Well, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Growth Edge Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Laurie Baedke, and I am looking forward to today's conversation with Dr. Lisa Swanson. Dr. Swanson and I just met recently at a CME course where we had the pleasure to both speak, and I was so captivated by her talk that I couldn't wait to make her a new friend and invite her to a conversation.
Dr. Swanson is a board certified dermatologist and pediatric dermatologist. In 2020, after 10 years practicing in one of my favorite states, Colorado, she moved to Boise to become Idaho's first and only pediatric dermatologist. And so she has an amazing career and an amazing practice, but she also has a fantastic perspective on failure. And that's why we're here to talk today. Dr. Swanson, welcome.
Thank you so much for having me, Laurie. I am honored to be here.
Fantastic. Well, you gave one of the most remarkable lectures I have ever seen on a topic. It was, I mean, you and I both go to a lot of conferences. You speak a lot, but you put together a really, really compelling talk on failure, and you covered so much waterfront, but you did it masterfully. And I'm hoping that we can kind of replicate that in the CliffsNotes version in our conversation today. Fair game.
Definitely. Yes, yes, I'm excited. I'm excited to tell the world about my failure.
I love that moxie. So you told us when you were speaking in Newport Beach a couple of weeks ago about what it was that you wanted to be most when you were growing up. And it wasn't a pediatric dermatologist. What was your dream, Lisa?
Yes. So I love to tell audiences like, what did you dream of being when you grew up? And you know, I speak to a lot of medical audiences. So a lot of people grew up wanting to be doctors or nurses or, you know, whatever, something in the medical realm. And occasionally you get somebody in the audience that wanted to be a teacher or a firefighter or something like that. And then I tell the audience proudly that growing up, I wanted to be a wide receiver in the NFL. And you know, while it's hard for people to visualize my height on the screen, I topped out at five foot one and a half. That's where I peaked. And so my dream of playing professional football in the National Football League had to die. And I fell back on medicine. So yeah.
I love it. I love it. And when you think about your journey through your medical training and now in your medical career, what's something that you have come to believe about failure that you wish you had understood far earlier?
So I have come to know and understand that failure is a stepping stone to success. Failure, in my opinion, is necessary to achieve success. Because if you aren't failing at some points in your life, you're not trying enough new things. You're not expanding your horizons. You're not trying to do things that you aren't used to doing. And so it's through failure that we find growth and ultimately success and also it's hard to enjoy success if you haven't been through failure first.
But you know, it sounds so logical at face value, Lisa. We're sitting here on a Friday morning talking about this. And as anyone who might be listening on an average Tuesday afternoon might think, yes, I know that, but when we each come face to face with failure, that rational logic flies out the window, doesn't it? So what happens when I failed becomes I am a failure?
Yes, and I've been through this personally. I kind of joked at the beginning of my talk that when I mentioned to my significant other Larry that I was giving a talk about failure, he looked at me kind of with incredulity. Like, what really you like, should you be the one giving the talk? Because certainly on the surface, I probably portray an element of being successful.
But it was not always that way. When I was in medical school, after, you know, losing my dream of being a wide receiver in the NFL, when I started medical school, we took our first block of exams and I totally flunked them, bombed them, failed them. Like it was, it was bad. Like picked up my scores, and there was a note in there to like come see the team of people at the medical school, which it was horrible. And I felt like a failure because I had failed those three tests. It was anatomy, pathology, and embryology, kind of the first round of exams. And I remember talking to my dad and mom on the phone. My dad is a recently retired urologist, and so he had been through medical school and my mom would like everybody to know that she got a master's in library science. So she also has an advanced degree and understands the stresses of that. And I was crying, you know, like, is medicine not right for me? Is this telling me that I'm not cut out for this? Am I not smart enough? And my dad said, he said, it's a great thing this happened now because you have plenty of time to right the ship. It's a great thing it happened with your first round of exams. And he was absolutely right because, you know, I'm so grateful that I flunked the first set of exams. It allowed me to really realize that I needed to come up with a different way to study. The ways that I had studied through high school and college were just not going to be suitable for medical school.
And so I had to relearn how to learn in order to absorb all the information I was going to need to absorb in medical school. Had I gotten a C on those initial set of exams, that might not have been bad enough for me to rethink the, you know, start over completely fresh with a new way to study and learn. It's a good thing I flunked, even though it made me feel like a failure. And the concept of like having failed and then feeling like a failure, that's when shame gets brought into the picture.
Mm-hmm.
And shame is what's telling you like you're a failure. It's not that you failed at this one thing in life, like you are as a person, as your identity, a failure. And there are ways that we can combat shame so that we can help avoid our fear of failure and push ourselves to be our best.
I think that that I love all of that. And so much of what you're talking about has to do with first connection and community. Because when we experience failure, I think my inclination, my immediate response is just to retreat and hide because I'm embarrassed. I feel shame. And I often think about that Homer Simpson meme where Homer just like backs into and becomes consumed by the hedge, right?
Yes.
That's what I feel. And that's when we experience failure, we want to hide and we don't want to share it with anyone. But your outreach to your dad, your then connection to the academic success team was in fact the connection and the community and the counsel that gives you tools and a framework to be able to kind of zoom out of your limbic system responds to that moment and find a path to both embrace that perfection is unrealistic, no one is perfect. And like you said, you were you were then looking for and identified what is the study mechanism, what is the learning path that is suitable for me, most effective for me.
Yeah, yeah. And it was, there were steps of it that were very very embarrassing. You know, part of failing the exams, you know, you get called into this office to talk about, and you know, they're trying to help, but you just feel in the moment like, my gosh, like special attention is being paid to me because I'm so bad at this.
Course.
And then they tell you, like, you can get involved with this kind of remedial group for the pathology courses, and it'll be a group of other folks that did poorly on the exam, and then some teaching assistants that are being brought in to help. And in that moment, you're like, No, I don't want to do that. I don't want to be, you know, in this kind of Breakfast Club group of people who have achieved suboptimal outcomes.
Mm-hmm.
But I got over that, I swallowed my pride, and that was a huge step for me. That group helped me so much. And just also making connections to my peers who were also going through the same thing. And then some teaching assistants who had previously gone through their first year of medical school and understood the trials and tribulations. And then I also reached out to a friend of mine first year in medical school named David Benson. And in my talk I paid homage to him because Dave Benson saved me.
He took me through anatomy and he spent weekends in the anatomy lab with me and was just an excellent teacher and so smart and didn't make me feel dumb and guided me through it until I could get on my own feet.
Ugh shout out to Dave Benson. I love that so much. And you also gave just such a diverse and wide array of examples from sport and from industry and from history of the number of incredibly, extraordinarily accomplished, successful, and impactful individuals who fail nonstop.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I know you can't share them all, but just kind of give us a highlight reel so that each of us is reminded of the perspective that the most amazing people are constantly facing failure.
Yeah. Yes, the thing is everybody fails. Everyone who has achieved anything in their life has had moments of failure. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Lucille Ball was told that she shouldn't be an actor and she needed to to quit acting. Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first television job and was told she didn't belong on TV. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple when he was 30 only to return later and turn it into the juggernaut that it's become. And you really like everybody you look up to, every single person you look up to, everybody's success that you admire has come through failure.
Indeed. And you also, because you're clearly a sports fan, hence your original life goal, you gave so many amazing sports data analytics examples as well from from baseball, from football, from golf, from basketball.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, the the evidence is really compelling to help any of us to understand that none of us comes through unscathed.
Well, and we're all, you know, I think all of us, especially in professional fields like medicine, we're striving for perfection. We're expecting perfection of ourselves. Others are expecting perfection from us.
Mm-hmm.
And while it's important to work hard and do your best and, be your best self, we also need to have grace for ourselves when we aren't perfect and nobody is perfect. And I showed examples of athletes who were record setters for their competency and their ability to hit a baseball, shoot a free throw, kick a field goal. And none of those numbers were 100%.
And so we need to have some grace for ourselves that we're we're never gonna be a hundred percent perfect. We do our best, we, you know, we understand our why in in what we're doing and why we're doing it. We choose things for the right reason, we go about things in the right way, but we understand that we're human and nobody's perfect.
Absolutely. And I just I I want to applaud you for bringing such an evidence-based and engaging and and entertaining approach to a topic that is so difficult to approach because especially in medicine where achievement and expertise and identity are so tightly intertwined and where quality and precision is incredibly important. But again, in medicine, just like in sport. Perfection is unattainable. So even talking about failures and normalizing the difficulty for our junior colleagues, for our senior colleagues. And as a reminder to ourselves, I don't think that that importance can be overstated, can it?
I I don't think it can. And really, I think the point in failure and success and taking yourself from a bad place to a good place is looking at failure in the right way. Failure is there to teach us. There's a quote that I used in the presentation that failure doesn't define us, it refines us, it makes us better, but you need to have the right perspective.
You need to be willing to learn from your mistakes, learn from your setbacks. Don't just keep repeating, you know, the same, the same strategies. And you know, learn to develop yourself and learn to step out of your comfort zone in order to find a better way of doing things. It was really difficult for me to decide that I was going to start studying in a completely different way.
You know, I had been successful in high school and college. I had gotten into medical school. And so to throw away all of those strategies that had gotten me that far and start fresh with a technique that was completely untried by me was like very intimidating. But thank God I did it. Because it was only by learning new ways to learn that I was able, we should tell everybody, I did graduate, you know.
Clearly.
I did great in medical school. And it's because I failed that first set of exams that I did great in medical school.
Well, and I think that that is just evidence of the need for growth mindset and adaptive or evolving approaches as we traverse our careers. Because, like you said, you had performed incredibly well academically in high school, in undergrad, and you had to retool, kind of break down, think about like I I'm not a golfer, but I hear about golfers and they realize they have to like completely deconstruct a swing.
That's what I am envisioning here. And I see this in another way in so much of my executive coaching practice, which is with leaders or executive leaders and physician leaders and physician executives as they advance. So much of what has served them incredibly well so far is actually something that gets in their way because they're continuing to reach for tools or methods or mindsets that worked at an individual contributor level, but now don't work at a leadership level, or worked at it at a mid-leadership level, but now that they have scaled to a system level executive leadership role or an institutional level executive leadership role, the things that have always served them really well are now a low ceiling and they have to completely relearn. And not only is it extraordinarily inefficient and humbling, but it's really, really challenging also.
Yeah. And I think it's so important for us to all maintain our our ability to be teachable, to be coachable, to not take offense to reaching out for help from others. It's through other people's success that we can look at that and say, gosh, I'd really love, I'd really love to be able to achieve that. And don't look at it with jealousy or envy. Look at it with, here's a role model that I could potentially look up to and reach out to that person because true role models will want to help other people, like Dave Benson helped me. And so there's no shame in like reaching out for help. There's even data that we're better able to achieve our goals if we involve other people in them. If we even at least tell somebody somebody about our goals, it increases our chance of achieving it by 65%.
And if we find somebody in our lives that can be kind of an accountability coach or mentor, it improves our chances of success by over ninety percent. So reach out for help. There's no shame in that. It's gonna make you better.
Yes. And interestingly, that other person, your colleague, is probably has probably just been waiting for or hungry for someone to pace them and hold them accountable. And for them to be able to say, my goodness, I just did this, right? That psychological safety that comes in connection in community with others is really where the magic happens. But something else that you just mentioned a moment ago brought a word to my mind. And that word is curiosity, right?
Yes, yes, yes.
The learning. Talk a little bit about how curiosity changes our relationship with failure, Lisa.
Yes, so in the face of failure, one of the most important things to try to maintain and curate is your curiosity. Because take that setback as a chance to just kind of absorb and be curious about all sorts of things to help guide your next path, your next decision, the next step you take in your life. So increase your curiosity. Look at things and situations as if you've never seen them before.
I mentioned a Buddhist theory of this, of looking at things with kind of a fresh mind. And they call it vuja de. And I mentioned several times in my presentation, my love of Bluey, the animated series Bluey.
You did.
And there's an episode called Born Yesterday that actually encompasses this way of kind of looking at the world with fresh eyes. And pay attention to what excites you, what grabs you because if you're just kind of surveying and you're like, what's my next step? Let me just kind of approach this situation with fresh eyes. And all of a sudden something piques your curiosity and something captures your interest and something makes you excited to wake up in the morning and think about more and pursue. That is a big sign that that's the direction you're meant to go. So maintain your curiosity really always, but especially in moments of setbacks and failure.
Well, and for the physician audience who's listening, you're trained scientists and that humble inquiry, that that that approach of curiosity that says, Okay, I just found another way that doesn't work, on my way to finding something that will work is is to be embraced. But also you gave an example of a ceramics class and research about a ceramics class.
Yes.
Tell that story to us today.
Yes, yes. So there was a book called Art and Fear, and it was by two artists, and they told the story of a ceramics teacher that was teaching the ceramics class and divided the group into two groups, divided the class into two groups. One group would be graded on the quantity of pieces they produced. So the more they produced, the higher their grade. The other part of the class would be graded on the quality of an individual piece. And so they were set off for the semester, the quantity group, the quality group. Interestingly enough, at the end, the best pieces, based on what they call technical and artistic sophistication, were made by the quantity group. And they attributed this to the fact that the quantity group wasn't being precious about any one piece. They were exploring. They were being curious. They could try something one way. And if it didn't work, okay. They at least have another piece to add to the pile to enrich their grade. But then they could learn from the experiences of making that piece and create something new. And they were able to build upon their experiences of making a piece that they liked, but they just want to tweak this or this piece totally messed up. Let's not do that again. And through that process of a little bit of trial and error, their pieces were the best.
That's so counterintuitive, isn't it?
I know, I know. Yeah. Yeah.
And especially for those of us who have a little bit of a leaning toward perfectionism and who want to perfect it, master it, and wait and get that just perfect one.
Right. Right.
But the evidence is is pretty compelling that that's not the best approach.
And I think what this also says is like if there's something you're thinking about doing, if you're thinking about starting your own business, if you're thinking about creating a product, if you're thinking about starting a podcast, certainly a certain element of planning is essential. However, just diving in will probably teach you more than planning for a year or two. Because you're gonna learn very quickly, like, okay, this works, this doesn't. Well, there was a story in one of the books I read about failure talking about tech companies that they are anxious to start beta testing products. They really want to take from inception to beta test as quick as possible, because then they can avoid spending extra time on an idea that's just nowhere near going to work out. And it allows them to like, okay, this worked a little bit, let's tinker with that. Or this worked not at all. Let's abandon that. So get to your beta test maybe sooner than you might otherwise feel comfortable with because it's through that process that you're going to grow and learn.
Yeah, I totally agree. And I was actually just thinking of another kind of tech startup founder quote that resonates a lot with me. It's from Reid Hoffman, one of the co-founders of LinkedIn. And he's well known for saying if your first draft doesn't embarrass you, you waited too long to launch. Right.
Yeah, yes Yeah, yeah.
And and I've thought about that often. And that is so humbling and counterintuitive because especially as we advance in our career and as we ascend professionally, we lose that beginner's mindset that says it's okay to launch a rough draft, right? It's okay to build a new talk or draft a document that isn't it's gonna need a whole bunch of red ink. And when I think I look back at some of my decks from my earliest talks when I was first starting to speak professionally 17 or 18 years ago, and I am mortified. I am absolutely mortified, but I I wouldn't have gotten where I am today, and I certainly hope I continue to get better over the years that come if I hadn't started and practiced.
Yeah.
You know, it's it's funny you mention that because I've been in practice 16 years. Speaking at medical conferences became a big part of my career maybe 10 years ago. And when I started doing more of it, I had kind of set my sights on speaking at this dermatology conference that I was a loyal attendee of. And just I I love this conference. It's called Fall Clinical. It's held in Las Vegas in October.
And it was a goal of mine to be able to speak at that conference. And finally in 2022, four years ago, I was asked to speak at that conference. And there were a few years there where I was like, why aren't they noticing me? Why aren't they asking me? But when I look back, it was it was a good thing because those years that I was just out there honing my skills, getting better, speaking at multiple different conferences of various sizes, it was actually preparing me for the moment where I was living out my dream and speaking at that conference. And had they asked me earlier, I wouldn't have been as good. It was through the practice and the trial and error of speaking in smaller venues and smaller settings that I was really able to grow as a speaker and and take that stage and feel confident and feel ready and perform in a way that I was really proud of.
That's amazing. And I think just all of these examples, and I just can't say enough how much I appreciate your talking about such an important topic. And it seems counterintuitive, but we all need evidence that someone else that we're looking at that we know is credible and capable and competent has insecurities, has suboptimal outcomes, has bad days.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And far too often all we see is evidence of perfection, which is a lie. And then all we tell ourselves in our own mind is also a falsehood. Just talking about these things is so important. I'm just curious as we kind of bring this to a close and and wrap this topic up, how does changing the way that we measure success change the way that we experience failure, Lisa?
Yes, so this was a big part of my talk because we all want to be successful, but success can be different for each of us. I shared a story, I shared two stories of some musicians that were personally affected by this. So I shared the story of a guitarist in a heavy metal band in the early 1980s who the band was about to make it big. They had just signed their first contract recording contract and they were about to like hit the big time. And in that moment, the band actually kicked him out. Kicked him out. And he fumed. They put him on a on a bus from New York City back to LA. And he fumed the whole time about how he was going to create a better band and they were going to sell more albums and they were going to perform more than the band that kicked him out. And so this guitarist name is Dave Mustaine, and he created Megadeth, one of the best heavy metal bands in the world. But the band that kicked him out was Metallica. And Metallica on paper has performed more, has sold more albums, has toured more, all of those things. And he admitted in an interview that he still sees himself as a failure because his metric of success is to be as successful as Metallica.
And so he sees himself as failure, even though the rest of us would say, my gosh, you're so successful. The second story was of a band member in a band in the early 60s. Similar story. The band had just signed a recording contract. They were headed to the big time. The band kicks him out. He spirals, goes into a deep depression, even attempted suicide, really, really had a tough time. But in the end, his life changed for the positive. He met his wife, he got married, he had kids.
And in later interview, he said that he's happier than he ever would have been had he been in the Beatles, because this band member was Pete Best. And he was replaced by Ringo in the Beatles. And so he looks at it positively because his metric for success is having that wonderful family unit, growing his family, having kids, being that dad and father figure for his family. That was success for him.
So if you want to kind of change the way you're potentially seeing the world, think about what your metric for success is.
Indeed. And I just think comparison is the thief of joy.
Yes. Yes.
And for each of us, the more that we can hone clarity on what is meaningful to us, what we most want, how we want our identity and our impact to be known, there are infinite examples of counterpoints and counterpaths.
But only we can define that for ourselves. And those examples hit me right in the chest. And hearing them again today just kind of make me electric again, thinking about the importance of this topic.
Last question is just a closing call to action or message. Maybe there's a person listening who's carrying a failure right now, personally or professionally.
Yeah.
What do you hope that they hear or do differently because of this episode today?
So I think it's important for anybody experiencing failure to kind of go through the appropriate stages of failure. Just as there are stages of grief, there are stages of failure. The first stage is grasping how on earth could this happen to me. The second stage is coping, and there are healthy ways to cope, like exercise and eating good, and maybe listening to some music and maybe meditating. And then there are not so great ways of coping, like maybe. You know, maybe eating a little bit too much or drinking a little bit too much or shopping a little bit too much. And then stage three is acceptance, like, okay, here I am. I gotta move forward. This happened, but I gotta move forward. Step four is letting go, forgive yourself and move on. Step five is healing, kind of taking that moment to just kind of heal yourself. And then step six, and perhaps the most important, you have to go through all the stages to get to six.
But six is the most important, and that's rewiring your stories and your patterns. So take your failure as a learning lesson. Understand what went wrong. Look back at what choices you could have made differently and what choices you're going to make in the future. Identify the problems that put you in that situation and look at it as a positive, as a learning experience, because again, failure is not going to define us, it's going to refine us. And if we look at it with that approach, you're gonna be so much better off in the end. And you're gonna end up looking back and saying, I'm so glad that failed, because it was through that failure that I realized my ability to succeed.
Lisa, this has been extraordinary. Thank you so much for your brilliant work. Thank you for joining me today to generously share it with my audience. I am just I'm so appreciative of you.
Thank you, Laurie, thank you so much, honored to be on the pod.
