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Moving On From Failure is An Exercise in Humility

Last week’s post about the hiatus of Body Boss received a lot of good, supportive feedback – 21 Lessons from Failure. That was interesting to me because it wasn’t a letter to the world about the close of Body Boss as much as it was about a learning opportunity. Instead, I wanted to follow up the lessons learned with a personal letter, but I didn’t know really how to begin. However, I believe a serial entrepreneur has just given me the spark with his one simple question:

Does humility factor anywhere in terms of your lessons learned from Body Boss?

Absolutely!
Body Boss has been incredibly humbling for not just myself, but for the whole team. Body Boss has helped me realize the hardwork needed to build a successful business and what it means to build a brand you can be proud of. We started Body Boss full of confidence, energy, and lofty goals, but we have to balance that with a healthy dose of humility. Yet, in a lot of ways, confidence and humility aren’t necessarily on opposite ends of the spectrum, but they work closer together. It’s been an incredible experience learning more about our strengths and our weaknesses. It’s not lost on me how much there is still for me to learn and grow, and that will never end. 
For me, personally, I’m disappointed I didn’t lead the team to success. Body Boss was the creation of everyone around us, not just the Body Boss team. I’m a product of my family, my friends, Georgia Tech, Emory, and so much more. It’s why we kept our family and friends up-to-date on our progress in addition to our customers and partners. We have had amazing support from everyone around us, and we are so grateful. It’s incredibly sad to let everyone around me down now. Sales make or break a company, and as such, I shoulder much of the blame. I’ve been learning from my mistakes, and I have to now take those lessons learned and improve them.
I’m saddened for the incredible Body Boss community that we couldn’t create a vast nation of like-minded coaches, trainers, and athletes to share their achievements to motivate each other for greater. Body Boss was built on a premise of “Motivation through Team Competition”. In a word – inspiration. Inspiration to achieve greater.
In the afterglow of Body Boss, I can relish being a part of an amazing team. The mastermind behind Body Boss’s inception was none other than Darren Pottinger – a true Brains meets Brawn entrepreneur. His tenacity and thirst to learn and dream big is second to none. Don Pottinger was the glue that brought us all together and the man who really made Body Boss come to life and hum. He labored so many hours late at night trouble-shooting and refining Body Boss into a better product for our customer-partners. And of course, all the amazing graphics, the sleek designs that landed us on so many creative sites… credit that to the revered Andrew Reifman. There wasn’t a soul around who wasn’t impressed with his amazing work. These are THE BEST guys in their fields – I know that.
People ask me what my Next Move is. I’m not entirely sure. It’s funny, but after my little Personal Renaissance during grad school, I’m now at this intersection where I’m firmly devout in what I want to do, but I don’t know where that means I should go next.
In any event, I do know I need to keep building off the lessons learned and to keep growing. Am I eager to start a new venture? Absolutely. I reflect plenty, and I’ll continue to write about entrepreneurial ideas including Body Boss, and share my thoughts with the World. I hope my writing inspires others to pursue their passions – startups, painting, pursuing European soccer glory (I can still do that, maybe?), or anything else others are scared to chase and grab right now. For me, I’m reaching for the opportunity to build companies to provide jobs, to build a smarter, healthier future, and to leave a legacy of my family, my friends, and my communities.
I’ve always wanted to be a Great Leader for others, and with that, I do have to constantly find the balance and inter-play between confidence and self-belief with humility. Body Boss was a great experience for all of us in becoming more humble. It’s allowed us to learn and develop for the next chapters in our lives. For the last 2.5 years, I’ve been fortunate to be a part of this Dream Team. As we may sunset this endeavor, I’m excited for where each of us goes from here. I firmly believe we’re all destined for great things.
So to all of you, our supporters, I say this with every ounce of my being and with eternal gratification: THANK YOU.
“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger
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An Exercise in Humility: Talk with Your Mouth Closed

Last Friday, I had the chance to sit down with several successful entrepreneurs over lunch.  (Successful in this case being “happy” about their previous startups’ outcomes either sold or otherwise while under their leadership.)  Over the lunch, I remember introducing some of the entrepreneurs to each other, but after that, I feel as if I might have spoke too much.  You ever get that feeling that you were a bit of a chatter box?

That evening before bed, I felt a bit guilty about it, and as I often do, reflected on my day’s events — what happened, what did I like, what didn’t I like, and what could I have done better.  I realize now that I’ve come to this point where a cocktail of confidence, passion, and experiential exuberance mixed too strong can be interpreted as arrogance and rigidity.  The experiential exuberance, in this case represents, is the energy I have from lessons learned through building a startup and other “wise” events through life.  No one actually said I was arrogant, but I felt that I could have been interpreted that way — if that’s my own feeling, then perhaps that’s how it was perceived.

While brainstorming stopgates for the future, I read a fitting article on LinkedIn — “Finding Strength in Humility” by Tony Schwartz from the NY Times’ Dealbook.  As you can imagine, the article talked about the importance of exercising humility as a leader.  Too often, leaders exude the “positives” of strength, courage and decisiveness without the balancing act of tempering those qualities from being excessive.  Some thoughts melding the article, my past, and what happened for the future:

  • Too much of a good thing (like confidence, tenacity) can be a bad thing.  Exercise patience and know it’s okay to let others not only speak, but to share their thoughts and actually listen.
  • It’s okay to say, “I don’t know — I’ll get back to you on that.”  No, seriously, get back to someone on that.  I was recently on a call for one of my consulting projects, and I was asked a question to which I spent a minute on the call fumbling through documents on my end to figure it out.  I should’ve just told the client I’d get back to them.
  • You have two ears and one mouth.  Heard this saying before?  If you’ve surrounded yourself with people smarter than you, you should do well to sit and listen to what they have to say.
  • Do speak up, and pass the baton.  Obviously, sitting in a group means so little if you don’t say anything at all.  You still want to leave an impression, after all.  Instead, just be sure to speak up, and pass the baton for others to talk.
  • Introduce others.  If you’re introducing new people, make sure they get a chance to converse with one another.  Networking is more about how you connect others and less about how you connect with others.
  • Read the faces.  As you talk to people in the group, be sure to gauge everyone’s facial expressions.  You may find others who are wanting to chime in, but may feel uncomfortable to do so.  Similar to the above points, try to ease those people into the conversation.  They’ll feel thrilled that you’d help them in, and you’ll feel great for getting them in.
It’s clear to me that I still have a ways to go to be an inspiring and effective leader.  Not just in groups, but I should start exercising humility even when I’m alone.  Confidence can be a tricky thing, but as an entrepreneur, especially, I feel there is a more careful balancing act of being confident in your startup and your capabilities and knowing that there are still ways to better your product, your skills.  Genuineness through humility can go a long way to not only communicating and inspiring others to follow your vision, but to buy your product, or simply have a friendly lunch.
At the end of the day, it’s being able to call on all these different tools you gather through your journeys to more effectively communicate to the audience in front of you.
How have you negotiated the trapeze of confidence vs. over-confidence in communicating with others?  What are some other tips when in groups of people that I didn’t include?
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