that's the first place where we learned that we have to behave and perform and be perfect as opposed to swinging, shooting for the stars. The second thing that struck us was that 43% of girls quit sports. And as a result of quitting sports, girls are losing access to one of the most important places where we learn to fail and bounce back, which is on the court or the field, right? Or the diamond, wherever it is that we're playing sports. And then another statistic that really showed up was that by age 13, most girls are on social media. And when a girl is on social media, she learns that she needs to perform a certain way for an audience to approve of her and let her in. And if she doesn't behave perfectly, not only will people not let her in or not approve, they will actively disapprove of her and, you know, cut her to the quick. I think the thing that was most shocking for us was how early it starts and that it doesn't just start in the classroom, on the sports field or online. It's happening in all three of these places at different stages of our life. Wow. So we really in the next generations, we could see an amplification of this fear of failure in females due to social media. And no one's really addressing that yet. Absolutely. And one of the things that that I've heard since the book came out is the number one piece of feedback that I've gotten is I'm buying this for my daughter and my daughter's in law. It's a book about women and failure, but women are reading it and saying, had I known this at, you know, 10, 20, 30, I could have saved myself an awful lot of heartache. And so it is, it's not something that I intended to be a parenting book, but it turns out it's a parenting book. That's amazing. Well, I have two daughters. One that's 27 who has had a huge setback in her life in the last six months. She lost the father of her children to leukemia. And so she's had a very difficult time, you know, bouncing back from it. She truly is shattered right now. And it's for me, I'm thinking, I don't know. I mean, I grew up without social media. I didn't have as much of the failure conditioning. My mother was quite the renaissance woman and quite different than most moms. But yeah, it's been really hard to watch her. But then the same with my daughter. She's in kindergarten and she was diagnosed with dyslexia this year. And the same thing that, you know, mommy, I don't really want to go to school. They're going to test me and I'm not going to do and I'm not going to be able to perform as well as the other kids. So I see this in both of my daughters right now in different ways. One's five, one's 27, but I'm seeing this behavior in both of them. So thank you for explaining how social media is sort of amplifying this already pre-existing condition in women. That's right. That's right. And I'm thinking, so first of all, my heart goes out to both of your daughters. Those are tough things to deal with and, you know, for very different reasons. And, you know, one of the things we talk about in the bounce back part of the book is the importance of grieving your failure. And so for your older daughter, this is what's known as a circumstantial failure. So it's something that happened through absolutely no fault of her own. It's something that happened to her. That's one kind of grief is when the world is just unfair. And for your younger daughter too, it's also a circumstantial failure. She didn't bring this onto herself. The world treated her unfairly and she's dealing with the consequences of it. For both of them, I can imagine that they might be talking about a second kind of failure too, which is called an identity failure, where you start to wonder, like, who am I in the face of this loss? Maybe the loss of being, you know, seen as neurotypical or the loss of being, you know, a wife or partner. So we talk about five different kinds of failure in the book, and some failures are all five kinds. Concrete, circumstantial, identity, paralysis, failure, and... perceived failure, which is when, you know, the world says you're a failure even though you know you're doing something right for yourself. Wow. That's, it's really profound it I'm seeing this is a very important message right now for young women, especially in mothers who are raising young women in a very different world. Social media has really changed the parenting game. Now your research is bringing up even more evidence that now we're now amplifying something that was already not great and the needs to be addressed in young women. So when you say women personalize failure, what does that actually look like in real life? What that looks like is that women see themselves as the catalysts for their failure. So I wasn't good enough. I wasn't smart enough. I wasn't prepared enough. I didn't plan well enough. My expectations were too high. My expectations were too low, dot, dot, dot, right? So there's a big, I in the center of failure, which, well, there is an I in the center of failure, but there's a big, you know, sense about, you know, I was the engine of this failure without recognizing that failure happens in a system, right? We certainly want to take accountability for our role in something not turning out the way we had planned or hoped for, but it often isn't only ourselves that are part of it. So, you know, an example would be childcare in our country. Is it terrible failure of the system. And when women have a caregiver crisis, they think about, I didn't do enough, right? I didn't do enough to make sure that my kids had the care that they needed. I fell short. I didn't carve out enough time, as opposed to realizing maybe you had some hand in it. But we've got a huge system failure here, and that is not something that you want to shoulder the blame for. Yeah, I know. That's another one that we talk about on my show a lot is, you know, if women are expected to work, which they very much are expected to work in our society. The thing, the elephant in the room is the fact that it costs a woman about $20 an hour in childcare for her to go to work. And she is in no way compensated or offset for that cost of her to go to work. So we have a huge systems failure for women when it comes to childcare. And then we really don't have adequate systems around childcare either. There should be a much better, more comprehensive childcare system in the United States. Absolutely. Agreed, agreed. If women are to work in society, then we must accommodate that in some way. And at this point, I see my 27-year-old really struggling with that now as a single mom. She is a seven year old and a three year old. And it's like, how, how do you work? And her, you know, her younger, younger son is not, is neurodivergent. And so it's like, how, what are you supposed to do? You know, childcare is so expensive that she goes to work. Maybe she makes $30 an hour and then she has to pay taxes on that, but it costs her $20 an hour to pay her babysitter. And it's, it's outrageous. And a woman is more likely to say, I should be doing this better. Why don't I have a handle on this? I am failing my kids. And that turns into feelings of shame. And we know that feelings of shame can kill. We want to be really, really careful about taking accountability and responsibility for our role, but not being overly accountable and overly responsible for things that are our failures of the system. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really important that we as women stand together when there is a failure in the system. rather than a failure in ourselves. And right now, the motherhood, the failure in motherhood within the American system right now is childcare. If women are to work, they must have childcare. You're absolutely right. And one of the other things that really struck us in our research was we had heard anecdotally about this phenomenon called the confidence gap, that women feel less confident than their male counterparts do. What we found in digging into the research is that there is less of a confidence gap and there is more of a consequence gap. That when a woman fails, the consequences for a woman more severe, they're quicker, more severe and longer lasting such that if a woman in a leadership role has a failure in that role, the organization is unlikely to hire another woman in that leadership role again. And this is, there is almost a 0% margin of error for women of color. Wow. I have seen that. I honestly have. I've seen that within the corporate world. I very much have seen that. I do feel like we as women kind of carry the weight for other women. You know, we're representing women as a whole when we go into a room that's filled with men. I've done it myself many, many times. Yeah, you do. You feel I feel the weight of, you know, being the representative for an entire gender at times. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, it's funny. I am certainly a victimizer. victim of it myself. I was giving a talk earlier in the week and somebody asked me a question about like, so what do we do to change the system? And I was like, oh my gosh, I haven't figured out how to change the system. Am I a failure that I wrote a book that hasn't figured out how to change the system? And I said, hold on, gather, gather yourself, learn your lessons, read the book, right? And said, no, I'm not a failure because I haven't figured out how to change the system. I would be failing if I pretended I had it figured out and I'd be failing if I avoided the question. But no, I'm not a failure for not having figured out how to change the system. No. And I think right now the questions, what we as women need to be doing is just having these kinds of conversations so that we as a collective can figure out how we change the system. I don't think it's going to be one person who's going to have the answer. I think that it's probably going to be more of a collective response, hopefully, as we create a larger conversation with a larger group of women. I think that there's going to be a lot of voices and a lot of really great minds behind this as we, you know, it's just, you know, if we don't talk about it, we're never going to fix it. That's exactly right. Exactly right. Yeah. So it's, you know, we start there. We start with the conversation and then we go everywhere else. Which I'm thrilled about. Yeah. This is very interesting. Do you think this connects to the invisible labor that women carry in our homes where we feel responsible for outcomes that we don't fully control? So I think any place where we feel responsible for outcomes that we don't fully control is a breeding ground for feelings of failure. I want to just put out there because I feel that it's important for me to say that my husband does more invisible and visible labor than I do. Good job. That means you're an adequate communicator because I feel like men want to help us. But when we keep the invisible labor invisible, we don't we're not really communicating with our partners how they can be adequate. partners you know how we're going to teach them how to help us with the mental load of the house which is the knowing how to do things without us telling them to do them right so it's like maybe at some point early on in our relationship if we have those conversations with them like these are the things that need to be done every week we've got trash that needs to be taken out trash cans need to go out on this day maybe you can own that i don't know did you have those kinds of conversations with him or did was he just intuitive he just had it handled and i think two things happened. Number one is, you know, he was raised in a home with a really equal division of labor. And number two was, you know, for the bulk of of our lives together, I was on the road and he was home. You know, he had a job, but he was the parent who had to be more flexible because if I was in China, you know, I couldn't pick the kids up from school. So as a result of him growing up in a household with with a you know, division of labor where he saw that, you know, both men and and women take care of the household tasks. And because it was out of necessity, I just wasn't there. He overperforms in that way. And let's put it this way. We're married almost 28 years. I have not done laundry in 28 years, which is kind of an amazing thing. Congratulations for that. Thank you. I married very well. I married very well. You did. So I am happy to talk about invisible labor, but I have to out myself by saying that I, um, I won the lottery when it comes to domestic division of responsibilities in my house. That's amazing. It is certainly something that contributes to feelings of failure, especially when you're supposed to be able to have it all and do it all. You can't have it all and do it all if there's a whole bunch of stuff you're supposed to be doing that other people can't see. Yes. Right? Other people can't see, that other people don't register, that other people aren't tracking as a place where you might need some help. And so if you're doing a whole bunch of things that people can't see, it means you have less time, energy and resources available for the things people can see, which is where we are likely externally to be judged on success or failure. But our ability to do those sort of non-promotable tasks are one of the places where we judge ourselves on success or failure. Absolutely. Yeah. Sometimes I look at it like Cinderella. It's like, yes, you can go to the ball, but first you have to do X, Y, and Z. And so you're so lucky. You've probably been so successful because you've had a partner who's willing to carry the mental load with you. The mental load is everything. The mental load, the physical load, the childcare load, the household load, the emotional intelligence load, the support load. I think you're absolutely right that I attribute having a very, very successful supportive partner to me being successful and equally as important, if not more important, happy. Yes. Yeah. Happy is so important. Happy wife, happy life. What a good man. Although I did just hear on, um, I was watching an episode of love on the spectrum and they, somebody's dad said, happy wife, happy life. And one of the young men said, that's so old fashioned. You have to say happy spouse, happy house. Yeah. That's cute. And I love that. So happy spouse, happy house. I love that. So let's see. One of the things I see a lot with women is the mental replay. I'm seeing this in my older daughter, too. The overthinking. Can you walk us through what's actually happening physiologically when women ruminate on failure? Yes. And so, by the way, not my last book, but my book two books ago was called Overcoming Overthinking that I co-wrote. wrote with my daughter because we are both highly skilled and committed overthinkers. So we definitely have a lot of expertise in this topic. But what happens is if you think about replaying something, you get this neural pathway that just gets this grooves embedded in it. And it makes the thoughts faster and easier to keep cycling, you know, cycling throughout your brain. This sort of replay that happens then becomes habituated, right? It goes from sort of a casual replay to a habit of a replay, and it leads to feelings of shame and blame and guilt and self-loathing and low self-esteem. So it's really pretty detrimental to constantly be replaying what's happening. One of the things that we also found in our research is that women tend to be catastrophizers, and catastrophic thinking has three components. The first component of catastrophic thinking is overestimating the likelihood of unlikely events. The second part of catastrophic thinking is overestimating how devastating those events would be if they happened. And number three is underestimating the resources we have available to us should they happen. With many of the women that I speak with and coach, I invite them to think about the third category, which is the resources, which is if you can build up resources either your belief in your resources or the resources themselves to know that if something terrible should happen, I've got family, I've got friends, I've got therapists, I've got coaches, I've got a team of people who will help me through this. And I'm imagining your daughter may, both of your daughters may be finding that they've got resources available to help them through these setbacks. If you can get some faith in your resources, then it can start to mitigate the fact that we're imagining the worst possible thing and how terrible that thing would be if it happened. Yeah, absolutely. For my little girl, it would be like, we're so lucky. We actually, my 16 year old also has very bad dyslexia, like probably one of the worst cases I've ever seen. But we actually bought our house near a school and a center that helps dyslexic kids. Amazing. That was founded by a woman who had a dyslexic daughter. Her a mother and all of the things. But it's so lucky to have that massive resource here for her. So it was one of the first things I did was let's go talk to Miss Kathy. Let's go see Kathy Johnson. Well, she'll figure it out, baby. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Oh, I love that. Resources, resources, resources. Yes. She's got you. And so we're hopping into reading therapy for her. And so she'll have lots of resources to be able to get through her learnings give her some tools. Because dyslexic kids just learn in a different way. So it's giving her the tools to learn in the way that her brain works. So we'll get her there. Good job, mama. Yeah. Fortunately, not my first rodeo with dyslexia. Thank God. So we get a little better the more kids you have. A little more resources there. And with my older daughter, one of the things we're talking about is EMDR. I had done a great EMDR session with a woman in Oceanside. And I'm going to schedule in six weeks, I'll have her back in town. She just left. She's in Texas. And my daughter will be back. So I'm going to have her do an intensive EMDR session just because I really think that'll help. I think she really has post-traumatic stress because of the way that he died. You know, being in the hospital, seeing someone like that in that state of being, I think she's really traumatized by it. Yeah, yeah. Again, I'm so sorry for her loss and everybody's loss. It happened to the family, not just her. And I think, you know, one of the important things that we need to do if we're going to build up our resources is be willing to talk about what's happening. You know, apropos of your daughter's situation, we had a loss about a year and a half ago. Our very close family friend passed away really young. very young, I was talking about the loss that I felt and a colleague of mine said, so I'm in North Carolina, said, you know, Duke University offers six free grief counseling sessions to anyone in the community who needs it. I said, what? She said, oh yeah, when my father died, I took advantage of it. I would have had no idea that that was available. And so that was a resource that I availed myself of, but I wouldn't have known about it if I was hiding feelings of sadness. I just wouldn't have known. Yeah. The more we talk, it is the communication is key. You're the communication expert. So you're right. You know, the more we communicate, you got a bunch of kids. You're a communication expert, too. You have to be. They teach you how to be communication experts. You might not have been before, but right now I am. It took me a while. So is there a practical way that we can interrupt a loop when we get into that kind of failure loop? So one of the things that we recommend, and this is in the third part of the book where we're talking about bouncing back from failure. So we have this three part, three stages, which is about ground, gather, and go. And in the grounding, the... Sort of key phrase is no sudden movements. When you are experiencing a failure, what you are going to want to do, every, you know, every cell in your body is going to want to get rid of it, move past it, shake it off, brush it off. But in fact, we suggest that the first thing you do is just pause. No sudden movements. Just take a beat. Pause. ground yourself, you know, physically and emotionally. And then we advise people, as I might've mentioned before, to really grieve the hopes and plans and expectations that you had for something that didn't happen the way you wanted it to, is to really allow yourself to grieve and to name neutrally how you're feeling, right? And one of the things that women do a lot of is judging their feelings. So have you ever thought to yourself like, oh, I'm so frustrated that I'm so tired all the time, right? I'm so angry that I'm so sad, right? That's not helpful. That's not helpful to blame yourself for how you're feeling. Emotions are data and we should just treat them as data and be willing to look at them without making ourselves wrong for feeling how we're feeling. I think one of the sort of reader favorite tools, this is some of the feedback that I'm hearing, one of the reader favorite tools is something called a portfolio. And this is a tool that I learned from an Adam Grant podcast. And the idea is that when you fail, one of your selves has been rejected, right? So the part of you that was an entrepreneur that wrote a proposal and the proposal failed, you know, your entrepreneurial self today got rejected. Not all of you got rejected. So if I think about writing a proposal that failed, I'm willing to say, you know, You know, entrepreneur Deb had a failure today, but mom Deb is still cooking. Dog mom Deb is crushing it. Wife Deb is doing a great job. Aunt Deb is showing up well. Niece Deb is doing, you know, a fantastic job. Coach Deb is still showing up for her clients, right? I have all of these selves that we have to recognize when one of ourselves gets rejected, we get to double down on the selves that haven't been rejected. I love that, actually. I love that. I rely on mom, Amy, a lot. My Amy mom. I can imagine. I'm like, okay, I can crush it at this. And it might not be with every single kid all the time, but I'm like, oh, I'm crushing it with that one right now. Good job. That's right. That's right. And so to remember that you've got to recognize and reward and cheerlead the parts of you that are not haven't failed and aren't rejected because they will be tomorrow, but for today you can draw strength from them. Yes, I love that. That's brilliant. And in a lot of ways, you're describing this loop in a lot of ways almost like the shame spiral sounds almost like you're getting addicted to this storytelling in your mind and it's going into very like it seems yeah it seems like it's going into more of the reptilian, like older part of the brain, you know, the fight, flight, or freeze part of the brain and getting out of the neocortex. That's what it sounds like to me. Yeah. I mean, we are wired to avoid losses, right? We are wired to avoid pain rather than go towards wins or go towards pleasure. And a failure is a loss, right? It is a loss of something you hoped for, planned or wanted. And so we get really, really activated when we register a loss. And you're absolutely right that, you know, our amygdala hijacks us and our prefrontal cortex, the part of us that's responsible for decision making, problem solving, you know, clear communication, collaborating with others is not functioning for as long as our amygdala is saying, you know, danger, danger, danger. And so we have to, you know, the idea of naming it to tame it, name it to tame it, say, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling disappointed. All of a sudden, that can start to get you back into your prefrontal cortex. just by the process of naming it. Wow, that's so cool. You're right, because you're giving it to the language center, back to the language center of the brain, which is in the prefrontal cortex. Yeah. So you're pulling it out of that old part, you know, that ancient... unspeaking part of the brain and bringing it up to the part of your brain that talks now. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's also really important to keep in mind that like our brain doesn't really register the difference between the pain of social rejection, which is what a failure can often feel like, and the pain of twisting your ankle, right? The pain center of the brain lights up regardless of which kind of pain it is. And so that's why we want to grieve is to give ourselves credit for having experienced real pain. I was watching a social media clip at one point, and it was about emotion and how when something happens, you're actually experiencing the emotion of it happening. And it's only about 30 seconds of that real emotion of that thing happening to you. And then whatever you experience after that is just a remembrance of that feeling. That tracks. Yeah, that tracks, right? The more you're kind of ruminating on this emotion, thing that happened and now you're turning into a story and it's really turning into this story and it's getting, you know, it's now becoming this thing that it really wasn't. Yeah, that's right. And we do a lot of work with clients around separating the fact from the story they make up about the fact, right? So the fact may be I didn't get the promotion. One story could be I didn't get the promotion because I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I didn't work hard enough. I didn't play politics well. I'll, you know, dot, dot, dot. Another story could be it wasn't my time. Another story could be there was somebody who is more qualified. Another story could be I prepared, but maybe not as prepared as I could have been. Right. There are so many there are infinite number of stories. But yes, once we are wired to make up a story about I did wrong, I did wrong, I did wrong. It just becomes, you know, it just becomes a mental habit, a mental shortcut. Yeah. And also, you know, Gangaji, she's, I don't know if you've ever heard of her. She was like, she's a white Indian guru lady, but she was around a lot, quite a while ago, but she always talks about how the ego uses story to kind of attach to. So you can see how this, the ego, once the ego attaches to this story, then it really becomes personalized. I can see that. And so you're right. You know, as we, the more we ruminate on something, the more it's becoming part of us. That's rather than like something that just happened out there in the universe around us. Yep. And that's why we that's goes right back into women treating failure as their identity rather than an event. Yes. Right. Failure is not a verdict on who you are. It is an event that happened to you and maybe it happened and you had a hand in it sometimes. And we heard plenty of stories about this. It's something that happened for you that you can't see in the moment. Right. And I'm I am anti toxic positivity. Right. I'm never going to tell someone, look on the bright side, see the silver lining in here. You have no idea how this is going to turn out for you. Blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to say any of those things. And we heard countless stories of women saying this failure happened for me. The universe did for me or my boss did for me or this company did for me or this partner did for me when I was not positive. doing for myself. And it didn't feel that way in the moment. It sure didn't. But eventually it revealed its gifts. Yes. For me, I can say that's absolutely been true. And it was within my partnership that some of the failures and some of the biggest, scariest things that have happened in my life within my relationships have kind of like unlocked parts of me that strength that I didn't even know that was there, abilities within me that I didn't even know were there. So sometimes, you know, you never know what's going to happen when something changes, you know, When a big change happens in your life, then you're going to experience change in some way. Yes, yes. And the catastrophizers think they know, right? I know exactly how this is going to go. It's going to be the worst possible thing and it's going to take me down to the quick and that sort of thing. But that's just a story. That habit, that neural pathway that's been, you know, beautifully carved. Yes. Okay, so let's get into bounce don't shatter. I love this concept so much. What does it actually mean to bounce back? like in a healthy, empowered way, not just to push through or suppress. Yes. Yes. So if I'm being honest, what we really want people to do is bounce forward. Yes. But we love the alliteration of bounce back. So what this means is that you are ready, willing, and able, not all at once, not too quickly, but that you become ready, willing, and able to to go again. And there's this wonderful quote that I will, of course, get wrong by Tina Fey, who says, you know, you can't be that kid standing at the top of the water slide. Eventually, you have to go down the chute. That's what we're talking about, is that you can't just stand there wondering what will happen if you try, try again, try again differently, try again with different timing, with different people, with different learning, with different lessons, you know, with a different approach. But try something and again, so that you can examine the variables, but have taught yourself that you are capable of resilience and recovery. Absolutely. And use your prior failure as data so you can do better. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And in the book, we tell stories of many, many business leaders who had, you know, front of the Wall Street Journal failures and had to use those failures as data to help them create something more fabulous. I love that. And because honestly, how can we know how to do something without failing at all? You never, you don't learn to walk without falling down. Right, right. Failing is the engine of learning. Yes. And I always tell my kids like, don't fail. You're not failing. You didn't, you had to babble before you could talk. You had to crawl and fall down before you could walk. You know, there is no such thing as failure in our house. I really try to keep it like, you know, that's just learning. So what are the- It's just learning. It's just learning, right? Just learning. What are the key behaviors or mindset shifts of women who bounce well? Ah, beautiful. For Women Who Bounce Well, what we really are doing is we're talking about making a shift from a caution culture to a courage culture. One shift is this shift from verdict to information, right? That this failure is a verdict on who I am and shifting from verdict to information of what can I learn from this failure that's going to help me move to the next step, to the next level. A second mindset. shift that we recognize is from crisis to calibration. So the idea that every single failure is a five alarm emergency. No, every single failure is not a five alarm emergency. It could be a problem. It could be a setback. It could be a mistake, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the end of the world for you. And then this third mindset shift that we write about is from shame to strategy. So separating your experience of failing from your identity of who you are as a leader, as a partner, as a parent, as a dot, dot, dot. And so verdict to information, crisis to calibration, shame to strategy. Those are three of the mindset shifts that we talk about in the book. Those are awesome. What a great gift for women this book is. Ah, Deb, good job. Thank you. Thank you. entrepreneurship and failure. A lot of my audience are entrepreneurs are stepping into leadership. What's your advice for women who are building something when failure is basically inevitable? Beautiful. I love how you said that. Let's start with failure is basically inevitable. right? So start with that as the foundation and assume that failure will be a necessary part on the path to success. So it's not about avoiding failure. I mean, it's about avoiding avoidable failures. It's about embracing intelligent failures, the kind that help you iterate and move from good to great and great to exceptional. And so I think that's a really, really important distinction to make. And we have a very quick language exercise in the book, which is a lot of people think about, well, what if I fail? And so we invite people to think about, even if I fail, dot, dot, dot, right? Even if I fail, I can still have a successful business. Even if I fail, I still can have the team that I'm looking for. Even if I fail, dot, dot, dot, because failure is going to happen. In our companies, my husband and I use a term called adjust and conquer, because a lot of times in businesses, It's not even like a failure, but it's like sometimes the system changes and you will have to make a shift in your model to accommodate the changes in the system. For example, when COVID hit, we had to make a shift. And during that time, so we looked at each other and we're like, time for AC. that means adjust and conquer. And we're like, yeah, let's AC. Yeah, I love it. So yeah, we want people to flex their change muscles, you know, to be versatile and adaptable. And again, to recognize that, you know, the failures that you have in business are not about you being a failure. They are events. They are not identities. Yes, I love that. And is there a way to reframe failure so it becomes an asset instead of a threat? How about just that? Failure is my asset. It is not a threat. I think you put it perfectly right. And and for anybody who's saying like, well, I can't believe that. Think about how many times you believe the worst to create that neural pathway. You're going to have to do some what I call glow casting. Right. So imagining a really positive, compelling vision of the future and put that into your brain and let that run its its path through your brain. Do some, you know, I guess another term for it is pronunciations. rather than paranoid, right? So if paranoid is the belief that things are out to get me, paranoid is the belief that things are there to serve me and things are working for me. Yeah. I've really experienced this. I've had five home births, safe, beautiful births. But birth will really teach you about the brain and how powerful your imagination is. So I would spend my entire pregnancy imagining everything going perfectly, seeing it all, you know, really never allowing my imagination to go to the place where, you know, it would allow fear and create the worst case scenario, no catastrophes, no ideas about that. So for me, it's so funny what my actual motherhood life has taught me about business and mindset. Yes, you're absolutely right. And I do think that there are people, myself included, who benefit from mental rehearsal, right? And so mental rehearsal, it can be, what will I do if it goes wrong? And also, what will I do if it doesn't? I think, you know, to know what kind of rehearsal works best for you is really important. I love that. That's brilliant. Beautiful. So I shared this story with you about my mom. She had this massive success, started the world's first mail-order pharmaceutical company, and then she lost everything. And then she had to rebuild again. So in your experience, how important is it for women to actually learn how to fail? That's why I wrote the book. And why Fiona wrote the book, my co-author. It is incredibly important for women to learn how to fail. It is incredibly important for women to learn that every person fails. And one of our key missions on this book is for women to be willing to talk about it. Because if we don't talk about it, then we don't know that other people people and women are failing and we keep it to ourselves and we assume that we are just the worst and that we are messing things up and nobody else is messing things up as awfully as we are messing things up. So please give yourself the gift of authenticity and vulnerability and talk to people who create a safe space for you about your failure because you will find out right away that you are not alone. I love that. And what happens when we've never been allowed to fail? Oh, well, when you're never allowed to fail, then you absolutely don't know how to bounce back I had originally approached my daughter, Sophie, about writing this book with me. We've written two other books before. She was 22 at the time when I approached her about this book. And I said, do you want to write this book with me about women and failure? And she said, I've never failed at anything before, so I'm not really a credible resource. And I said, that terrifies me. I said, if you've never failed, then you don't know how to fail and you don't know how to bounce back. So go out there and take some big, bold risks and go mess a whole bunch of stuff up and then come back and report back and I will be here to hear your stories. And so she's taken a lot of big, bold risks since then, has had a lot of success and a few failures along the way. But if we don't fail, we don't know that we can and we don't know how to bounce back. Oh, it's so true. I know. I really do wish more mothers would encourage their daughters to fail. Go out and do something big and give it a try. And if you fall down, that's just as good as not falling down. Honestly, I've learned more from my failures in business than I have from my successes. Totally. Absolutely. When I think about every big growth point that I've had in my business, it has been because something failed, whether it was a concrete failure, whether it was a circumstances circumstantial failure, a paralysis failure, some kind of failure, that big boom happened because of a bust. Heck yeah. Oh my gosh. Even in the beginning of my show, I really refined my method with my guests and my interviews and my guests because of one guest who I interviewed and I didn't have a great pre-interview with her. And it was just like, ugh. And it was that failure of that episode that really allowed me, you know, we have to be honest about the fact that we don't always do things perfectly, especially when we're learning how to do something new. And so it's like, but we're going to keep refining our processes. We're going to keep refining it. Yes, exactly. That's I mean, that's the whole point of failing. Right. Is to is to learn and get better. Yeah, I love it. I love what you're talking about here. It's right up my alley. Let's talk about leadership and AI in the modern world. Given the pace of change right now with AI technology and everything shifting, how important is our relationship with failure in this next era of leadership? Let me start by saying I'm absolutely not an expert on this topic, but what I will say is the ground is going to be shifting under us really, really quickly. If If you have an unhealthy relationship with failure where you see failure as a, you know, as a verdict on your character, as opposed to something that happens when you are learning to get better, you are going to be in a lot of pain because the world, the world and technology is changing so fast that failure is absolutely inevitable. And so I can't even imagine all the different ways in which I will fail as, you know, AI and leadership, you know, converge. But I know that I know how to fail in a smart way and that I have a track record of bouncing back from my failures and that I have a track record of learning how to compartmentalize a failure in one area from failures in other areas of my work and life. And so I think having a really healthy relationship with failure is going to be important. I couldn't agree more. You know, I see a lot of women right now that are so scared to even try AI. Like you've never even tried it because they're afraid. they're going to not be good at it. Well, you won't be if you never try it. That's right. You can't really mess up AI anyway. It's going to teach you. You're going to learn. You're going to teach it. It's going to teach you. But do you think fear of failure could hold women back from participating in shaping the future? Yes, full stop. Yeah. Yeah, I worry about that too. So your book is really important for the future of female leadership because if we don't address this fear, this underlying fear of failure that we have as women. And we, you know, we're at such a pivotal time in human civilization where women are really going to decide, are we going to close this pay gap between men and women using technology or is it going to widen because of women's, you know, failure to adopt the new technology? Yeah. I wouldn't want to let the fact that we may not be able to fundamentally overhaul a system today or tomorrow. I wouldn't want that to let that get in the way of stopping trying. You know, I would want people to try and it can't just be women alone. It has to be women and allies. Absolutely. Yeah. I see new associations popping up. I just joined the board of the National Association of Women in AI, which is going to be teaching women AI, but also working in AI policy as well. Amazing. Thank you for doing that. Absolutely. It needs to be done. You know, it's the world of we're living in now. So we've got to jump right in as women and get involved. Yes, absolutely. And you are definitely putting your money where your mouth is. Definitely. So let's talk about some practical tools and make this really tangible. What are two or three things a woman can start doing today to change her relationship with failure? You can identify when you're engaged in catastrophic thinking. where your brain starts calculating unlikely disasters as likely disasters and shift that to courageous thinking and asking what information does this give me and treating the situation as data as opposed to a verdict. Number two is to stop setting impossible standards for yourself where anything less than perfection equals failure, where you get into compare and despair territory. You want to shift into achievable standards, advocating for yourself and your boundaries and your priorities. priorities and recognizing that a commitment to perfection means that you will always be procrastinating. It will never be good enough. You will never be good enough. You'll never know when to start and you'll never be able to stop. And then the third one is recognizing that more research, more planning, more preparing instead of acting doesn't prevent failure. The more you fear failure, the more you delay what could actually prevent it, which is action. And so to take small, deliberate moves forward and aim for progress rather than perfection. Yes. Gosh, those are beautiful words. Yeah. You're not going to be able to do everything in one day, but you might be able to take one little bite out of that whale today. Take one little bite. One little bite. And consider it a win. Yes. Yes. I love it. So we're going to go rapid fire. What's one failure that shaped you the most? When my business failed in 2008 and 2009 because of the housing crisis, the mortgage crisis, and the Madoff crisis, that absolutely shaped me. I ended up taking a job in China, which 100% changed the trajectory of my life and business. Whoa. One belief about failure that you had to unlearn? That other people are judging me for it. One sentence every woman should remember in the middle of a setback. Ooh, I love that. This says nothing about who I am. I love that. You are amazing, Deb. Thank you so much for being on my show today. Thank you so much. Yes, this conversation felt so important because I think so many women are walking around carrying the weight of the things that they were never fully theirs to hold. Amen. When we start to understand that, when we start to separate who we are from what happened, everything changes. Deb, your work is giving women a new language and honesty and a new level of freedom around failure. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for being here. If you love this episode, girls, I highly recommend checking out Deborah's new book, Aim High and Bounce Back, especially if you've ever found yourself or a friend stuck in that loop of overthinking or self-blame. Also, if you're a mom, this sounds like a mother of a daughter. This sounds like the book is a must read for us. I know I'll be getting myself a copy. And as always, if this conversation resonated with you, please share it with another woman who needs to hear it because this is how we shaped the narrative. Thank you so much. And I will see you girls next week.