Podcast

It’s hard enough to get through failures and setbacks — we only make them worse by beating ourselves up or trying to move past them too quickly.

It can make a professional paper cut feel like a full-fledged crucible. It leaves you wondering why you and your work are never good enough. But perfectionism, for all its insidiousness, can be overcome.

There never seems to be enough time to finish all your work — let alone think about it, especially when crucibles hit. Harvard Business School professor Joseph Badarocco says that’s because we view reflection all wrong.

She had a great corporate job, doing what she felt called and equipped to do. Then Toni Munoz Kaufman contracted SARS, which nearly killed her and did cost her a lung. As she recovered, she was laid off. But her joyous spirit and wisdom passed down from her father pushed her to persevere and help other Baby Boomers overcome their crucibles as entrepreneurs.

Understanding what science has to say about learning the lessons of a crucible experience — from reframing what happened to embracing forgiveness — can be an overlooked key to moving past the pain and toward healing and significance.

Heroic leaders like Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln get movies made about them — just like superheroes such as Batman and Captain America. But the rousing triumphs that echo through history, or comic books, aren’t the whole story — or even sometimes the best story. Quietness, patience and humility are key qualities of success and significance even for great leaders.

His big-deal career and its big-money perks left him unsatisfied. So he stopped seeing success as outperforming others and started serving others. Today he’s the best-selling author of The Millennial Whisperer and making a lasting impact on the leaders of tomorrow.

After losing her husband to a military training accident, she fought for joy for herself and her four children by moving beyond surviving.

Mike Valentine was a blue-collar kid who grew into a blue-collar young man, a longshoreman’s son who began working as a steelworker as a teenager, walking his first skyscraper beam at 14. His was a hardscrabble existence: He spent the next decade and a half addicted to alcohol and beset with its devastations — bar fights, car accidents and times behind bars. All that changed when his daughter was born — and he turned his attention to living life in pursuit of a worthy purpose.

Listening is one of the most necessary, and least practiced, leadership skills in business and life today. And lest you think lack of listening is a new phenomenon, brought on by the last few decades of tech advances that have created tech distractions, think again. Harvard Business Review found in 1957 that people remember only about half of what they hear, even when they’re trying really hard to dial in.