The Missing Step Between Failure and Growth

“You don’t learn from your mistakes. You learn from your reflection on them.”

There’s a popular myth that failure makes us better leaders. But failure on its own often just leaves scars.

Consider Winston Churchill. In 1915, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he championed the Dardanelles campaign at Gallipoli - a bold attempt to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. It ended in catastrophe. Thousands of Allied troops were killed, and Churchill was forced to resign in disgrace.

He could easily have written it off as bad luck, or buried it as a painful chapter. Instead, Churchill spent years studying it. In his six-volume history, The World Crisis, he laid out every misjudgment, his own included. He analysed the flawed assumptions, the poor coordination, and the overconfidence that had blinded him.

It wasn’t the failure that made him a better leader later on. It was the reflection - the deliberate act of dissecting what went wrong so he could avoid repeating it.

The point is simple: failure alone doesn’t teach you. Reflection does.

Why We Don’t Automatically “Learn” From Failure

We love to tell ourselves that mistakes are the best teachers. But neuroscience disagrees.

When you fail, your brain’s alarm system lights up like a flare. It says: “Something went wrong!”

But here’s the catch: awareness isn’t understanding.

If you don’t deliberately unpack why it happened, your brain files the event under “bad things, avoid at all costs” and moves on.

No reflection = no pattern recognition.
No pattern recognition = no growth.

It’s why so many of us keep stumbling over the same problems - different boss, same fight; different partner, same argument; different plan, same ‘stuck’ pattern.

The Reflection Gap

Here’s the trap: most of us think reflecting just means “thinking about it for a while.” But unstructured reflection quickly slips into rumination - looping over the pain, not learning from it.

What actually moves the dial is strategic reflection. That means slowing down with a clear process: asking the right questions, spotting patterns, and translating them into action.

And here’s the second truth: it’s hard to do this alone. Your brain is wired to protect your ego. 

It hides the uncomfortable parts, blames luck, or glosses over the patterns you don’t want to see.

That’s why even the most capable people need someone else in the room - a trusted partner who can draw out what you can’t yet see, and hold a mirror steady enough for you to face it.

That’s a large part of the work I do.

Because I’m outside your system, you don’t need to keep the armour on. You don’t have to be bulletproof with me. You can say the things out loud - the doubts, the mistakes, the moments you’d rather gloss over - and know they’ll be met with curiosity, not judgement.

My role is to help you do what’s so hard to do alone: take failure and hold it still long enough to see the patterns inside it. Not to spiral into rumination or shame, but to use it as a lever for change.

And in the long run, that’s why the leaders who thrive aren’t the ones who avoid failure altogether - they’re the ones who have learned how to turn failure into reflection, and reflection into strategy.

Final Thought

That’s the difference between “having an experience” and actually learning from it.

Failure isn’t a teacher by default. Reflection is what turns pain into pattern, and pattern into power.

So the next time you stumble, don’t just push forward. Take the time - with someone who will help you look honestly in the mirror - to ask:

“What is this mistake trying to teach me?”

That’s how scars become strategies.