Someone who’s been awarded an Order of Australia can’t have failed much, right? Wrong.

The former Managing Director of Orion Expedition Cruises is among a bunch of other industry legends stepping up and sharing their success stories – and their failures along the way.

Bratton best describes failure, or the possibility of it, through a metaphor.

“When you are at the diving pool, standing on the 10m platform, about to do a new dive that you have never performed before, you need confidence in your ability, you need confidence in the training you have undertaken, confidence in your coach’s assessment of your ability to execute the dive, you need to be able to visualise what needs to be done to ensure you do not land flat and hurt yourself,” she told TW.

“Your heart is racing, you are about to do something you have never done before, it’s terrifying.”

And she stresses the importance of confidence – even if you might not succeed the first time round.

“You know you have put the hard work into doing this, you know you have the skills, you know you have the right people around you, you now need the confidence you can pull it off,” she continued.

“If you land flat, is that failure? NO. It hurts for a while, but you get back up there and do it again, and again, and again until you get it right.”

The rest of our fabulous speakers can attest to this – they had to fall flat a few times before they got it right as well, but that’s what success is all about.

And throughout her long tourism career, Bratton has certainly had some failures – along with a few success stories, of course.

“Every entrepreneur and every success story has many failures. Without them, we wouldn’t have new enterprises or industries,” she said.

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