You're Not Losing You're Learning

From the cover: “Life puts us to the test on a day to day basis. Sometimes we win, but often, we don't. Most people would call that a failure. I want to challenge that. It's time we changed the stigma around failure.”

The argument goes like this. Failure only occurs when you quit or give up on a goal. If you miss an attempt, have a bad quarter, or have to take the test again, that isn't failure. That is learning, and the book gives it three better words, perseverance, resilience, and grit, each one a trainable skill with its own chapter.

It ends with the Cycle of Learning, a five-step loop for turning any setback into the next attempt, including workbook pages that tell you, plainly, to put the book down and go try again.

Anyone who has ever been stopped by the fear of messing up: leaders, teams, students, parents. It's short on purpose, and written the way I teach: plain words, real stories, and no jargon.

The stories are mine. There's my family, which lost four of its five schools in the 2008 crash and rebuilt what remained into the largest kids karate program at a single martial arts school in America. There's the student who failed his black belt fitness test seven times and passed on the eighth. And there's a six-year-old learning a cartwheel without a single worry about falling down, the way most of us adults have forgotten how to do.

The book is the fastest introduction to how I work. The next step up is bringing it into the room: a team workshop built on the Cycle of Learning, or the signature keynote for your event.