You must learn to live with the fact that you will make mistakes—lots of mistakes—and that you will learn from them. Mistakes are in fact a great source of strength; making mistakes is analogous to building muscle in athletic training. Think about it for a minute: how does an athlete get stronger? By pushing to the point of failure. You do, say, three pull-ups and fail on the fourth. The body point of failure. You do, say, three pull-ups and fail on the fourth. The body adapts and gets stronger and the next time you can do four pull-ups, and fail on the fifth. The next time out you can do five pull-ups, and fail on the sixth, and so on.

The first part in understanding how you lead is to know your strengths—the things you’re talented at and love to do. This is crucial because great management typically comes from playing to your strengths rather than from fixing your weaknesses. There are some useful frameworks for understanding your strengths, like StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath or StandOut by Marcus Buckingham. If you want to do a quick version, jot down the first thing that comes to mind when you ask yourself the following questions:

• How would the people who know and like me best (family, significant other, close friends) describe me in three words? MY ANSWER: thoughtful, enthusiastic, driven

• What three qualities do I possess that I am the proudest of? MY ANSWER: curious, reflective, optimistic

• When I look back on something I did that was successful, what personal traits do I give credit to? MY ANSWER: vision, determination, humility

• What are the top three most common pieces of positive feedback that I’ve received from my manager or peers? MY ANSWER: principled, fast learner, long-term thinker.

Like mine, your responses will likely cluster around a few themes. Here, you can see that my strengths are dreaming big, learning quickly, and remaining upbeat. Whatever yours are, remember them and hold them dear. You’ll be relying on them time and time again.

The second part of getting to an honest reckoning with yourself is knowing your weaknesses and triggers. Right beneath your list of strengths, answer the following:

• Whenever my worst inner critic sits on my shoulder, what does she yell at me for? MY ANSWER: getting distracted, worrying too much about what others think, not voicing what I believe

• If a magical fairy were to come and bestow on me three gifts I don’t yet have, what would they be? MY ANSWER: bottomless well of confidence, clarity of thought, incredible persuasion

• What are three things that trigger me? (A trigger is a situation that gets me more worked up than it should.) MY ANSWER: sense of injustice, the idea that someone else thinks I’m incompetent, people with inflated egos

• What are the top three most common pieces of feedback from my manager or peers on how I could be more effective? MY ANSWER: be more direct, take more risks, explain things simply

Again, you may see some themes emerging. The biggest barriers that get in my way are self-doubt, a tendency to complexify, and not being clear and direct enough.

Categorize Your Failures

It’s useful to categorize failures into three types so you can more easily identify where the growth potential lies.

Screwups are just that—simple mistakes about things that you normally get right. It’s not that you can’t do better. You normally do these things right, so you don’t really need to learn anything from this—you just screwed up. The best response here is to acknowledge you screwed up, apologize as needed, and move on.

Weaknesses are failures that happen because of one of your abiding failings. These are the mistakes that you make over and over. You know the source of these failures well. They are old friends. You’ve probably worked at correcting them already, and have improved as far as you think you’re going to. You try to avoid getting caught by these weaknesses, but they happen. We’re not suggesting you cave in prematurely and accept mediocre performance, but we are suggesting that there isn’t much upside in trying to change your stripes. It’s a judgment call, of course, but some failures are just part of your makeup, and your best strategy is avoidance of the situations that prompt them instead of improvement.

Growth opportunities are the failures that didn’t have to happen, or at least don’t have to happen the next time. The cause of these failures is identifiable, and a fix is available. We want to direct our attention here, rather than get distracted by the low return on spending too much time on the other failure types.

Now consider what happens when senior executives, or parents, for that matter, state unequivocally that failure is off-limits, that only good results are acceptable. Failures don’t stop. They simply go underground. Unwittingly, the financial services executives I spoke with were at risk of inhibiting the transmission of bad news. That wasn’t their goal. Their goal was to encourage excellence. But it’s human nature to hide the truth when it’s clear that sharing it will bring punishment—or even just disapproval. Our fear of rejection presents the third barrier to practicing the science of failing well.

And because they’re ready, their confidence doesn’t crack. The venture capitalist Josh Wolfe likes to say, “Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure.”

The bottom line: people who think about what is likely to go wrong and determine the actions they can take are more likely to succeed when things don’t go according to plan.

A smart way to assess your options is by using the following principle.

The Second-Level Thinking Principle: Ask yourself, “And then what?