Episode #248 – Do We Learn More From Success or Failure? You Might Be Surprised By the Answer

I always hear this from attorneys in and out of H2H –

"I learned more from my failures than my successes." 

Well, throw that bullshit out the window because this week's episode is all about debunking the myth that failure is the ultimate teacher.

Tune in to find out how to break the cycle of fixating on mistakes (because let’s face it, that only leads to one thing: giving up ????) and instead, champion a mindset fueled by success.

Xo,
Sari

➡️Listen on Spotify

➡️Listen on Apple

➡️Listen on YouTube

➡️FREE FB GROUP FOR PLAINTIFF & CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEYS

"We learn more from success than failure. Success is more motivating than failure. Success will have you work harder than failure. This is backwards from everything y'all believe. You believe it has to be hard. You believe you have to be hard on yourself. You believe that you can't decide you're amazing before you actually achieve something great. The research backs me up here. It's success that we want to emulate; it is success that we want to focus on."

sari de la motte

EPISODE 248 TRANSCRIPTION

You guys, does my voice sound different? Because it just totally feels different to me, I've got to go have that checked out. I'm freaking out having had thyroid cancer, I just went to get checked and I'm totally fine, but I don't know. Maybe it was the cold and the bronchitis, but if you're noticing something, I'm just confirming your sanity because I'm noticing it. It's a lot scratchier than normal. All right. Today we are talking about...

Do we learn more from success or failure?

Now in our last Trial Lab, we always have a part after our first mock jury, where we talk about... Well, we actually do this on the day where we look at the video. But this particular last Trial Lab, I asked them, I said, "Tomorrow when we look at the video", because they have two mock juries they get to look at, we've changed this actually.

Now we're going to have one mock jury on each day versus two in one day, but up to this point, they've been two in one day. I said, "Which one are you choosing to watch? Which one do you think I want you to watch? The one where you did better or the one where you did worse, because we can only debrief one." All of our Trial Lab participants get to take both videos home, plus video of me coaching them, but they only get to debrief one of them. All of the attorneys including some of our coaches said, "I would expect that you would want me to watch the one that I did worse on", and I hear this all the time. When we talk about wins and losses, clients will consistently tell me, or not even clients, just attorneys just out in the world when we talk about how H2H is different, how we need to let go of winning, focus on our job, and all of that is true.

You know I believe that's true, but people will always come and say, "I learned more from my failures than my successes." I hear that all the time. Y'all should put that on a T-shirt because I hear it so often. So it hit me, now that I'm doing all this research for this last batch of podcasts to find out whether or not that was actually true.

Is it true that we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes? I'm afraid to podcast on this because I'm afraid your brain is going to break because I think you all believe that it is this noble worthy thing to lose, and the only reason we're losing is because at least I can learn from it. And what I want to say before I share this with you is that you're going to live, you're going to survive, and you're going to be just fine.

Failure is part of the deal. It is noble to lose because you fought, not because it just gives you a learning opportunity. It's just part of the deal, right? You want to be a trial lawyer? Great, get used to losing. It's part of the deal. The end. Anyone who tells you anything differently is blowing smoke up your ass.

So again, I went down the rabbit hole and dived into the research. Do y'all know about this concept called "The Winner Effect"? So there's a book actually called The Winner Effect, I just ordered it so I don't have it yet, which I probably should have waited to podcast, but you know me, I want to share all the things that I'm learning with you as I'm learning. So I'll follow up if I find out some new great stuff, but it's a term used I found out in biology, and I'm reading it here, "to describe how an animal that has won a few fights against weak opponents is much more likely to win later bouts against stronger contenders".

As Ian Robertson reveals, it applies to humans too. "Success changes the chemistry of the brain, making you more focused, smarter, more confident, and more aggressive. The effect is as strong as any drug, and the more you win, the more you will go on to win." And I thought, isn't that interesting? Because I have found, for example, in my Mastermind clients, many of them come to me because they've been doing this for 20 or so years. They don't have the eight-figure verdict. They want the eight figure verdict, and one of the first things we do is we get them off that track. We're like, well, we're going to put that aside. We're going to work on some other things first. But then once they do the work with me, they go on, they get the eight-figure verdict, and then they just keep on coming, happens over and over and over again.

I thought, well, isn't that interesting? The Scientific American, I found article there and they said this,

"Success has a much greater influence on the brain than failure."

Let me say that again because I think you think it's the opposite. Success has a much greater influence on the brain than failure says Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They're a big deal. Neuroscientist, Earl Miller who led the research, believes the findings apply to many aspects of daily life in which failures are left unpunished, but achievements are rewarded in one way or another, such as when your teammates cheer your strikes at the bowling lane. The pleasurable feeling that comes with the successes is brought about by a surge in the neurotransmitter, dopamine. By telling brain cells, when they have struck gold, the chemical apparently signals them to keep doing whatever they did that led to success. As for failures, Miller says, we might do well to pay more attention to them consciously encouraging our brain to learn a little more from failure than it would by default.

That's true, but if we look at, for example, dog training, right? The old way to train dogs, and I know a lot about dog training now because of asshole Coco, who training has had basically zero effect on, even though we've done all the right things. But the old way of training dogs was to soil the carpet to stick their nose in it, right? Or the old way of raising children, which I'm sure some of you cantankerous bastards out there would agree we need to get back to, is hitting a child, spanking a child. "That's what we did in my at any age, I turned out fine." Did you though? No. You know I love you. Okay, so we don't do that anymore because we know that just take dogs, dogs respond way more to rewards when you are training them than to punishment.

Just think about dieting. Anyone who's ever dieted, if you create a plan for what you're going to eat that day, or what you're going to eat on your diet, and let's say you go out to dinner with some friends and your friends are like, "Let's get an appetizer", and you hadn't planned on getting the appetizer. You had planned to have your seltzer water and your salad. But you get the appetizer, and then what happens? Your brain goes into this, "Well, then just fucking forget it. I fucked up today". And you go and you order the nachos, right? Instead of the salad, because that's what, let's just call it the "Loser Effect", right? The Loser Effect is, "Well, I fucked up so then fuck it, right?" And Kevin's laughing because he knows that I do this all the time.

You guys do this. You go from CLE to CLE, from book to book looking for the answer, and when the answer doesn't show up, you're like, well, just forget it, let's go on to the next thing, right?

Because that's what failure teaches us. Failure teaches us to give up in many cases, fixating on mistakes, and impairs brain function.

Another neurologist, Judy Willis says, "As you internalize your thwarted efforts to achieve your goals and interpret them as personal failure, your self-doubt and stress activate and strengthen your brain's involuntary reactive neural networks. As these circuits become the automatic go-to networks, the brain is less and less successful in problem solving and emotional control." Meaning the more we focus on our failures and trying to avoid our failures, versus looking at our success and trying to redo that over and over and over again, our brain gets more tired. It gets impaired, it gets stressed, it gets worried because it's worried about being punished versus repeating success. Now I know what you're saying or thinking, "But Sari, I haven't earned my success yet. I need to earn."

You got to have this whole thing. "I need to earn feeling amazing. I need to earn my success." Well, the Harvard Business Review has something to say to you, which is research shows, quoting from here, that when people work with a positive mindset, performance on nearly every level, productivity, creativity, engagement improves. Yet happiness is perhaps the most misunderstood driver of performance. For one, most people believe that success precedes happiness. Let me say that again. Most people believe that success precedes happiness. "Once I get a promotion, I'll be happy", or "Once I hit my sales target, I'll feel great." But because success is a moving target, who said this before, I wonder? Thank you Harvard for backing me up, as soon as you hit your target, you'll raise it again. The happiness that results from success is fleeting. It's exactly what I say about those people who once they get their eight-figure verdict, Michael Cowen will tell you this.

He thought that was going to be the be-all-end-all, but then when he fucking fixed his brain and realized that wasn't the point. He got his eight-figure verdict and he was like, "Eh, it's great, but it wasn't the be-all-end-all." Harvard Business Review continues, in fact, it works the other way around. People who cultivate a positive mindset perform better in the face of challenge. I call this "the happiness advantage". Every business outcome shows improvement when the brain is positive. I've observed this effect in my role as a researcher and lecturer in 48 countries on the connection between employee happiness and success, and I'm not alone. In a meta-analysis of 225 academic studies researchers, Sonia Lyubomirsky, Laura King and Ed Diener found strong evidence of directional causality between life satisfaction and successful business outcomes. Meaning, if you focus on being happy and feeling good and success, more success will follow.

We do not need to wait for success to be happy or to have a positive mindset.

I know you all are believing that you think you're going to miss something and you believe that being hard on yourself is what actually makes you successful, but the opposite is true, which is why when you come to a Trial Lab, or you're working with me as a Mastermind, of course we're going to fix mistakes and we're going to talk about how to do things better,.But when you look at your performance, I'm going to focus on what you did well so that you can repeat it. That is what we want for kids. We want to encourage them to continue to try and to do the right thing, to be kind and to treat others with respect, and we want to reward that behavior and point it out and tell them how proud we are of them versus punishing them for every bad thing they do.

What you focus on, you create.

The research backs me up on this. We learn more from success than failure. Success is more motivating than failure. Success will have you work harder than failure. This is backwards from everything y'all believe. You believe it has to be hard. You believe you have to be hard on yourself. You believe that you can't decide you're amazing before you actually achieve something great. The research backs me up here.

It's success that we want to emulate, it is success that we want to focus on. So to do that, I have three things for you to do.

ONE, focus on what you did right, not on what you did wrong.

It's very similar to how we do Voir Dire in H2H versus exclusionary Voir Dire. In Voir Dire in H2H, we go looking for the people we want on our jury, not for the people we don't want on our jury.

Now, in that process, we will find the jurors we don't want and we will get rid of them with our peremptory challenges or even cause challenges. But our focus, notice I didn't say that's all you do. Our focus is on finding our ideal juror. So when you focus on your success, that doesn't mean you don't learn from your mistakes or you don't fix your mistakes, but the focus should always be, "Oh, what did I do well?". One of the first things that I have everybody do after their mock jury is ask, "What are they celebrating?" And they'll come up with the most bullshit things I've ever heard. "I'm celebrating that I didn't fuck up that bad. I'm celebrating that I'm a little better than last time when I had such a fuck-up when I was here." I'm like, you guys don't get it, do you?

I want actual things you're celebrating. I'm celebrating that I went out there and I tried Price vs. Value, and I got into at least one resonant conversation. I am celebrating that I was able to deliver my opening in under 30 minutes when I thought for sure it would take me 45. I'm celebrating the fact that I'm holding my gestures out longer now, I'm not dropping them like I used to. Now you can then go, all right, next time you have even a more resonant conversation, I'm going to avoid doing that one thing I inadvertently did to that one juror that made them shut down. Great. Next time I'm going to hold out my gestures a little longer so that I don't have that thigh slap a couple of times like I did, right? So you're still focusing on your success and we're dealing with the mistakes, but the whole energy of it is celebrating what you did well, so you can replicate that and then using those failures in service to your next success. Do you see the difference? That's what we want.

TWO, develop self-compassion.

When you are doing the work of a trial lawyer, which is very difficult work, as you've heard me say many times, you have to develop self-compassion because you are going to do things wrong. You are going to be objected to, you're going to be talked down by the judge. You're going to do the wrong thing in front of jurors. You're going to get emails from opposing counsel that are horrible. You're going to get called a mean, nasty woman in depositions like one of my clients just told me this week. All of those things are going to happen, so you have to not be a part of that, but most of you will jump right in with that and beat yourself up alongside all of those other people. You got to have compassion for yourself and tell yourself, I am doing a kick-ass job in a very difficult career where I don't get a lot of live practice, and I'm not going to get it right every time, but I'm so glad that I did A, B, and C well.

I'm so glad that I was able to do this thing that I wasn't able to do last time. I'm so celebrating that, which really brings me to...

THREE, which is you have to be your biggest cheerleader.

You heard me say before that there are so much that can go wrong, not just in trial lawyerdom, but in life. Look at cancer. Cancer was a part of my life, and I don't know where that shit came from. There's so much that can go wrong in the course of a single life. Why on earth would you add to that by being in that camp, being that person that's tearing you down? You got to be your biggest cheerleader, and that's a little different than having compassion. Compassion is saying, listen, that was a hard venue or a hard day, or you're not feeling great. Cheerleader is, you got this.

You are amazing. You can do this, and telling yourself that all the time. You think, well, that doesn't feel real. I don't give a fuck if it feels real. It doesn't feel real because you haven't been doing it. You haven't created the neural pathway yet to where it does feel natural and normal. If you don't have your own back, you cannot expect anyone else to have it. Have your own back, be your biggest cheerleader. But I hope that the biggest thing that you take from today's podcast is that I was right and you were wrong. No, that is not the biggest thing. The biggest thing is that you recognize that all of the research and everything we know about the brain tells us that replicating success will actually get you farther than focusing on failure. That doesn't mean we don't learn from failure. It just means we're not going to focus and dive into the muck of how horrible we did because we've somehow along the line believed the adage, well, I learned more there.

Bullshit. Focus on what you're doing well and do more of that. That's how we become awesome. That's why me telling you "You're amazing!" works. That's why you coming out here, me showing you on video how amazing you are works. Everybody who leaves here in a Trial Lab feels like they could go try their case the very next day. Why? Because we focused on their success. They would not feel that way if we tore them down for four days. It just doesn't fucking work that way. Focus on your success and you're going to have more success. I love you. Talk next week.

Have you ever wished that you knew what the jury was thinking? Well, grab a pen and paper because I'm about to give you instant access to a free training I created for plaintiff trial attorneys called Three Powerful Strategies to Help You Read a Juror's Mind. It's going to help you to understand what the jury is thinking, so you'll feel confident to trust them and yourself in the courtroom.

Ready for the address? Go to sariswears.com/jury. Enjoy.