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Aspire for More with Erin

This podcast is designed to mentor, motivate and create momentum to support the Executive Directors in the senior living industry. The Executive Director role is one of the hardest roles to succeed in due to the constant demands of the expectations from residents, families, home (corporate) office and associates. It is the goal of the host, Erin Thompson, to create an interactive environment that allows active support and mentoring in the same place consistently. A safe and neutral space where the silly questions, the hard and emotional questions can be asked without fear.

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Aspire for More with Erin

Fail Forward: The Freedom Framework

August 28, 2025 • Erin Thompson

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What if failure isn’t something to fear—but something to use?

In this episode of Aspire For More with Erin, we unpack one of the hardest truths of leadership: you will fail. But failure doesn’t have to define you. In fact, it can refine you.

Erin introduces the FAIL → GAIN Framework and shares personal stories, practical leadership lessons, and the mindset shifts that can transform mistakes into momentum.

You’ll learn:

Why assumptions are the fastest way to stall leadership growth
How to use failure as feedback instead of judgment
The difference between being more and doing more
How to build resilience that keeps you moving forward

If you’re an Executive Director, senior living leader, or anyone feeling the weight of mistakes and setbacks—this episode will help you see failure not as the end, but as the beginning of growth.

Key Quote: “FAIL becomes the framework that leads to GAIN. When leaders learn to fail forward, they build the freedom to succeed.”

Here is a F.A.I.L. to G.A.I.N. Framework for you: https://aspireformore.myflodesk.com/failtogain

New ED's Playbook to Creating and IMpactful Community Cultrue

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1:05

Okay, today we're going tactical. What if it all works out? What if we've been lied to our entire lives and we're so scared of failing?'cause we're really scared of the judgment that we give ourselves and the judgment that other people bestow on us. But what if it all works out? What if success and failure is exactly what you need to reach the goal to create the future, to be who you are destined to be? Because I believe the biggest lie we've ever been told is that we need to avoid failure. Now let's talk about how to accept failure, reject judgment. And learn from it all to create the future that we want You've made some mistakes. As a leader, I've made some mistakes. As a leader, I've seen plenty of mistakes made as a leader. It happens. Welcome to the club. It's not a disqualification. It is actually a qualification. to grow into the future that you want. Lemme just tell you something. I found myself on a phone call with private equity group this week, and I have had several phone calls with them. And why would they wanna talk to me is a thought that runs through my mind and they keep coming back and they want advice and they want consulting and they're, they're getting into the senior living space for the first time. And I as a default mechanism want to say to them, I'm not your person. I don't have this experience, and I don't have that experience. But then I realize I'm qualified. I'm qualified because they don't know senior living. I'm qualified because I know a lot more than I did when I was inside of a community. I'm qualified because my perspective is a gift and the way that I look at things. Is a way that they don't know how to look at it. And so then I find myself on a call when they want me to work with them, And I realize this is the greatest return on my failure that I could ever have to sit on a call with private equity group and giving them my opinion. And they want it. They're paying me for it. And to be able to say to them, you need somebody that can devote time and attention to the success that you want. I know that I can't do that for you right now. My life doesn't allow that right now, but that is the greatest return on my failure and a lesson. because here's what I learned through failure. The failure that I described last week is that I have to know my own limitations. I have to know what I want. I have to know what I'm capable of. I have to put myself out there and learn and fail and try again, and reiterate and do all the things. So when that conversation happens that. Opportunity comes my way. I can ground myself in knowing I'm enough. I can ground myself in knowing I've worked hard to be in this room, and I wouldn't have been able to do that if I hadn't failed, if I didn't feel uncomfortable by having this podcast and inviting guests and learning and editing. And being in meetings and putting myself in a room I didn't necessarily feel like I belonged to, because I realize now that going in the rooms that I feel unqualified for makes me qualified and turns me in to the person that I want to be six months from now, seven months from now, eight months from now. I wanna be in those rooms and I wanna learn and failing. It gave me that perspective. That's huge. But it's not even really failing. It is taking away the lessons that I learned and leaving the judgment. So How do we do that? Let's talk about it folks. We are gonna talk about failure. We're gonna talk about it very tactically. If you have pen and paper. Let's get it down because this is the secret sauce. Someone recently told me that there is freedom and frameworks. That means that there is freedom from judgment. There is freedom from the lack of confidence in stepping out. Again, there is freedom in knowing this is part of my process. let me give you some frameworks. Fail is not a word. That we're gonna be scared of anymore. Fail is an acronym, just like Fear is an acronym, right? Face Everything and Rise. Fail is now an acronym. Let me break it down for you. F is for feedback. What did this mistake teach me? You are giving your own self feedback and if you're brave enough, getting feedback from other people because that's important as well. Great leaders, listen. Not just to people, but to the outcomes that they had. the point of feedback is to gain clarity, and so you have to sit through that discomfort. You have to sit through the mud to figure out where the real clarity comes from. That's what feedback is for f. Is for feedback, a adjustment, What needs to change? Leadership is not about staying the same, because when you stay the same, you cannot grow. It's about being responsive, responsible, not reactive. If something isn't working. You gotta figure out why, and you gotta change something. That word pivot comes to mind, You gotta do something different because it's not working, so what's not working? The adjustment. There's power and adjustment. When you actually take the time to figure out what is it that's not working, it may just be one tiny thing, but you don't know if you don't get the feedback, if you don't gain the clarity and you're not asking yourself, what am I missing? What is this teaching me? Because clarity is the goal here, and in fact, I told that private equity group going through this exercise with you, it's fleshing out what you really want, what's important to you, It's adjusting things, negotiating things with clarity. Don't let it be too muddy where you can't see. You wanna get it really clear. So F is for feedback. A is for adjustment. I is the investment. What did this cost me? How much time? Because your time is much more valuable than your money because you only get so much time and you have a lot of opportunity to make money. what did this cost me from a time perspective? What did this cost me from an emotional perspective? What did this cost me from a financial perspective? how much money did we lose because we've failed and we have to pivot? how expensive was this mistake? And what am I getting in return? What is this failure teaching me? And is the return on the failure worth it to try again? That's pretty powerful. Questions. Every hard day, every hard lesson. It deposited something in you, everything. Is it learning how to problem solve? Is it understanding where my communication went wrong? Is it I gotta learn how to be gritty and work through this and not be so sensitive about it? Is it I am building my empathy account? Growing in that emotional intelligence and honestly the ability. to grow your capacity and endurance, because if you're a senior living leader, this is a long game. I like to sprint. That's just kind of like my favorite. I have never been an endurance runner. It takes practice, and honestly, I'm not that gritty when it comes to running, but endurance is a gift that I have in growing my potential. And understanding this business that I have, this podcast that I'm doing, the content that I'm sharing with you, the email newsletters that I'm sending out every Saturday morning, that is an endurance game. That's where consistency becomes your best friend, and you do it not for immediate return, but knowing that you're planting seeds. And those seeds don't grow in seconds. They will grow in seasons. And your capacity for what you can take and what you can grow through will grow as well. The investment is worth the outcome. If you learn and you pivot and you adjust, and you make the necessary changes to keep going, so don't waste the investment. Figure out if it's worth it. Figure out if you want it. Figure out if you're curious enough. And you have the endurance enough to keep trying again until it works. And the last one is leadership. The L and FAIL is leadership. Who else gets to hear this story? Are you willing to share the story? If you bury your failure, your team can't grow from it. I have to tell you. I was pretty much an open book. I'm sure that's not a shocker for you inside of the community. I feel like, you know, people need to know when we're doing right. People need to know when we're doing wrong and I, I just believe that's how you build connection inside of a community. And in 2020, when we first started doing all these Zoom meetings and I was at home one day with the kids, and I had to be on a conference call, I didn't think much about. Honestly, I forgot I had the conference call. It was a wild day, wild times, and I was trying to work from home with a couple young kids. and all of a sudden I remembered I had to be on a conference call or my, Beth, my RDO at the time could have reminded me to get on the call. I can't remember which one. And so I frantically put on a t-shirt, fixed my hair, and sat down. I did not think about the shorts I was wearing. I did not think about my kids coming into the call. I was in such a panic, and then my kid comes into the screen. I'm not a Zoom aficionado at that time. the boys in her underwear, and I get up and I try to shift them out, and I am in like pajama shorts. That doesn't necessarily sound like a failure, but I was Mortified because we were welcoming somebody new into the region. Mortified, okay? And so of course my heart sank into the ground. I felt nauseous like thinking about this. And then I go back to work We're in our pep rally meeting, which is something that we have after standup where everybody that's actually working that day comes to a meeting. And I tell them how I represented them on the call. And there was actually a regional, nurse there. I don't know. Somebody, somebody was there. I, I don't know who it was I told them my embarrassing failing story. And they laughed. They had a good time. I mean, they lived it up at my expense, It was a connection moment. It is I am one of you. I make these mistakes all the time, but here's what I learned from it. Be aware of what you're wearing, right? When you have new tech, when you have new. Circumstances. you gotta be more aware than you were before. You know, if you bury your failure, your team cannot grow from it, and it's really important to share it. Share it when it's not so raw and so hurtful, right? if you can't share it without really judging yourself, then obviously you need to be aware of that. But if you can share it, share a failing story, and then apply a learning lesson from it. And talk about how it felt. Talk about what you did to get through it. Talk about what you're doing to overcome it. You're gonna be an example of courage, and that's important in leadership, right? When you lead with transparency and humility and honesty, you give people permission to learn without fear. And that's what I hope I'm doing with you, sharing my stories with you. Because truly as a leader, you tell people how to think about your failure by the way that you describe it, you do because if you learn from it, it's leverage. But if you stay stuck from it. It's a wound that never heals. And that's really important. fail is a framework for success. It's not a stop sign to say that you're never gonna be good enough, that you're never gonna get through this. No. It is a framework and there is freedom in frameworks. Okay, so let's go over this one more time. F is for feedback. A is for adjustment, I is for the investment. What did you learn? What needs to change? What is this experience giving to me? And L is leadership. Who needs to hear this? So now that we have freedom in the framework, we have given ourselves permission to feel and fail. And grow forward, right? How can we just dissect each problem and reflect on the failure? it does not matter how simple or how small, or how large this failure was in your life. Every single failure is a gift if you learn from it and if you look at it as an ability to learn even a fight. With your significant other, can give you clues on how to never have that fight again. So let's dive in on how to do that. let's break down your last leadership or relationship, miss. another acronym to give you is the word gain. Now I got this acronym from, storyteller Tactics, and it kind of helps you break down the story of a failure. So I did not make this up. We will give credit where credit is due, but I have used it and it's fabulous. The G in gain is goal. Was I aiming at the right outcome or was I just chasing approval? Did I define what success looked like or did someone else. So let's think about it. a goal for a tour is to move in. And so as an executive director or a sales director or the nursing director or the activity director, or even the maintenance director, If we are all in this, going through this tour, and they don't move in, is that tour a failure? Well, if you define success as getting the move in, then yes, that tour is a failure. But it was that. The main goal of the tour, someone would say, yes, that you, for every tour you wanna move in. But some would say, we gotta get to the root problem here. What's an objection that's holding them back? if the goal is to figure out what's holding them back, then you can move forward in a productive way that adds meaningful, follow up, meaningful assessments, allowing the team the information they need to connect and continue to connect along the tour follow up process, the move in process, so a tour can have many different goals. let's talk about my own personal failure of being terminated or asked to leave a position that I loved. What was the goal? For me, the goal has always been to climb up the corporate ladder. That's what I wanted. In my mind, right? Like that's what I always envisioned. Like what success would feel like is if I get to a hundred percent, then I'm gonna go up to the next rung of the ladder. a very outdated and unrealistic for my life circumstances. But in my mind, that's what success looked like. But I never defined success on my own terms. I define that success because that's what society told me success was. I never looked at what success looked like to me, and so now I am very intentional about being able to define what success looks like. What's the goal, what's the goal of this podcast? That's gonna be what success looks like to me. If you want my honest truth, I want this podcast to motivate you to go out and fail and look at your past failures and release the baggage of what's keeping you stuck so you can continue to grow. I also want to reach 10,000 downloads from this episode, so the fact that you're listening to it. Means a lot to me. Thank you. I'm so close, and when that happens, that's a big deal to me, These are the goals of success. If I can get somebody into my ED launch lab or buy a course that needs CEUs to give them the gift of perspective, that's a goal. My goals are not big and outlandish. My goals fit my unique lifestyle. They fit where I am at and they stretch to where I wanna be. That is a goal. So looking at a failure, why was this a failure to me? Was that aiming at the right outcome? At the right time? Or was I aiming too high and I didn't have all the information I needed? Did I define success well enough to myself and the team, or did someone else define that success for me? And is it realistic? That is important. Assumptions, my God. Let's talk about assumptions folks. Assumptions are killers to momentum. They are killers to success and they are killers to relationships. When we talk about clear is kind, that is really talking about assumptions are killers. If you are assuming you were unclear, if you are assuming people's thoughts. You are holding yourself back. I had a coaching client that I'm working with and the community is not where it needs to be, from an occupancy standpoint. and I asked her one question because it was a question I had to realize about myself, especially when I was working for underperforming communities. When people walk into your community, do you think. That they are thinking about the fact that you have 25 vacant rooms, the fact that you have been through a few management companies, the fact that you're struggling to gain occupancy, and that you are desperate. Do you think that they think that and that they know that? And she looked at me and she said, yeah, wrong. You are making assumptions. And that is a problem. Because you're not showing up as your best self because you are wasting so much energy on overcoming mountains and hurdles the family, the potential resident aren't even there and you're losing the ability to connect because you feel smaller and you feel less than. When really all you have to do is understand that clear is kind, listen and ask questions so you can know where their perspective is. That's powerful. It's the same thing in relationships in your marriage. It's the same thing when you're dealing with your caregivers. what are we assuming and when we assume we start solving problems that we don't even have to.'cause they're not real problems because we never asked the questions. I was in the ed launch lab and we were talking about how questions are powerful tools for leaders from an operational standpoint and from a sales director standpoint. And there was an example given that day, just a few hours before our launch lab session where the executive director there asked questions. And now if she had not asked questions, and she would have just assumed. Then there would've been a huge drama going on between the caregivers, because when one caregiver tells you something, you can assume that she spoke to the other caregiver. But if you ask questions and you say, did you ask the other caregiver? Did you do this? Did you do that? She realized none of that had been done. So when you assume communication was thorough, when you assume. That other people don't care or that this isn't gonna bother them. You are setting yourself up to fail. Yes, it requires a little more effort. Yes, it requires a little bit more energy, but let me tell you something, it will be less energy than what is required when the stuff hits the fan, because there was no communication. So some questions to think about. Assumptions through failure, right? What did I think I knew? What did I assume other people were thinking? What didn't I know then that I know now? What did I not control that I thought were controllable? And what are the uncontrollables that I can't control, You gotta stop trying to control things that you can't control. It's never gonna happen for you. It's never gonna work, ever. You can't control people. You can't control reactions, but you can control your own capacity to solve problems. You can control your reactions and you can control. When to stop assuming and when to start gaining clarity on every situation. when we ask somebody to do something for us, are we assuming they know how to do it? Are we assuming that they understand what we're going to use this document for? Or are we saying to them, Hey, I really need this document made. Here's the end result. Here's what I'm going to use it for. Here are some of the necessary frameworks that I need, and here's the freedom to go create it. You cannot get mad at somebody if they did not deliver something to you, if you were assuming they understood. People cannot read your mind. It doesn't matter how good they are in understanding energy and being present and emotionally intelligent, they cannot read your mind. Do not assume people know what you're thinking. Assumption kills communication. In fact, there is no communication when people assume. So take the effort to ask the questions. Clear is kind. Giving people, clarity is kind, even if it's uncomfortable. My God, it is so kind because being unclear is being unkind, and that is really important Insights. So G, in gain, we are learning how to gain from failure here. The G in gain is the goal. What am I aiming? Was I aiming at the right outcome or just chasing approval? Did I define success for me? Assumptions. Always believe that. Clear is kind. Always ask questions. Never assume you know what people are thinking. The I is insights. Ooh, when did I realize? This wasn't working, and did I keep going, assuming that it would work itself out when I should have taken the time out to say, let me look and see what's going on here. And did I not listen? Did I ignore the signs or did I push through them thinking that we were going to make this happen? Anyways, these insights, right? Reflection, taking the moment to look at the hard truth. Did I ignore the signs? Did I see it coming? Did I think that we were gonna push through when I should have paused and pivot? This is where the power of the pause comes in. Literally taking these insights and reflecting on them can turn your experiences into wisdom. The ability to pause and reflect will change everything for you. It goes back to who needs to hear this. in that fail story, Who needs to hear this? What did I gain from this? How am I going to use this? Did I listen or did I ignore? Did I assume or did I communicate and were people trying to tell me this wasn't working and I pushed through? Anyway? You can use the power of the pause. As leverage in creating the future that you want, and then new skills. This is the present that failure gives you, right? This is the present that looking through this GAIN acronym gives you every failure, every experience gives you a new skill. Do you recognize it? Are you using it? Are you just ignoring it and not even looking at it, right? What can I do now? Because of that mistake. What can I do now and what growth would not have happened without it? I can say for me that my growth in general would not have happened if a door wasn't so severely slammed in my face. and think about in every situation in your life when the door shut. And another window opened. What was that? I can look back at several different turning points in my life and I can realize that door had to shut for me to get to the next level of my life. my daughter had to make an F on a spelling test for me to realize that I had to be more involved in her spelling. You can make. Whatever grades, as long as you're trying, but you don't get to make an F in spelling because that's an open book test. You'll be writing your spelling words over and over again and don't tell me that you know how to spell the words because you just made an F, right? So I gained a new skill of perspective, and she gained a new skill of understanding how important homework was. That was a failure that we had to learn, and it also taught her that I don't care about perfection. I care about the process. I care about your potential. I care about putting the effort in to get whatever grade that you're capable of. And we know that an F is not the highest that you can get, so it was a learning lesson. There was a lot of assumptions in there. There was a lot of insights, and there was a lot of new skills learned because of it. So that's what we gain when we look at what happened. I want you to think about. That failure that you're holding onto over and over again, that may be limiting your growth. That may be lessening the courage to stand up in meetings or get in the room, or that you say that you can't do something because something else happened in the past. If you are saying that to yourself, whether it's personal, whether it's professional, let me tell you something. Learn from it. What did you G.A.I.N. from it? And if you haven't grown from it, let's reflect on it and figure out the insights that you have. What are the new skills? Was the goal wrong? What were you assuming? Because right now, the reason why you may not be growing from it or the reason why you carry so much shame around it, or that you don't want to talk about it is because you're assuming. People will care about it as much as you do. And look, maybe they will, I don't know. Maybe they will. But like I said to you on the last episode, I spent a long time trying to figure out how to tell people that I was fired, terminated, asked to leave, paid to leave, rejected, whatever you wanna say. And nobody cared. Nobody cared. But there is this ability that you have to be able to communicate how a failure, the door being shut in your face, or not being able to rise to the next level. Whatever it is in your life, you tell people how to think about it in the way that you react about it, the way that you discuss it, the way that you feel about it. And if you learned something from it or not, you pre-frame people on how to believe the experience affected your life. That is so important for you to understand and it goes something like this. Yes, I worked at a community for 10 years and I was asked to leave that community and it hurt. It hurt really bad. In fact, I wanted to sit in a hole and cry for a long time, even though I knew that the relationship was over. But here's why. It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because I grew from it, because I learned actually that I had a voice, that I had something to say, and that I was able to grow my confidence in all the micro moments. Of learning how to start a podcast, learning how to be a speaker, to working through the shame of rejection, and learned that rejection was my deepest wound that I was covering up my entire life. And when I exposed that wound to the air and I found its stronghold on my life, The energy inside of me started changing and I no longer attract people who will not see me for my worth. I will only be attracting the people who want what I have to offer, and I will not feel less than when people fall off because they don't need what I need or they don't need what I have to offer. And I will always go into a room and be so glad that I'm there. No matter if I'm the smartest one in the room, Or the least experienced? Because my goal and my life is to grow, and if that experience had not happened to me, I don't know if I would've learned how to live the life that I'm living now. That's how you turn failure into the biggest gain of your life. And I mean, Every word. Now, if I ever saw those people, in a room, would I feel a little small? Maybe would I be nervous? Yes. would I look them in the eye? Yes, I think I would. I'm proud of who I am and I'm so thankful for the opportunity and I have gained so much from the experience. And that's important. It's important for you to be able to say in your life and your failure, is this a good miss or is this a bad miss? a good miss is something that is still the failure you tried and you're learning to pivot and you're gonna learn to do something a little bit better and it's going to get you closer to your goal. That's a good miss. A bad miss is when you're not gonna be any closer to your goal. You were trying something that wasn't going to propel you into the direction that you want to go, or you're staying stuck and you're not learning how to grow from it. That's a bad miss. So how can you turn every failure, every bad outcome into a good miss? It's the freedom of the framework of fail feedback, adjustment, insights, leadership, and the tactical dissection of gain. I wanna make every failed outcome a good miss in creating the future that I want. According to a Harvard Business Review, the most resilient leaders do not avoid failure. They reflect. And recalibrate within 72 hours. I tell myself, you have three days. You know, my son had a lot of health issues. at the very beginning. It was gut wrenching. And when they had to put his trache in. I was devastated. I mean, he was two months old. he couldn't breathe on his own, it was like the worst day of your life. And then they had to put a trache in, in order for him to survive. And then I was faced with this moment of, now I have to keep this child alive. And we didn't know how long this TRA was going to be in there. We didn't really know. All I know is that my world came crashing down, and I didn't know what to do. And the NICU nurses, God love'em, I could not be where I am today without them. Wanted to start teaching me how to suction his trach and clean it and all these things immediately, but my world had just come crashing down. And I said to them, I can't do this. I cannot take on this responsibility. I had been in the NICU every day since the day he was born, and I had been discharged from the hospital. When I was let go the first time from that company, my job became to be the administrator of his care, and I was there every day, all day. I was there for doctor rounds, And then my world came crashing down. Hope had left the building, and I had to say, I need 72 hours. I can't do this. I will come back to you on Monday. Ready, but mourn. What just happened, the life that I'm not gonna have, and I need to figure out. How to come back prepared. And they gave me those 72 hours and I ate and I cried, and I slept and I did all the things that I needed to do, and I came up Monday morning prepared to be the person that he needed me to be. So in those three days where you are in mourning of something that happened, if it's that big, if it's not that big, take three hours, right? Write the failure down. Okay. Name the failure, then name the lesson. I was terminated, but I have grown and I am valuable, right? My world has changed and I have changed to, right? Identify the adjustment, the pivot, identify that, and then share it with one person. This is why coaching is so valuable. Because when you share it publicly with someone that you trust, your regional director, somebody inside of your community telling it to your team, you're accountable to who you are now because of what you've gained and what you've learned through the failure. So here's one thing I want you to write down. If you're walking through any type of. Leadership loss. This is the new thought process. I want you to think about, This mistake is my mentor, and here is what it is teaching me right now. Growth isn't clean, it is dirty. It is gritty. It is messy and it is forged through failure. There is nothing in life about growing and creating the future that you want for yourself. Being able to identify it. Know what success is to you. There is nothing clean about growing. Don't be scared. It is worth the outcome. Growth is the goal. Influence is the outcome. and knowing you are enough is the foundation because failure kept me stuck and not being enough. It reinforced those old wounds. Those wounds are healed now, and now I know that failure propels me forward. So I fail fast because I don't have time to waste. I want to be a success and I want to be an example to people that. You gotta fail to grow, and it's worth all of the energy in doing that. So if this episode resonated with you, help me get to 10,000 downloads. I really want this episode to be something that inspires people to look at themselves differently and know that this is worth it. And we're enrolling in the ED launch lab in 45 days. I can almost guarantee you, you're gonna feel more confident, more prepared, and more directionally focused on how you have to run that community perspective is a gift. And I'm gonna give you everything I have. and then there's also one-on-one coaching. My clients feel more confident in the first three sessions because I'm not your typical coach, right? I'm a mentor. I share my stories and I ask you questions for you to see yours in a different light. Coaching was the biggest investment and the best investment I've ever made in myself. And if not me, find a mentor. Find somebody for you.'cause it will change your life. As always, I want you to aspire for more for you so you can create the future that you want. Growth is the goal. Influence is the outcome and enough is the foundation for you to keep going. Talk to you soon.