Why Failure Needs To Be An Option For All Of Us - Arianne Donoghue - HeroConf London 2019
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One of the (many) issues facing us in digital right now is a lack of diversity, including gender where recent stats estimate that only 26% of people working in our industry are women. Something that might be holding women back is a fear of failure and taking risks. In this session, Arianne will talk about how we should not be scared of failure, and why we should embrace it, using her own history of epic fails as a backdrop. She’ll also give actionable tips and advice to women who are early in their careers – about things they can do to gain confidence, build their networks and make their voices heard. While aimed at women, this talk is really for anyone who has struggled with confidence and has a fear of failure, regardless of their gender!
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Why Failure Needs To Be An Option For All Of Us - Arianne Donoghue - HeroConf London 2019
- 1. Why Failure Needs To Be An Option For All Of Us Arianne Donoghue | @ArianneDonoghue
- 2. Public Fear of failure affects us all @ariannedonoghue
- 3. Public 71% of us have turned down opportunities due to a lack of confidence https://roar.training/71-of-us-have-turned-down-opportunities-because-of-confidence/ @ariannedonoghue
- 4. Public We compare our worst moments to other people’s best @ariannedonoghue
- 5. Public Life is like an iceberg @ariannedonoghue
- 6. Public Being in the minority can magnify this @ariannedonoghue
- 9. Public Society makes us this way @ariannedonoghue
- 10. Public One of my fave TED talks @ariannedonoghue
- 11. Public The innate ability that should give girls confidence, doesn’t @ariannedonoghue
- 12. Public “What’s wrong with me?” @ariannedonoghue
- 13. Public Less talented …how girls see themselves compared to boys by age 6 @ariannedonoghue
- 14. Public 60% vs 100% …the percentage of criteria men need to meet to apply for a job, vs women @ariannedonoghue
- 15. Public We are afraid to fail @ariannedonoghue
- 16. Public There are now only 5 female CEOs in the FTSE 100 @ariannedonoghue
- 17. Public “I don’t believe a female is ever hired as C.E.O., especially from the outside, for the reasons that she was the absolute number- one pick.” — Carol Bartz, former Yahoo C.E.O. (Carol Bartz/Wikimedia Commons) http://freakonomics.com/podcast/glass-cliff/ @ariannedonoghue
- 18. Public “We found that white women and people of color are significantly more likely than white men to be promoted C.E.O. to weakly performing firms.” @ariannedonoghue
- 19. Public Female-founded companies represent only 2.3% of the total capital invested by US venture capital firms in 2018 https://techstartups.com/2019/02/28/report-female-founded-companies-represent-2-3-total-capital-invested-us- venture-capital-financing-2018/ @ariannedonoghue
- 20. Public Despite data showing women-led companies do better @ariannedonoghue
- 21. Public This needs to change @ariannedonoghue
- 22. Public The confidence to fail @ariannedonoghue
- 25. Public I was a failure from birth @ariannedonoghue
- 26. Public Unplanned in more ways than one @ariannedonoghue
- 27. Public My hair took a while to come in… @ariannedonoghue
- 29. Public I had no idea what to do @ariannedonoghue
- 31. Public Ran away to marry a bloke I met on the Internet @ariannedonoghue
- 33. Public I wound up here… @ariannedonoghue
- 36. Public I got to jump out of a plane @ariannedonoghue
- 38. Public All work and no play @ariannedonoghue
- 39. Public Off to the big smoke @ariannedonoghue
- 40. Public Damned lack of education @ariannedonoghue
- 43. Public Not even six degrees @ariannedonoghue
- 44. Public You either love me or hate me @ariannedonoghue
- 46. Public Be bold … it’s better to take risks than wonder, “what if” @ariannedonoghue
- 52. Public Bring your whole self to work @ariannedonoghue
- 55. Public Great minds DON’T all think alike @ariannedonoghue
- 57. Public “WOAH what is my life now?” @ariannedonoghue
- 58. Public Let’s talk about the 90% @ariannedonoghue
- 61. Public Thomas Edison “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 1,000 ways that won’t work” @ariannedonoghue
- 62. Public Mark Zuckerberg “move fast and break things” @ariannedonoghue
- 65. Public Take a chance on new opportunities @ariannedonoghue
- 67. Public “Never ascribe to malice what can be attributed to ignorance” @ariannedonoghue
- 68. Public You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it @ariannedonoghue
- 69. @ariannedonoghue
- 73. Public 3. Don’t be scared @ariannedonoghue
- 80. We have to lift each other up @ariannedonoghue
- 84. Public Do the scary thing …even if you don’t succeed the first time, you’ll learn so much @ariannedonoghue
- 85. Public You don’t have to be the best at something for it to be worth doing @ariannedonoghue
- 87. Thank you! Go forth and fail! ● Be bold ● Remember your failures are just lessons ● We are more beautiful for the damage we survive ● You don’t have to be the best at something for it to be worth doing ● Empower others and pass these lessons on @ariannedonoghue
Editor's Notes
- Regardless of gender.
- In this age of social media, we find ourselves easily comparing our worst moments to people's best moments.
- Life is like an iceberg. We only show off the 10% to people… We generally don’t share the 90% below the surface.
- But these things can be magnified when you're in the minority
- This is something that Mindy Kaling talks about - being the only woman/person of colour and knowing that you're responsible for the "profile" of that group of people. If you fail, then it's evidence that group can't do the job
- Then you end up here
- Crazy right? Yet society makes us this way
- Favourite TED talk from Reshma Saujani, who's written a brilliant follow-up book called "Brave Not Perfect" We encourage boys and girls differently
- 1980s study - the cleverer the girl, the higher their ability, the faster they lose confidence. Boys will say there’s something wrong with this. Girls will say, there’s something wrong with me.
- By age six, girls see themselves as less "innately talented" as boys - that's heartbreaking. If you ask them to draw a doctor, scientist, astronaut - chances are they'll draw a man
- Impacts how we apply for jobs - men - 60%, women 100%. To help this we need to consider how we write our job specs, but it’s a bigger problem than that.
- We've created a culture where we in general, but especially women or people who identify as a non-mainstream group, are afraid of failure.
- Last time I gave this talk, there were 7. Now there are only 5. There’s more men called Steve, than women full stop. There’s some amazing stories and reading to do around this topic.
- Freakonomics did a series about CEOs, and one of their episodes was about the “glass cliff”. Carol Bartz describes her experiences at different companies and makes this observation.
- This is backed up by the data – from the same episode, you can see this uncovered from the research done.
- The same is true at the very start of the business journey. We’re half the population, yet only 2.3% of money goes to female-founded companies. When women do get money, they’re given less. And usually with more strings attached.
- Despite the data. There are so many studies showing how much better companies perform even when they only have 30% of their boards being female.
- It needs to change. To make it change, we have to approach it from two angles. We need allies and we need to overcome our own fear of failure.
- I have failed a LOT in my life, despite my perfectionist tendencies. I'm going to tell you all some of my story, in the hope that you'll go away with the confidence to fail. Not to glamourise failure, but to take away the fear of it
- So strap in, we’ve got a bit of a rollercoaster ahead! And pandas!
- Cute, but a failure.
- Unplanned pregnancy, third of four kids. Arrived a month early, should have been a boy.
- But to be fair I passed for a boy for a while.
- Early life was hard. I bullied at home and at school… was an odd kid with no friends. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up.
- So I did what anyone would do – dropped out of school at 17 and ran away to marry a man I met on the Internet. Back in the time when that was not the done thing.
- Found myself in the valleys of Wales, with no idea still of what I wanted to do. Not a lot of work, so I signed up for a childcare course, before realising I’m the least maternal person in the world and I don’t want to have any of my own kids, never mind look after other people’s.
- Eventually, back to Peterborough and my first corporate job working for these guys, in Procurement. I learned a lot of things in my time here.
- I got to do things like jump out of a plane, and learned what happens when you reply all on an email, when you meant to hit forward…
- But more importantly I learned about EXCEL. And somehow wound up in the fledgling PPC team because I was good with spreadsheets and numbers. This was my first time of understanding the value of networking when it comes to finding work.
- Decided to go off and work in London. Started to do ok, and not long after, Google came knocking.
- But in those days you still needed a degree, and so they changed their mind. Turns out dropping out of school wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had.
- A 4 hour plus daily commute was killing me, so we looked for ways to make it better. Having made many sound impulse decisions, we decided to make another a move to Leeds in pursuit of a better worklife balance.
- I don’t know what Notts is like, but in the digital scene in the North, everyone knows each other. There are no secrets. At best, it’s 2 degrees of separation. So it means that word about you spreads. For better or worse, you get a reputation.
- And mine is like this. I’ve had some good jobs, and some terrible jobs – some that went so badly, I got asked to leave, which is pretty soul destroying. Particularly when it happens more than once. Leaves you feeling like this.
- And so around this time I began to doubt the personal philosophy I had for myself. About being bold, taking those risks. I’d taken some risks that turned out badly, and I didn’t feel like I could trust my intuition anymore. My brain was letting me down.
- To add to this, around the same time, I also came to the realisation that I am high-functioning autistic. While on the one hand it explained a lot about my childhood, lack of friends, weird social issues etc, it made me feel like..
- My brain was a bunch of faulty wiring. Having never been able to rely on family, I’d always relied on my brain and my smarts to sort me out. But it felt like I’d been betrayed by the only thing I’d ever been able to rely on.
- My fave panda so he gets to come back.
- So what have I done since then, which was probably about 7 years ago now.
- I've had to re-evaluate my life and how I interact with the world. Every single aspect has had to be reconsidered.
- Despite feeling like the biggest failure I ever had, I wanted to do better at owning my differences. Bringing my whole self to work, as it's too exhausting not to, to pretend. Weirdly since doing this, I’ve been more successful than ever.
- So much research shows the value of diverse teams - if we were truly ourselves, owning our differences and the perspectives that make us unique, think how diverse our teams could be If you're somewhere where you don't feel like you can be yourself, find somewhere you can be and move on. Be clear about who you are and what you want in your roles. In the years since I've started doing that, I've achieved more than I ever thought I could and had all my success.
- Own your difference. Be yourself. Don't feel like you have to be like someone else to succeed - whether that's acting like a man, copying behaviour that makes you uncomfortable - whoever it might be. Be yourself - there's more than one ladder - more than one path to success. Blaze your own trail, or find people you look up to and emulate them if that's what YOU feel comfortable with
- Put yourself out there, tell your stories. We need the diverse perspectives - it's important for the future of tech and the future of society. Great minds DON'T all think alike.
- The rollercoaster hasn't ended there - this last few years have been challenging dealing with my own physical and mental health issues and 2019 in particular has been really tough. The most important person to me in the whole world, my husband, tried to take his own life earlier this year - and there's nothing to make you feel like more of a failure as a wife and a friend than that - even though it wasn't my fault. I tell you this, not as a sob story, because it's not. It's because none of us are ever the finished article. Life is an ever evolving journey and I want you to know that even if someone looks like they've got it together, chances are they may feel a fraud on the inside - whether that's rational or not, whether that's fair or not. I certainly don't feel like an adult...
- It's like I blinked and got to 35 and woah what is my life now!?! It's ok to feel like that.
- I want to try and remove the stigma and fear from being able to talk about these things. As intensely hard a talk this is for an autistic introvert to give, I think it's important to smash that image of perfection and show you the 90% of the iceberg below the surface.
- Coming back to failure... Aside from my actionable tips on how to build confidence in a minute, I want to leave you with this idea of reframing things. It's not something I've come up with, but it's an incredibly powerful way to deal many of the things in life that might otherwise knock you flat on your butt. It's sad that we're so scared to fail, yet we work in an industry that would not function without failure - because it's the best way to learn. Experiments that didn't work - only really a failure if you learned nothing from it.
- Failure makes the best teacher. If you don't know what you want to do when you leave school or uni, that's ok.
- If you realise you don't want a career in what you studied, it doesn't matter. It's ok to change your mind (ABBA?) Take a chance on the new opportunities!
- Reframe your failures. Reframe the things people say to you.
- I heard a great phrase - "never ascribe to malice what can be attributed to ignorance". While that doesn't come naturally to me after a life that's predisposed me to think the worst of people, it helps me stay more positive in my outlook. I can look at things people have said to me and view it less as a failure of me as a person, trying instead to understand what might have been going on with them at the time. For example, the boss who told me that I was too young, blonde and female to be promoted because the board wouldn't take me seriously, was probably a bit sexist, but he was also probably insecure and worried about being made to look bad if I didn't perform in the role and showed him up (even though I'd been doing the job for free since my manager left). Or my older sister telling me that I'll never amount to anything is pretty mean, but it probably came off the back of her own insecurities and fears, rather than anything I did. And she was most likely jealous of my boobs! Remove the power these things can have over you. I take things personally, internalise them. But reframing takes out the sting and stops them paralysing me how they used to, or exacerbating my imposter syndrome.
- It's also a happier and nicer way to live life. You can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it.
- Kintsugi. Over time, the negative has shaped me into who I am today. Increasingly, and despite never thinking this could ever happen, I'm actually starting to like that person. I do need to do a better job of being kind to that person though. I treat myself in ways I would never treat another person. I say horrific things to and about myself that I would slap my friends for saying about themselves. But, I'm a work in progress.
- Speaking of happier and nicer ways to live life. It can be hard to do the above without confidence. How can we build confidence in the first place? Here's some tips to both help you do that and help your career at the same time, so you can make your voice heard and build those all-important networks
- Plan - if you're plan and are prepared, you'll naturally feel more confident in any situation - even if that situation is getting on stage in front of a load of people I’ve never met before and sharing an intensely personal story!
- Know your s**t (know you're s**t) - planning only takes you so far. But if you really know your stuff, you'll naturally be more confident. Think about this before a meeting, or presentation. Immerse yourself, in what you know.
- Don't be scared of failure - literally the entire point of this talk, but it's one of the best ways to improve your confidence. If you can shrug off that fear, you'll walk taller. Something great to tell yourself is your body’s response to fear, is the same as the response to excitement.
- Positivity - in the same way they talk about setting goals and how important that can be mentally to achieve them, it's the same with being positive. You'll start achieving more by being positive which in turn leads to more positivity. Fake it till you make it couldn't be more true here. Plus you'll attract other people to you and together you'll achieve awesome things
- Keep a log. Not this kind.
- Keep a confidence log - whenever you've smashed something, write it down. If someone drops you an email telling you did a good job, save it. Not only are these great fodder for when it comes to negotiating a pay increase or promotion, they're really nice to look at when you're feeling like a massive failure and want to hide under the duvet eating ice cream. It's also worth noting down these times so you can understand what triggers them, so you can work on improving
- Be bold - this is easier the more confident you become but is important to do as early as possible. Put your hand up, ask for things. Don't be shy about asking for what you want. Some people call this assertiveness, but in women it can be seen as having negative connotations. So I like to call it boldness
- Be visible - this might be by taking credit for your own work and calling out others who do a great job, or it might be by speaking up in meetings. Don't be afraid to have a different opinion, or to highlight an idea that you mentioned which someone else might bring up later. You can also do this for others, particularly if they're interrupted. Be that ally for them.
- These are things you can do for yourself. But what can you do for others? I strongly believe that to drive change we have to help and lift each other up (GIF). Create an environment in which it's ok to fail. Confidence is something internal, but empowerment comes externally. Support those around you to do the same and celebrate their differences.
- All too often, some women have the attitude that we have to step over each other to be successful. That helping another woman will mean you lose your seat at the table. That’s just not true. The more we help others, the more seats at the table there will be.
- by empowering others you can help boost their confidence and as a happy side effect boost your own. There are few bigger payoffs in the world of work than knowing you made a fundamental difference to someone in terms of their career, or development. This is what gets me out of bed every morning.
- Final thought, from Almost Famous. "Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid".
- Despite the times I've taken risks and failed, I believe this more than ever now. Be bold, take the risks.
- Commit yourself to being brave and tackling something scary and new — if you don’t succeed the first time you’ll learn so much from the experience.
- Remember you don’t have to be the best at something for it to be worth doing! (Print on wall)
- And when you succeed, you’ll have proven to yourself and those around you that not only are women brave, but that prospect of failure is something to be embraced and encouraged, rather than feared