Ann Bancroft

Ann Bancroft is one of the world’s preeminent polar explorers and an internationally recognized leader dedicated to inspiring women and girls around the world to unleash the power of their dreams. Here are her thoughts.

I always talk about my mistakes, especially when I’m doing a corporate keynote, as it makes people uncomfortable because they only like to talk about success. There are many expeditions that we failed. For example, Liv Arnesen and I went to the Arctic twice because politics pulled us off the ice in Russia after 20 days, which was heartbreaking. The following year, we went back and started from Canada, and then Liv froze her feet. We had to ski back out, and that was very painful.

At that point in the polar expedition, we had 5 million kids following us and sponsors, and it made you feel like you were letting everyone down. Of course, the kids tell you right away not to feel bad, and they have more wisdom than you could ever disseminate to them. There have been lots of failures here and there, more so than successes. Those are valuable stepping stones to gearing you up for the next one. You find the courage after you’ve had some successes and people’s expectations for you are high.

I have my journals from all my expeditions, so I can mentally go back there. It’s a place to remember specific facts. It’s a place where your books come from. And it’s how I met Liv as she wrote me after I had gone to the South Pole and said she was going there the following year. Asking could I share my expedition position reports and what I saw? Our routes were very similar, so I sent those off to her as a strategy going forward.

Expedition journals are just such a wonderful container, and there’s something powerful when I bring them on stage when doing a lecture, and I read from one of them, you can feel the audience. It’s like going to a muse, which may be my bias because I love muses. But seeing the artifacts of those early explorers takes you back in time; there’s something really magical about them.

I can leave you with a piece of advice from a fifth-grade girl, not my student, but she wrote me a letter, and I carry this note with me because I need the reminder periodically. It goes back to people’s expectations and how they view what you achieve. The fifth grader said something like this, “I hope I am as brave as you as you went to the pole. As when I have to change schools and make new friends.” It was in big capitals, and it had big hearts on it. I keep rereading this note because, to me, what it speaks to is risk is all relative, and it’s relative to the risk-taker.