Let’s be honest—failure sucks. But avoiding it altogether? That might be even worse.

In this episode, I reflect on my newfound fascination with sports—yes, sports!—and the surprising thing I’m learning from athletes that has nothing to do with winning... and everything to do with how they handle losing.

LISTEN HERE...

🧠 Inside this episode:

1. How my non-athlete, choir-kid roots made me risk-averse for years

2. What sports like cycling, March Madness, and the NFL Combine taught me about mindset

3. Why athletes seem shockingly good at failing—and how they bounce back mid-game

4. A college voice lesson that cracked open my perfectionism (and sent me storming out...)

5. The Duke University course that literally gave me chills: Learning to Fail

6. A quote from Giannis Antetokounmpo that redefined “failure” forever

💡 Key idea:

Athletes fail all the time—on their way to winning.

What if failure isn’t something to avoid, but something to integrate?

🎧 Favorite moment:

“They just move on. Like…they miss, they mess up, and they just go to the next play. I’m watching that more than I’m watching the score.”

📣 Let’s talk about trial.

Trials are hard. You win some, you lose some.

Statistically? Civil plaintiff cases are around 50/50. Med mal and federal court? Even tougher odds.

So what’s your approach to failure?

1. Are you like my college self—only attempting things you’re sure you’ll get right?

2. Or are you starting to flex a more athletic mindset—staying present, regrouping, and growing?

📬 I want to hear from you.

If you’ve ever used a failure as a launchpad for learning or growth, I want to know.

➡️ Email me at [email protected]

Let’s swap stories—and normalize failure as part of mastery.

🔗 Resources & Inspiration:

1. Giannis Antetokounmpo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj4icUkwP2A

2. Mel Robbins: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1FrrKCN4M2/

3. Learning to Fail class at Duke University: Iss.duke.edu/courses/learning-fail

4. Book a free vocal snapshot: https://calendly.com/fostervoicestudio/30-minute-assessment-clone

🏀 Final thought:

What if failing wasn’t a dead end, but a step forward?

Let’s train ourselves like athletes do—fail faster, recover better, and keep our eyes on the long game.

Until next time,

Keep fostering your voice. 🎤

TRANSCRIPT:

(singing) Hellloooo! Hello Foster Fam! How's everybody doing? In my neighborhood, we're in the "go home, Spring, you're drunk" weather time. Beautiful sunny days to start, low 70's, perfect. but by afternoon it's pouring rain with overnight temps down to the mid-30's. haha! Makes it hard to get dressed every day cause I'm probably going to be changing 1/2 way through.

You know what's NOT hard though? Leaving a star-rating and a review. Haha! Okay, that was maybe a stretch of a segue, but seriously...it's easy. I mean, I LOVE hearing from folks that they're enjoying the podcast. Someone in one of my online community groups just commented on a thread "loving your podcast by the way." And it just BLESSED me. But it ALSO makes a world of difference when you leave star-ratings and reviews on your podcast platforms, share episodes or subscribe on YouTube. So, please take just a sec to do one of those.

Hey, so before we get into today's topic, I just had to share with you something that I came across the other day.

I'm all the time fascinated by HOW we learn, but maybe moreso, how we grow. As we work on our goals, or even just declare a goal, there are fascinating things that happen in the brain. I mean, it's sole job is to keep you alive and it wants to do this by maintaining the status quo. It views any change away from it's normal habits as a threat to you. So, it shuts you down. It tries to squelch that drive towards something new — a new thought, a new activity, whatever.

This dublicity of the brain is truly fascinating to me. Like, how can I cognitively want change, and at the same time, my brain prevents me from making the change? It's WILD how double-minded we are.

Now, the good news is that we CAN rewire that part of the brain that is keeping us mired in old habits. But it takes INTENTION and DISCIPLINE. Repetition and consistency, so that the brain can say "Oh, you're serious about that? I mean, I don't want to, but we can i guess."

I mean, Bless. It wants to protect us, and it HAS protected us. We KNOW to not just step onto a street without looking both ways. Why? Because we were taught it on repetition, intentionally, consistently. We might have even had a scare when we forgot once and, maybe even got disciplined for it. That now is locked into our habit brain, so now as adults, you don't even think about it. of COURSE you look both ways before stepping into the street. It's a habit now. And it keeps you safe.

So, yeah...the brain is well intentioned. But sometimes that well-intention transitions to over-bearing and we have to lovingly set some boundaries. "Thank you, Brain. I know you're trying to protect me. But we're actually safe in this moment. There is no imminent danger. So, we're going to try something else today, and it's going to be fine. You'll see. Here...let me show you."

And then you start to do the new thing in small ways and build safety to convince the habit-side, the over-protective side of your brain that your cognitive-side, the part that wants to grow and do new things, it knows what it's doing and everyone is okay.

So, anyway, what I came across the other day was a video of Mel Robbins — modern day thought leader, best selling author, podcaster — and she was saying that "The fastest way to rewire new thinking patterns is to marry a new thinking pattern with something you don't normally do physically."

I'll put the link to the video in the show notes. But essentially, she's talking with a young man about how to change how he thinks about himself — low self-esteem, low self-image. So, to re-wire that thought pattern, she suggests that he daily hi-fives himself in the mirror.

Now, she says, "this is going to feel ridiculous." BUT...that act of high-fiving is infused with so much positive meaning — "you got this" "well done" "yes!" "let's go" "yeah, buddy." Those are all phrases that our brain associates with the act of high-fiving.

So, when we take a moment to look at ourselves in the mirror, to really take in (as Mel says) "the person you go through life with" and then conscientiously give them a high-five...you are connecting all the infused positive meaning form that physical action into the person you're staring at. You.

What do you think? Do you have any personal experience with this type of thing? I'd love to hear from you. Email me at [email protected] and let me know how you've experienced your own rewiring of thinking patterns.

—BREAK—

If you've been listening to the podcast, you'll know that I've been using a lot of sports metaphors and analogies and it's a little weird. I did NOT grow up in sports. We were a music & youth group family. There's lots of kids now that do both, but when I was growing up, there wasn't a lot of crossover. You were either a creative or you were an athlete. I just don't remember a lot of my peers doing both or developing both.

Anyway, that said, I'm kind of coming into sports late in life. And...let's be clear, I'm not PLAYING sports. I mean, I like to work out and i'm working on it, but I'm not joining a rec center pick up game or taking up pickleball anytime soon.

Now, as I shared a few episodes ago, I've been a 20-year road cycling fan. And I go all in on NFL in the fall. And I did a deep dive on the Summer Olympics. THOSE were some wild sports, right? I mean...speed bouldering? rugby 7s? and did you watch the kayak slolum? It was crazy intense.

This year I watched the football Combine for the first time — that's where all the hopeful college recruits do a series of workouts and tests and interviews with NFL scouts and coaches. THEN, this week is the Draft. By the time this comes out the draft will have happened already, but today when I'm recording this, I'm looking forward to it. I'm trying to remember who i saw at the Combine and I'll do my best to track well, first off, how the draft even works and the strategies in the process.

I also got into March Madness for the first time. I didn't officially join a, I don't even know, like a pool I guess. I just did my own unofficial bracket and it got busted right away. But it was still SO FUN to watch. So fun in fact, that I'm now watching the NBA playoffs. And, honestly, I'm kinda bummed that it's not a single-elimination like March Madness was. At least not yet. haha! I don't know what's going on, really.

So, WHY am I telling you all this? Well, it's because, while I would never count MYSELF as an athlete, I am utterly FASCINATED by something that I"m seeing, pretty much across the board with these athletes. The mindset and the grit of athletes? Wow, I'm totally inspired by and "drawn to".

But above all that, I think they have some really healthy perspectives around failing that I'm curious about...like in my deep inner being, curious...and want to try to glean a little of that, just by osmosis. ha!

As I'm watching, let's say basketball, the whole game is made up of what I would think of a "failures." Missing a basket. Making a bad pass. Accidentally touching the ball before it goes out of bounds so the other team gets it. Letting the shot clock run out. Dribbling on your own foot and losing the ball. Or the ones that kill me, are when a team mate has just turned themselves inside out to get the ball within scoring, and they pass to someone who has a better angle, and they do, I don't know, is it called a lay-up? but then they MISS and the other team gets the rebound. Like, ALL THAT HARD WORK for nothing, AND your teammate totally let you down.

Now, I'm sure they'll go back and watch film and break down the struggles and such, but in the moment...they just move on. WHAT?! They just stay in the present moment and go on to the next thing, work the next play, keep talking to each other and just move on.

THAT'S what I'M watching. Yeah yeah, scoring, rivalries, "yeah, go team." All that's fun, but I am utterly gobsmacked by the masterful way these athletes know how to fail on their way to winning.

Here's the truth: I've never really embraced failure. And, I think it's prevented some moments of growth for me. I suppose most folks don't LOVE to fail, but for me..I often wouldn't even try things if I wasn't sure I could do it right...right away. You know?

There was one time in my voice lessons at college where my voice teacher was trying to...I don't know...free up my vibrato, open up my tone, or something like that. And he was convinced that i needed to just have fun with it. So, he just kept kind of riding me about it "Have fun! Let it go. Have fun! What do you do to have fun?!" and just egging me on to the point where I got in his face and shouted "I get it right." And I stormed out of his office. ha!

Now, of course I had to cool off and then go back and apologize for being disrespectful by raising my voice at him, but it was a really informative moment for me that I've carried through the years. I take delight in getting something right, which...I think we all do. But for me, that drive to "get it right" has prevented me from taking some risks or try things that might have been really rewarding if i had been willing to fail along the way.

Needless to say, I was FLOORED when i learned that there is an actual course at Duke University called Learning to Fail. It's an undergrad course in their Information Science & Studies program for entrepreneurship. Here's the course description:

Most people spend their lives afraid of failing. Yet, many of the world's most successful people failed numerous times on their paths toward success. The underlying question of this class is if failing is as antithetical to learning as we're taught to believe. To explore this question, we will test ways of using failure as a strategy for learning. We will experiment with failure to learn how it can make us better as we develop our skills as innovators, specifically focusing on the earliest stage of creativity: ideation. We will use failure through experimentation as a technique for problem definition and needs discovery which, in turn, will help us validate the quality of our ideas.

That literally sends chills down my spine. I am equally intrigued AND terrified. So valuable to offer this course to undergrads. I wonder if I would have been brave enough to take it if it had been offered at my school. Would you?

What's YOUR approach to failing? I mean, let's face it, TRIAL IS HARD. And for civil cases, it's about 50/50 as to whether the plaintiff will prevail. Recent studies say plaintiff's verdicts are up to maybe 66% for automobile personal injury cases. But med mal is lower, and federal court trends really low for plaintiff's verdicts.

Failure is a very real part of being a lawyer. So, my question is real...what's YOUR approach to failing? Are you more like my college-self who didn't take risks BECAUSE of a fear of failure, or at least to try to mitigate it as best as I could? Or do you take more of an athletic approach — quickly moving on, staying present, thinking of it just as a blip on the say to more successful times?

I happened upon a post-game press conference, which now is quite famous, and you'll understand way. It's with Giannis Antetokounmpo, the star forward for the Milwaukee Bucks. After the Bucks were eliminated from the 2023 NBA Playoffs, Giannis was asked whether he considered the season a failure. Here's what he said:

"There's no failure in sports. You know, there's good days, bad days. Some days you are able to be successful. Some days you are not. Some days it's your turn. Some days it is not your turn. And that's what sport is about. You don't always win. Some other people are going to win. And this year, someone else is going to win. Similar as that, we're going to come back next year, try to be better, try to build good habits, not have a 10-day stretch of playing bad basketball. You know, and hopefully we can win a championship. So, 50 years, from 1971 to 1921 that we didn't win a championship it was 50 years of failures? No, it was not. It was steps to it, you know, and we were able to win one. Hopefully, we can win another one.

Wow! I love that. Substitute "sports" for "trial." Setbacks are part of the journey toward success and each step, even losses, contributes to growth. So keep growing. Keep putting in the effort to expand yourself, your skills, and your resources.

And, if you have a specific time where you used your loss as a strategy for learning & as a paver stone on the path to success, I'd love to hear from you. Email me, [email protected], to tell me about it, okay? I know in my bones that failing is fruitful, good, and beneficial and i want to get better at embracing it. So, check in and tell me how you navigate, and embrace, failure as a path to success in your life. Let's get better at it together.

And until next time, keep fostering your voice.