Author’s note: Selecting the right image for each article I write is part of the work. But it’s also a part I relish because I’m a visual person myself. When I come across something that halts my eye, I know I’ve found it. As it happened this week. What you see in the image above is something hikers will recognize. It’s a trail marker. It’s information for hikers, left by someone who went before. For us, it confirms that failure can be framed as a useful signal rather than a warning. Either from our own previous experience or that of others.

You delay the decision. You research it one more time. You hold onto the thing longer than you should. You avoid the conversation.

Do any of those sound familiar? They certainly do to me.

We tell ourselves we’re being careful, or just thorough. That we’re being responsible. But most of the time, we’re only fooling ourselves with those platitudes.

We’re not weighing the decision at all — we’re avoiding what we think failure would mean if we got it wrong.

We’ve been taught to read failure as a warning sign. Something to flinch from. Something that shows up at the end of a bad decision, confirming we shouldn’t have made it.

But what if we’ve been reading the signal backwards?

What if failure isn’t the consequence of a decision — but one of the inputs required to make better ones?

Here’s the line I keep coming back to from the work I’m doing now:

Everything makes something else possible. Including failure.

Failure isn’t there to stop you. It’s there to work for you — if you’ll let it.

That shift — from failure as risk to failure as a resource — changes everything downstream. It changes what you’re willing to try. It changes how long you will sit with a decision before you make it. And it changes what you do with the ones that don’t go the way you hoped.

All of that brought me to the thoughts I want to share with you here and to walk through what failure actually does for us when we stop treating it like an enemy and start treating it like a collaborator.

Seven things, one for each letter of the word itself.

F — Freedom

A — Awareness

I — Interrupt

L — Leverage

U — Uncover

R — Reframe

E — Elevate

That’s a progression.

Release. See clearly. Break the pattern. Use what you’ve got. Expand the possible. Change the meaning. Rise with it.

That’s the arc. Let’s walk it together.

FREEDOM

There are many reasons we avoid decisions. But the reason most people will give, when pressed, is fear. Not just any fear — the fear of failure. What if I get it wrong? What if this derails everything? So fixated on what could go wrong, we lose sight of what we’re resisting on the other side of the decision.

That’s why, to fully embrace failure as not just an unavoidable part of life but a necessary part of success, we have to free ourselves of that fear. Once we recognize that we have agency over the decision and everything that follows, we can see it as part of how and what we build, rather than a verdict on our worth.

For many years, I passed up opportunities to advance in my career because I was afraid I would be rejected for not having a college degree. I didn’t think I would fail at the job. I thought I would fail at getting the job. Rather than have to face that rejection (failure), I just didn’t try.

I decided to call my own bluff and went back to college in my 50s, finishing the degree. What I found out was that the opportunities had never been beyond me. I was placing myself beyond them. What I learned from going back to college was that the degree didn’t open doors. Deciding I was allowed to knock on them did. And when I looked back, I saw how many doors I’d walked past because I’d decided — before anyone else got a vote — that they weren’t mine to open.

I realized there were many lost chances due to that false narrative. That’s what fear does. It gives us a picture that’s meant to contain us, not free us. Failure, on the other hand, is there to do just the opposite. It sets us free from that fear so that we can move.

AWARENESS

I spent a good portion of my career in business intelligence. We gathered data, studied it, sorted it, and handed it back so others could make better decisions. But no matter how thorough we were, it didn’t always lead to the best choices — because there’s no way to fully exhaust the data or model every scenario that could happen. In many cases, what we missed only became visible after the decision had already missed the mark.

That’s the hard truth about information. It can only tell you what’s knowable in advance. And most of the decisions that matter live in the space where the knowable runs out.

Failure is what reaches into that space. It shows you what the research couldn’t — not because the research was bad, but because some things simply cannot be known until you move. Over-research is my trap. And what I’ve had to learn, slowly, is that over-research is fear wearing the costume of diligence. It looks productive. It looks responsible. But past a certain point, more data isn’t making the decision clearer — it’s just delaying the moment when you find out what you couldn’t have known anyway.

Failure gives you that information in a way no report ever could. It also does something else, something I didn’t expect: it shows you how much of what you feared was never real to begin with. Most of the catastrophes we spend our energy trying to prevent never actually arrive. The ones that do arrive are usually smaller and more survivable than the version we built in our heads.

That’s awareness. Not just seeing what happened. Seeing what was real.

INTERRUPT

There’s a meeting you’ve been meaning to have. A hire you know isn’t working. A direction the business took eighteen months ago that hasn’t played out the way you thought it would. You keep moving. The calendar fills. The quarter closes. And the thing you know isn’t right keeps getting ignored.

Then something happens. A client leaves. A number comes in low. A conversation you weren’t expecting forces the issue into the open. And for a moment — usually an uncomfortable one — everything stops.

That moment is the gift. Most of us treat it like a setback.

Failure interrupts. That’s its job. Not to end the journey, but to break the momentum long enough for you to see what the momentum was hiding. It’s the trail marker on the tree — the painted exclamation mark that tells the hiker the path just changed, pay attention. It isn’t telling you to turn around. It’s telling you that autopilot stopped working a while ago, and you didn’t notice until right now.

The hardest part isn’t the interruption itself. It’s what we do with the pause it creates. Most of us rush to fill it. We explain the number. We reframe the client departure. We tell ourselves a story that puts the momentum back where it was, because momentum feels safer than stopping. But the pause is where the choice lives. The pause is the whole point.

When you let the interruption actually land — when you let the failure do what it came to do — you get something you can’t get any other way: a clean look at the path you were on, from a standing position. You can see the turn that’s already happened. You can choose what comes next instead of inheriting it from what came before.

That’s what failure is offering when it interrupts you. Not a verdict. A vantage point.

LEVERAGE

What does this make possible? It’s the closest I have ever come to having a true-life mantra. It’s not about being opportunistic. It’s about leverage. If you believe, as I do, that everything makes something else possible, failure has to be in that realm as well.

When I wrote my first book nearly 10 years ago, it focused on resilience.  The title is Adjusted Sails: What does this make possible? I had gone from an empty nest season to losing my job to facing a significant health scare. All within a condensed amount of time. Wave after wave of what felt like getting knocked down. I had to find a way to get back up. It started with understanding each of those situations as something other than failure.

That’s where I realized we already have what we need, when we need it — if we’re willing to see it. And to invest it as a resource into what’s next. That’s the essence of leverage.

What we might initially see as failure is ripe with possibilities for leverage. Not just within that moment, but for the future as well.

I learned that the failures I was trying to hide were the very ones that could be teaching the most. And not just because what you bury, you repeat. Because it is also often where you have the most potent opportunity to serve others.

UNCOVER

There’s an old saying — it’s been attributed to Alexander Graham Bell, to Helen Keller, and to Cervantes before either of them — that when one door closes, another opens, but we often look so long and regretfully at the closed door that we miss the one that has opened for us.

The quote has traveled through so many voices because the pattern it names is that universal. We stare. We linger. We replay the closing. And while we’re doing that, something else is becoming available that we aren’t looking at yet.

That’s what failure does at the level of a single decision. It closes a door you were counting on, and while you’re standing there trying to understand why, it’s revealing something else. Information you didn’t have. A possibility you couldn’t see from where you were standing. A version of the path that was never visible to you until this door had to close.

The same pattern shows up in the physical world all the time, at a much larger scale.

Earthquakes reveal to us what the Earth is made of. Seismic activity has taught geologists more about the planet’s interior than any other source of information. When the plates shift, they expose rock that had been buried for millions of years. What feels like a catastrophe from the surface is also — at the same time — the only way certain information about the world becomes available.

The science is one thing. Living it is another.

When my daughter and her family moved to Alaska in 2018, they experienced a 7.1 earthquake that November. What I watched them learn over the months that followed wasn’t just how to prepare for the next one. It was how to live alongside the knowledge that the ground could move again at any time. They had to make peace with a kind of uncertainty most of us never have to reckon with directly. You see and feel things differently when you’ve been inside them.

My own version was milder. I was stuck in an elevator in California during a quake once. The whole building swayed. There was nothing to do but wait. When it stopped, and the doors finally opened, I walked out into a world that had been rearranged by something I couldn’t see and couldn’t control. I couldn’t tell you what had changed. But I knew something had.

That’s what failure does, too. The shaking ends. The doors open. And the world you walk into is not the one you walked out of.

REFRAME

The idea of framing and reframing was more literal for me before I decided to pursue life coaching as a possible next career season.

I love art. I always have. Some of my treasured pieces go back decades. But of note is the fact that I rarely kept the artwork in its original frame. In fact, sometimes I bought a piece just for the frame because I had a different, but perfect painting for it.

So when the master coach who led the training cohort said that one of the key values coaching brings is the ability to help ourselves and others reframe situations, events, and ideas — it became an extension of what I’d already discovered in a physical application.

How we see things depends, in part, on how they’re presented to us. But only in part — because we can change the presentation. That’s what reframing is. And it’s led me to one of my favorite discoveries: perspective is truth in motion. Because we can change where we’re standing, we can see what’s true from a different place.

But changing perspective isn’t spontaneous combustion. It needs a catalyst. And quite often, what we first see as failure is exactly that.

The question then becomes what the failure is trying to show us. Not to review what happened, but to change what happens next.

As a possibilitarian, I try to live by another often-quoted truth: when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Failure is one of the forces that lets that shift happen. It hands you the new frame whether you asked for it or not.

Failure doesn’t change the facts of what happened. A different frame doesn’t change the actual painting. But in both cases, the meaning changes. And the meaning is almost always what we were really responding to in the first place.

ELEVATE

Some of my favorite memories from childhood and my teenage years are of family trips from our home in Ohio to West Virginia. We went to visit my grandparents and to see the places where my parents had grown up.

One spot that my Dad and I frequented was Hawk’s Nest State Park. We climbed the peak of Gauley Mountain for the breathtaking view of the New River below. I didn’t just see a place. I saw history. My Cherokee ancestors had lived along that river. They had walked where we were walking. They had stood on this ridge. I didn’t have anything to prove that other than how it felt, but their story became real to me from that elevation.

Sometimes, we cannot see what it is we need to see until we can go to a higher plane.  It’s still about perspective, but it takes stepping out of the frame for this one.

When we are in the throes of what feels like failure, it can be easy to see only what is staring us in the face when what we need is to rise above that and see the whole vista. When we do, two things happen. Where we are becomes clearer. And what’s just beyond us — the thing we couldn’t see from the ground — comes into view. Failure is often what lifts us high enough to see both at once.

You don’t get better at decisions by making more of them; you get better by letting each failure raise the floor you make the next one from. Because once you’ve experienced the view from above, you’ll know how to find it again.

Which of those attributes of failure resonated most with you? While these do show a progression, it doesn’t mean that every failure does all of them every time. And, you may find, as I did, that as you work through them, you also begin to improve your overall decision framework because the lens keeps adjusting.

In his recently released book, How to Get a Return on Failure: Fail Smarter—Return Stronger, John C. Maxwell talks about this as moving from apprehension to appreciation of failure. His thesis is that to get a return on something, we have to first appreciate its value.

“Appreciating failure means properly estimating the advantages it brings as you learn from it. The ability to deal with failure opens doors to the exploration of new territory and a life of greater potential.”

That progression from apprehension to appreciation is what the seven letters are tracing. Freedom is where apprehension loosens its grip. Elevate is where appreciation finally settles in. Everything in between is the work of getting from one to the other.

Here are three ways you can begin that practice for yourself:

1. Pick one decision you’ve been circling for more than two weeks. Not the biggest one — just one. Now ask: am I stuck because the decision is actually unclear, or because I haven’t decided what failure would mean if I got it wrong? (Write down the answer before you do anything else.)
2. Look at the four behaviors I’ve mentioned — delaying, over-researching, holding on, and avoiding. Which one is running right now, in your life, today? (Name the decision underneath it. That’s where failure can work for you.)
3. For the next decision you face this week, don’t ask “what if this fails?” Ask “what could failure here make possible?” (Then decide.)

The decision you’ve been avoiding isn’t waiting for more information. It’s waiting for you to decide what failure would mean — and decide it doesn’t mean what you’ve been telling yourself it means. That’s the only decision underneath the decision. Everything else is just the path.

When we stay focused on finding the good in every situation — and on what it is making possible — success becomes inevitable.

That’s what I want for you, for all of us.

The post What do we keep missing about failure? appeared first on Kathi Laughman.

Welcome to the fourth installment of our Personal FAQs series, where we are exploring questions that can serve us as we continuously recenter, realign, and move forward with clarity throughout our lives.

To make it easier to have questions that can help based on where we are and what we need at any juncture, we are looking at five different FAQs domains.

We have covered the first three domains and are moving on to Integration and Rhythm.

The Five Personal FAQ Domains:

1. Identity & Purpose
2. Work & Contribution
3. Decision-Making & Direction
4. Integration & Rhythm
5. Growth & Legacy

Integration & Rhythm

When you live your life
in harmony with your purpose,
there is no conflict or dissonance,
only clarity and direction.
~Kathi Laughman

This week’s topic is one of my favorites because I have spent much of my professional life focused on how to use effective integration to create bridges. Whether it has been between various groups, companies, trading partners, software solutions, or even entire industries, effective integration has been, for me, the ultimate playground for innovation.

Whether we are talking about our life, our work, or any of our roles, it isn’t about balancing competing silos. Like a beautiful tapestry, integration is about weaving things together. Then the rhythm is the tempo. It’s how your commitments, values, and energy flow together without forcing harmony where it doesn’t exist.

But even more than those silos, it’s key to know that integration isn’t about smashing all the pieces of a disparate group into one tidy puzzle. It’s more like jazz. Each instrument (your roles, goals, commitments, values) has its own sound, but the music only works when they listen to one another.

Rhythm provides the tempo, the pacing, the groove that keeps the music going.

Integration is about coherence; rhythm is about sustainability.

The most important thing I look for in a musician
is whether he knows how to listen.
~ Duke Ellington

Why It Matters

When we live without integration, life sounds more like competing noise than music. When we live without rhythm, even good things wear us down because we’re out of tempo. Together, integration and rhythm help us create a life that works in harmony, not because everything is easy, but because everything fits.

Without rhythm, even integrated priorities collapse under exhaustion. Integration ensures alignment, while rhythm ensures longevity.

What to Look For

• Are your priorities creating harmony or dissonance?
• Do your commitments flow together, or do they compete?
• Is your pace sustainable, or are you sprinting through a marathon?
• Do you have natural “rests” built in, like pauses in a song, that make the music stronger?
• Is your calendar consistent with your deeper story?

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.
~Dizzy Gillespie

Integration and Rhythm FAQs:

Remember that these FAQs aren’t about grand revelations. They are about grounding. They are prompts designed to invite honesty and curiosity about our current and future state. Only choose those that resonate with you for the season you are in.

• What daily or weekly rhythms help me feel most alive and support my best work?
• What would integration look like if I treated my life less like a checklist and more like a composition? (My personal favorite!)
• What is the integration I’ve been resisting?
• Where do I need to slow down or speed up to restore balance?
• Where in my life do I feel most “out of tune,” and what would bring it back into harmony?
• How can I create natural pauses or “rests” in my schedule that strengthen the overall flow?

How do you know you’re asking the right questions?  

• The noise starts to quiet.
• You begin to notice less friction and more flow.
• You no longer feel like you’re juggling parts.
• Instead, you feel like you’re directing an ensemble.
• There’s a sense of coherence between what you want and what you’re doing.
• Your calendar feels like an ally instead of an enemy.

Integration and rhythm aren’t about perfect balance. They are essentially about freedom. Like jazz, the beauty isn’t in playing every note, but in choosing the right ones, and leaving space where silence belongs.

When your life begins to sound more like music than noise, you know you’ve found your rhythm. And from that rhythm, possibility opens. Not because you control every beat, but because you trust yourself enough to improvise.

And, by the way, here’s the best part: when you find your rhythm, you make space for others to join in. The music grows, the themes expand, and what you’ve created becomes more than a moment. It becomes a legacy. That’s where we’re headed next: Growth & Legacy.

This Week’s Additional Resources:

Note: This domain’s resources are a reading list I’ve put together for you because so many of you have said this is an area where you face the greatest resistance.

The idea, even fear, of doing less to accomplish more is so foreign to us that it’s no wonder we push back on that harder than anything. Each of these books speaks to something in that ongoing riff we have going with ourselves.

Check them out and then choose the one that makes the back of your neck tingle a bit. It’s likely the one you most need to read next. 

• The Art of Possibility — Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander

Blends the perspectives of a symphony conductor and a psychotherapist to show how possibility thinking reshapes how we work, create, and live. A beautiful reminder that life, like music, expands when we choose to see what’s possible.

• Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less — Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Challenges the myth that harder work equals better results. Pang draws on science and stories from great thinkers (from Darwin to Stephen King) to show why deliberate rest fuels creativity and productivity.

• The Infinite Game – Simon Sinek

Finite games, like football or chess, have known players, fixed rules, and a clear endpoint. The winners and losers are easily identified. Infinite games, games with no finish line, like business or politics, or life itself, have players who come and go. (Think of a symphony vs. a jazz trio).  Simon Sinek offers a framework for leading (and living) with a commitment to a vision of a future world so appealing that we will build it week after week, month after month, year after year, even though we do not know the exact form this world will take. 

• Slow Productivity – Cal Newport

Drawing from deep research on the habits and mindsets of a varied cast of storied thinkers from Galileo and Isaac Newton to Jane Austen and Georgia O’Keeffe, Newport lays out the key principles of “slow productivity,” a more sustainable alternative to the aimless overwhelm that defines our current moment.

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and total involvement with life. Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance, so that we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives.

• Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives – Richard A. Swenson

Margin is the space that once existed between ourselves and our limits. Today, most of our lives are marginless as we battle overwhelm, burnout, and hurry. But there is a path to the life of balance and peace we crave. The benefits can be good health, financial stability, fulfilling relationships, and availability for your divine purpose.

• Elastic Habits: How to Create Smarter Habits That Adapt to Your Day – Stephen Guise

No two days are the same. By making your habits elastic, you can adapt to conquer every unique day of your life. The ultimate improv approach! Elastic habits give you an answer for every situation. Any dread or sense of monotony you’ve felt about forming habits will disappear, because this system is dynamic and exciting.

The post FAQ Series: Integration & Rhythm-Bringing Possibilities to Life appeared first on Kathi Laughman.

Even though I write every day and publish each week, there are still times when, when I first sit down at my desk, I don’t know what to write.

Not because there isn’t anything to say, but because there is too much.

Too many thoughts. Too many possibilities. Too many truths all asking to be heard. It occurred to me that maybe that is itself a message.

We often imagine creativity, clarity, or insight arriving as a single beam of light—sharp, clear, focused.

But more often, it arrives like a kaleidoscope. Beautiful, yes—but also jumbled. Chaotic. Demanding that we sit still long enough for the patterns to reveal themselves.

It struck me that this is exactly how life feels sometimes, especially in the in-between.

So much of life isn’t lived in the big moments, the clean-cut chapters, the obvious transitions. It’s lived in the spaces between them. That undefined, often uncomfortable space after something ends but before the next thing fully begins.

We know how to talk about the before.

Before the diagnosis.
Before I became a mother or a grandmother.
Before the pandemic.
Before I lost my Mom.
Before I left my job.
Before I moved.

After is easy as well.

After the move.
After the loss.
After everything changed.

We think in those terms once it’s all said and done.

But we rarely speak of what happens in between.

We rarely talk about that strange middle space where we are neither who we were nor yet who we’re becoming. This is a space where there is no clarity, just movement, questions, and pivotal decisions. It is the place where transformation happens, but slowly, silently, like roots growing in the dark.

I’ve been thinking about my own recent in-betweens.

Standing in the liminal space between freedom and purpose, and realizing they were not opposites but dance partners.

Maybe you’ve had those seasons too. Or perhaps you are in one even now.

Where the role changes, but the new rhythm hasn’t arrived.
Where the friendship fades, but the grief hasn’t caught up.
Where the calendar is open, but the heart is crowded with uncertainty.

These in-between moments don’t get celebrated. We don’t have parties for them. No card says, “Congratulations on not knowing what comes next!”

But they are where life truly happens. They are where we decide who we are becoming.

It’s not the wedding or the divorce, the new job or the layoff, the diagnosis, or the recovery. It’s the moments before we know what any of those really mean. The quiet, confusing, often sacred space where we wait, question, wrestle, and become.

So much of our growth happens in that undefined middle.

And in many ways, we’re always in one. The truth is that we are always standing on the threshold of something, being led to letting go, reaching for, holding steady. It’s humbling. It’s uncomfortable. It’s profoundly human.

The important part of this is to remember that while we don’t always choose the before, we do get to choose the after.

And that… changes everything.

Which brings me back to the space between and what we do with all of this.

Whether it’s about identity, purpose, relationships, or healing, these in-between spaces call us to be intentional. They ask us to stop waiting for clarity to arrive before we act. Instead, they invite us to act with hope, even when clarity is still on its way.

We acknowledge that the in-between is not a pause in the story. It is part of the story.

We honor the space for what it offers—time, growth, intentional change.

And then we ask: What do I want my “after” to be?

That question doesn’t initially require a complete answer. But it does at least prompt a slight shift in direction, a choice, an act of courage, kindness, or connection.

You see, even when the in-between feels like a waiting room, a pause, a delay. It’s not.

It’s a bridge.

A bridge we build, piece by piece, step by step.

Some days, the next piece fits easily. Other days, it takes time to find the right shape. But every choice, every insight, every small act of courage is a puzzle piece in the bridge from where we are to where we are going.

We aren’t meant to wait until the bridge is fully built before crossing it.

We are meant to build it by crossing it.

There’s a certain beauty in that. It means that even when we don’t know the full picture, we can still move forward and begin to build something whole, meaningful, and strong.

It begins with recognizing where we are.

What season of “in between” are you living through right now?

What is it asking of you—and what is it making possible?

I’d love to know if you want to share it.

The post Building Bridges: Embracing the In-Between appeared first on Kathi Laughman.