How do we recover from experiences of failure? On this show I talk with Lisa Becksford, Head of Learning Design Initiatives at Virginia Tech’s Newman Library, A.M. Alpin, Director of Library Lab & Special Projects at New York University Libraries, and Isabel Soto-Luna, Business Librarian at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Each shares personal reflections on failure and insights for recovery. While failure is something none of us wish for, it holds potential growth. Being able to talk about this and know we are not alone can help all of us successfully move past failure.
Transcript
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Adriane Herrick Juarez:
This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. You’re listening to Library Leadership Podcast where we talk about libraries and leadership, and speak with guests who share their ideas, innovations, and strategic insights in the profession.
How do we recover from experiences of failure? On this show I talk with Lisa Becksford, Head of Learning Design Initiatives at Virginia Tech’s Newman Library, and A.M. Alpin, Director of Library Lab & Special Projects at New York University Libraries, and Isabel Soto-Luna, Business Librarian at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Each shares personal reflections on failure and insights for recovery. While failure is something none of us wish for, it holds potential for growth. Being able to talk about this and know we are not alone can help all of us successfully move past failure. Enjoy the show!
Lisa, A.M., and Isabel, welcome to the show. Thank you for talking with me today about recovering after failure. The wisdom we can gain after recovering from failure has the potential to help us grow and become better. Yet, it’s something none of us ever wishes for. As we begin, I want to say that you have my appreciation for being willing to share your stories of failure and how you recovered, as well as sharing your insights about failure. I think having our listeners hear this will be of great use as none of us lives in a foolproof world, and we can all gain perspective by hearing and learning from other people’s experiences.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: Lisa, let’s start with you. Will you please share your story of failure and how you recovered? 02:20
Lisa Becksford:
Very early in my career as librarian, I was invited to work with a team at my library to open a collaborative instructional design space. Faculty and librarians could work together to create online learning content, and we worked on it for over two years. But then, just as we were heading for its launch, the product–the project was paused and then stopped.
The project really was just a victim of campus politics, staffing changes and questions about the library’s role in online learning. As a new librarian, I had really been excited to be working on something like this, so it was also really difficult to have it stopped so abruptly. It was difficult to see something that I’d worked on for so long not come to fruition. A lot of my professional goals that I was going to be evaluated on in my annual review were tied up into this project.
So it took me a while to come to terms with the project’s end. One of the ways I recovered was just by not taking it personally, recognizing that the project’s failure was really out of my control, and putting the project’s failure into context was helpful. It was a big part of my job, but it wasn’t the only part of my job. I also looked for the ways in which it wasn’t a failure. The space was actually repurposed into a really successful, student-focused space, and I also still get to collaborate on instructional design projects at a pace that is probably actually better for my overall workload.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #2: So what were your takeaways and what advice would you give others facing similar circumstances. 03:43
Lisa Becksford:
From a distance—from this point, almost six years, this failure actually no longer seems like a big deal, but I would definitely advise others facing similar circumstances not to minimize the failure, even though in the future you may not view it in the same way. This particular failure was really stressful and really disappointing, and it was really important for me to feel those feelings so that I could eventually move past them.
Putting it in context is also really important. This particular failure does not define me or my professional worth, and all workplaces change frequently, but academic libraries seem to change especially quickly depending on the campus climate, budgets, campus politics. I’ve also learned to hold new initiatives with an open hand and be careful about thinking that any one thing is going to be the thing that determines my success as a professional.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #3: Thank you, Lisa. A.M., let’s turn to you. What can you share with us about failure and recovery? 04:35
A.M. Alpin:
Well, first of all, every person in the whole wide world is going to experience failure. In fact, failure is our norm. Success is really the anomaly. That is one of the, I guess, great truths that no one wants you to know. Or certainly, maybe you feel like your boss doesn’t acknowledge about the world, that you’re going to fail more often than you’re going to succeed, especially if you’re learning. That’s certainly been true for me both in my career as a librarian, and in my creative work as a filmmaker.
For example, behind a New York Times Critics Pick film I produced and distributed on Netflix, there was a full year of rejection by twenty-two film festivals. [laughter] So you know, when people see that New York Times review or they see it out on Netflix, they’re not seeing that whole behind-the-scenes story of what it took to get there. I think that is characteristic of most people’s experience in the real world—is that behind every success, or happy Instagram moment, there’s a whole behind-the-scenes of failure and struggle and strife that we’re not seeing.
Based on this experience of mine—and by the way, I’ve seen failure not be properly acknowledged or maybe even celebrated, if we can go that far in our profession. I’ve been on a mission for the last ten years to normalize failure. I’ve done that through a session I used to host at the Library Collective’s Annual Conference called Failure Confessions, through a podcast called Failure Confessions that I executive produced—and that’s created by Samuel Hanson, one of the volunteers who worked with me on that session, and through an experience I organized at NYU Libraries a couple of summers ago called Failure Camp, where we taught people how to fail.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #4: I feel like we should all take classes on how to fail. It’s a great concept. So A.M., given what you’ve shared with us already, what learning and insights would you offer based on what you know? 06:31
A.M. Alpin:
There is so much to learn and unpack around failure and so many incredible resources. Many of them I have compiled in an online guide which anyone’s welcome to check out for free at bit.ly/failreads. Those are some of the resources that I used in creating Failure Camp and that are out there, including the School of Life, which publishes some great books on hard topics, including failure.
Also, I mean, failure is not something that’s just being talked about in our modern startup technology era. It’s something that Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, was writing about when he penned, The wound is the place light enters you. So really, this idea that failure is something that brings us insight, that brings us healing, that helps us to grow as people, is ancient and timeless. Know that we as humans have been experiencing failure since time immemorial. You’re not alone.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #5: Thank you, A.M. It always feels good to know we’re not alone in failure, and we certainly are not in any way. Isabel, let’s go to you and your experience. What can you share about failure and recovery? 07:48
Isabel Soto-Luna:
Well, there’s lots to failure, right? We all have a lot of failures, I think, behind us. But I’m going to talk today about something that I think as a newer librarian, and probably the newer one here, is something that a lot of us new librarians go through and that’s the job search process, what that looks like for us, and how at times that really can bring us down so much.
Going through, a couple of years ago now—trying to find that first permanent position, that first tenure track position as an academic librarian, it was really difficult. I kept getting excited because I had like five or six final interviews. I kept getting those callbacks for the final interviews and did the research, did the work, got my presentations ready, I hit all my marks, my presentations were great. I researched all the possible questions that could be asked, had all the perfect anecdotes and examples for showcasing my work—just went over and over and over again. It always seemed that I’m coming in second.
I would ask. After a couple of weeks, Okay, I haven’t heard anything. So I’d send an email, Hey, thank you so much for the interview. Just wondering—the time you gave me has passed, just kind of wondering where we’re at. It was always like, We made an offer. We’re just waiting to hear back. If they don’t take it then the job’s yours.
It’s like, dang it, [laughter] like every single time. Over and over again. It was like, Okay, what could I possibly be doing better? I would be reviewing everything and going, I got to get everything just right.
Then there was the worst interview I had. There were a couple of things that went wrong. To me, they felt huge. This was during zoom time, so all of my interviews were on Zoom, and me thinking, Well, I don’t have to travel. I can schedule these fairly close to each other. In the process of having two final interviews really close together, I messed up my second interview and wound up switching around some of the database links on my presentation. So, my database links were wrong. In that time I sort of played it off and went, Yeah, you know, see? Students—even librarians make mistakes. You know, we’re not perfect. This is why you come to us, because we’re here to help you. Then in the question and answer they were asking me questions of students and I went to pull up the database list, which in retrospect I should have had up already, but I pulled it up for the wrong university. It was the same system. It was the exact same system, university system, but it was the wrong university.
In my head I was like, I’m done. The worst part about this one was I was like, This is the job I want. This is the one that’s really going to hurt if I don’t get it—this is it. Inside my head. I was like, Okay, I’m dead.
But something clicked. Something just—I went, You know what? I’ve got nothing to lose now. It’s done. I messed up. It’s done. I’ve got nothing to lose anymore. There’s no more. And, I just kept going. Just kept going. Just kept working at it—kept going, and I clicked with everyone. There was just something that relaxed me through the interview. And lo and behold, that’s the one that I got the job for. That’s where I’m at right now. I honestly believe that came down to instead of letting it ruin the rest of the interview—just letting myself be human, letting myself be human. I wasn’t perfect. I acknowledged it and said, You know what? I apologize for that mistake. I’m sorry. We make mistakes.
I think that was part of it. I think the first reason, honestly, that I got this job is because I was very willing, and ready to move for the job. They had been burned before by people taking the job and then saying, You know what? I don’t want to live here, I’m going to move. We were very willing to move. We were ready to do that. We were ready to go try something different, so I think that helped. But the biggest part was exactly the fact that in that interview, even though I did make mistakes, my mistakes weren’t so big that I wasn’t able to recover from them.
In that recovery it just made me seem like a much more real person. And to me, it was like, Okay, this is great. I made a mistake, but I didn’t let it ruin anything. I didn’t just chalk it up to, Well, I’m done now. I’m just going to not give it my best anyway, because I think that’s the instinct that we have a lot of times—I made one mistake and now it’s over. When the reality is that’s it’s not. It’s all about how you pick up on those mistakes and how you move on from them.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #6: Isabel, do you have any takeaways and insights from this for our listeners? 12:47
Isabel Soto-Luna:
Yeah, the biggest is you don’t have to be perfect. Here’s the thing, you know, as both Lisa and A.M. have said, we live in a world where everybody shows off the best side, right? Social media articles, what you post, your CV, it’s all about showing your best side. But everybody forgets what it took to get there. What did it take to get that best side? What did it take to curate all of those things? You don’t see all of the noes that everybody else around you is getting. Before you get that one, yes.
If you really want to reframe it—you’ve got to reframe failure. If you look at what failure is, go to Google, you look it up. The answer that I got was failure is a lack of success. Okay, well, now you’ve got to figure out what is success, right? Before you can fail, you’ve got to know what it is that you’re trying to accomplish first. You look up success, and the answer to that is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose—is what I’ve found. Well, before you can even really say that you failed, what was your aim? What was your purpose? What was that accomplishment you were trying to get to? What is it going to take to get there? Are you going to have failures along the way? What does it mean to even fail in that case?
If we look at it from the point of view of—did something happen, or did it not? …just that simple. You’re always going to be seeing everything as failing. But really what you’re doing is you’re gaining the experience necessary in order to reach that accomplishment, in order to reach that purpose. You know, I don’t think of any of those interviews as failures anymore. They were experiences. I honestly think that all of those interviews helped me get to that last interview where I made a mistake. But I had already had so many interviews that I was able to just continue on and not let it cripple me. So, were those really failures or were they more experiences that then helped me to succeed and land the job that I actually wanted? We have to reframe that. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to learn from the mistakes that you make and from the things that don’t work out.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #7: Thank you, Isabel. I was recently talking to a colleague about this reframing of what failure is. He told me that for him he was very socialized in being perfect in life, being at school and getting good grades, high parental expectations, and some of the institutional expectations that he’s worked under. So for him, failure felt like a threat because he’d gotten a lot of messaging about it throughout his life. What advice would you give those who find themselves working to overcome some of those societal expectations? Isabel? 15:05
Isabel Soto-Luna:
Honestly, I would start with introspection. There are a lot of societal expectations and they come from a lot of different places. I had a lot of that myself. You’re supposed to get things right. You’re smart. Why aren’t you understanding this? Why aren’t you getting that? Take a good look at yourself and realize that the person whose opinion really, truly matters is your own. Once you start recognizing that and you start seeing yourself as a full person who is going to make mistakes it starts reframing in your head.
The idea of perfection is never going to be reached by anybody. And, honestly, if you are to that point where you need perfection so much that it makes you constantly and continuously put yourself down all the time, that’s something you’re going to need help with. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Don’t be afraid to reach out—not just to others, but to therapists, if you need to, and ask for the help that you need. Because if you’ve got good colleagues and you’ve got good people around you, they’re going to be able to help you realize that you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be you.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #8: A.M.? 16:52
A.M. Alpin:
Your story is one of the reasons why I think it’s important for us to celebrate failure and talk about it more often. If our culture is one where failure is denied and it’s always invisible, it’s always in that behind the scenes, then it perpetuates that comparison culture where success is the only projection that you can make. It also creates that very toxic perfectionism that you described, where you feel like as an individual, there’s not space for failure, that failure comes maybe even from some kind of moral failing, right, or skill failing—that there’s no value to that experience in and of itself?
So, I think one of the steps that we all have to take is to talk about failure more openly, especially those of us who are privileged enough to be in leadership positions and who can create expectations for our fellow employees, colleagues, co-workers—especially those who might report up through a hierarchical chain to us. So, let’s talk about it and let’s talk about it in a positive light—let’s see what failure can bring us into our organizations.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #9: Lisa? 18:10
Lisa Becksford:
I would—agreeing with what A.M., and Isabel have said, but also just watch the way you’re talking to yourself about your failure or potential for failure. You know, that idea, would you say that to a friend and you’re saying those things to yourself? That’s never going to help you. You just want to be really aware of the language you’re using to speak to yourself about your failure, because that’s not going to help you get over your failure. That’s not going to help you learn to reframe your failure, if you’re just telling yourself that it’s the worst thing that ever happened to you. That takes a lot of consciousness, because a lot of times we talk to ourselves in ways, again, that we wouldn’t talk to other people that we care about. So just being cautious, I think, of the monologue you’re running through your mind when these kinds of things happen can help you to then get out of that monologue and see it from a different perspective.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #10: Thank you. Another question I’d like to reflect on is circling back to something you said A.M. that it would be helpful if we understood that failure is the norm. When you say that, what comes to mind how we as librarians, as leaders and as members of our organizations can make this more possible for those we work with and serve? 18:56
A.M. Alpin:
Well, here’s one wild idea [laughter] off the top of my head. What about in our annual performance evaluation, if we ask about failure and say, Hey, instead of giving me just your top five accomplishments and the stats that make us look good, tell me about the five top things that went wrong this year. What did you learn, or did you learn anything from them? Was it just a failure? You know, Is there an iteration? Is there some kind of design thinking approach that can be applied here?
Sometimes is it just a catastrophic failure that we’re going to [laughter] maybe laugh about later on? Maybe the takeaway isn’t yet apparent. That could be okay, too. But, it could be as simple as asking that question in a performance evaluation. If that’s too scary to put it on the record, then how about just informally in your one-on-ones in your check-ins? Hey, tell me a story about something that went wrong.
What some organizations—I believe Creative Mornings used to do this at their employee meetings. They would call it cherry in a pit. So, everybody would talk about their bowl of cherries, the things that were going well in their life, including perhaps their work-life, but maybe beyond. And then, what are the pits? What are the things not going so well or that are a bit unpleasant to sink your teeth into? So again, it doesn’t take [laughter] money. It doesn’t take any kind of crazy bureaucratic process to make this a little bit more normal and a little bit more accepted. It can be as simple as asking a question.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #11: Isabel? 20:57
Isabel Soto-Luna:
We just need to talk about this more. Again, we live in a world where for those of us who are going to tenure track, we have to turn in every single year this perfect list of everything we did—this absolute perfect list of, you know, everything we’ve done throughout the year, what we’ve accomplished, what we presented, where we taught, what we got published.
Every year there’s that anxiety, I think, for all of us—where we’re going, Did I do enough? Was it enough? Am I going to get there? I think having that time with your colleagues, or with your friends, or with anybody else where you can sit down and you can be like, You know what? Here’s everything I did, and here’s everything I didn’t accomplish.
Being able to be open and honest about those things really helps you reframe all of that. Because yeah, you have all of the things you didn’t accomplish, but then you have all of the things that you did, and then you start to learn that, Hey, here’s why I wasn’t able to do, because maybe I took on too much this year, or maybe this just wasn’t the right time for this idea. You start not looking at it as a failure, but you start looking at it as, Okay, that was an experience. Now I know what I can do better. It no longer becomes something weighing on you. It turns it into something much more positive. I think that’s really the big thing for everyone, is we need to start figuring out how to turn all of these like negatives that just weigh you down into positives that actually help you improve and grow.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #12: Agreed. And it strikes me as we talk about this, that it takes a certain degree of trust and vulnerability to engage in this. What would you say to those who may not feel like they are in a situation where they can be that open with those around them regarding failure? 22:35
Isabel Soto-Luna:
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of people who are not in a situation where they can be open with their colleagues. I would say find your people. They may not be in the same department. They may not even be in your same profession. But, even if it’s family, even if it’s friends, even if it’s outside of work, find your people. If you are able to, drop the ones who are not your people, because I think that’s the part that we forget—is that not everybody is fortunate enough to live in a job where they can really trust their colleagues, or where they can form friendships at work. And that’s okay. That is not a failure on your part. That is a product of your work environment. But finding your people is going to ease a lot of that pressure. Find the people that you can be open and honest and vulnerable with, and that is not the easiest thing in the world. It’s actually one of the hardest things you’re going to find, being able to be vulnerable with people. But when you find the people that you can do that with, you find that you start developing real relationships, and you find that you start seeing even yourself in a whole new, different light.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #13: Thank you, Isabel. Lisa? 24:01
Lisa Becksford:
Going off of what Isabel said—I would say be willing to go first. Sometimes I think other people just need that encouragement to share these things that have gone wrong. Sometimes you have to test and see if it’s an okay place to do that. But then also just be willing to be the one who goes first.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #14: That can help break the ice and open the door for other people to share and be open themselves, and it sets a tone within the group. As we talk about this, I appreciate all of your trust and vulnerability for being on this show to talk about this topic. Is there anything else you would like to share? 24:16
Isabel Soto-Luna:
I would just say to all of your listeners, you know what, everyone—go out there, kill it, do your best job. Realize that you’re not failing. You’re just experiencing something new. It may not always feel good at the beginning, but it does get better. It will get better. You’ll find your place.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #15: It’s true. Thank you, Isabel. Do any of you have any favorite management or leadership books or resources, and why? Lisa? 24:52
Lisa Becksford:
I would say anything that helps you know yourself better, whether that’s Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, all those different kinds of things. I think to be able to lead others and to work effectively with others, knowing yourself is a really good first step for that. I know I’ve really benefited from both MBTI and StrengthsFinder. As I’ve grown as a person, I’ve been able to work better with other people around me.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #16: Thank you, Lisa. Isabel? 25:21
Isabel Soto-Luna:
A specific book, and it’s a bit of a different kind of book—it’s called Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, written by Barbara Kellerman. The reason I like this book is because it goes through seven different types of basically bad leadership with an actual example in each one. In a lot of these cases, it’s people who really wanted to do well and really meant well, but they made every possible bad decision they could. And again, it wasn’t always so obvious from the beginning, but it really highlights how even when you’ve got the best of intentions, you need your people. You’ve got to have the people around you. You need to listen to them, because things can go bad really quickly when you look at leadership, not as something you’re doing for others, but as something you’re just doing for yourself.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #17: Thank you. Lisa, A.M., and Isabel—in closing, what do libraries mean to you personally? 26:17
Lisa Becksford:
So for me, libraries mean possibilities. Walking through the door of a library invites possibilities for learning, being creative, maybe even discovering something that answers a question that you didn’t even know you had.
A.M. Alpin:
To me, libraries mean creativity and also paradox. We do impossible things every day from trying to preserve forever things that will inevitably decay. There’s something beautiful in acknowledging the impossibility of our task and yet still trying to do it.
Isabel Soto-Luna:
For me—access, access to information, access to resources, access to things that a lot of people might not normally have access to, whether that’s a referral to a service that you really need, whether that’s the ability to use a computer so that you can find a job. It’s access to everything—it’s the last place you can really, truly just exist and not have the expectation of, I have to pay for something. I have to pay to use this. I have to pay to use that. I have to… You can just simply exist in a library. I think people really downplay the importance of having those spaces where you can just simply exist and be there and have access.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #18: Lisa, A.M., Isabel, those are wonderful reflections. Thank you all for thinking through not only what libraries mean to you personally, but what failure means to each of us personally. This is a topic that we do need to talk about more openly and accept that failure is a part of life. It’s a learning experience and we can all grow and learn from each other in this space. Having this discussion today is hopefully going to reflect that we are not in this alone and that there are ways to learn, grow and successfully move past failure. Thank you all so much for being here to share about this important topic. 27:41
A.M. Alpin:
It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
Isabel Soto-Luna:
Yeah, this has been great. It’s a wonderful conversation that definitely needs to be had more, but thank you for thinking of me and having me on the podcast today.
Lisa Becksford:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It’s not fun to talk about failure, but it kind of has been.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
I’m glad it’s been fun for me to have you all here, and I know our listeners will benefit from the conversation.
You’ve been listening to Library Leadership podcast. This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. For more episodes, tune in to Library Leadership Podcast.com, where you can now subscribe to get episodes delivered right into your email inbox. Our producer is Nathan Sinclair Vineyard. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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