Failure and the art of rewriting reality

This week, I went and spoke at a divorce support group.

I've never been divorced, but when I saw the call for speakers, I immediately replied. Because divorce is an area where people often experience A LOT of burnout and A LOT of negative self talk, and I knew that the work I do could be relevant and helpful for these womxn. 

The talk I gave them might also be relevant and helpful for you. 

Because what I chose to speak about was failure.

Failure is not a super fun topic.

But I think it's SUPER IMPORTANT that we talk about it anyways.

Because, for many womxn I know, it’s something we think about a lot, even in the best of times. And in the worst of times (like when we're going through a divorce, or a layoff, or a difficult health event), it can be an overwhelming, all-consuming topic.

So let's talk about it. 

Let's talk about how hard it can be to manage our own criticisms and judgments of ourselves, how hard it can be not to feel like we’re just failing at everything.

How hard it can be to resist the mean narrator in our head that says everything sucks and it’s all our fault and we should have known better. 

Even if you would never say those things to someone else, the reality is, most of us *DO* say those things to ourselves.

And we think that because we say those things, they must be true or right somehow. 

We think that there must be something wrong, with us. Either because the mean things are true or because we're actually fine, but we keep saying the mean things to ourselves anyways (it's a lose-lose.)

But the real truth is that there’s nothing wrong with you, and those things our brains say aren’t even actually about us at all. 

How could this possibly be true?

Like most of what I talk about, it all comes down to social conditioning and brain science. 

As womxn, we've learned a certain set of social expectations and most of us measure ourselves against them often. 

And since these social expectations are usually impossible to meet and sometimes even contradictory, we generally come up short. 

Womxn are generally taught that it's our job to be really good at everything, not bother anyone, and take responsibility for everyone else’s feelings. We’re also often socialized to try to make all that look effortless.

(You can see why this is a recipe for disaster, right?)

And as I've mentioned before: even if you don’t consciously agree with these cultural ideas, they may still show up in the way you think about yourself and the world. When we were kids, we absorbed cultural ideas and social conditioning from everyone, especially authority figures like parents or teachers. And those ideas may still be playing out in your thoughts, even if you don't consciously subscribe to them. 

And let's also remember that the brain has many biases that distort how we see the world. The two I like to harp on are negativity bias and confirmation bias.

Negativity bias kept our species alive a long time ago, but now it means that your brain is much more likely to remember and obsess about negative stuff while simultaneously ignoring what’s going well, because what’s going well was less important for keeping humans alive back in the day.

Confirmation bias is our brain's tendency to privilege information that aligns with its current beliefs and ignores data that does not.

When you combine cultural conditioning with negativity bias, what you get is that inner critic voice that many of us know so well, insisting that whatever you’ve done or are doing or will do is a complete and total failure.

The voice that says we should have known better and comments snidely on all our choices but never actually offers any helpful ideas. And when you add in confirmation bias, what you have is that voice constantly showing you data that supports its criticism but also suppressing data that disproves it.

And this all happens in our brains all the time, even at the best of times, but when we’re going through a rough time, it can be especially difficult to navigate. 

When you’re going through something hard, like a divorce or navigating a difficult office relationship or arranging hospice care for an aging parent, and then your brain also applies social conditioning and its evolutionary biases to the mix, it’s a recipe for everything feeling very, very bad. 

Because in addition to all the normal social conditioning we all received as womxn, there’s also tons of social conditioning about particular topics. For instance, we have a lot of cultural ideas about what marriage and careers and families should be like. 

And when your life doesn’t match what your conditioning says it should be like, then your inner critic will come in with a lot of thoughts about that, and especially thoughts about what that means about you and your life.

For most of us, our inner critic will bring up the word failure, and then it will look around and find all kinds of things it can list as data about that. Not because there is truly so much to list, but instead because this is how confirmation bias works. Your brain sees what it looks for. And when it thinks you failed, it will look at you and your whole life though failure-colored lenses. 

But that’s not the only way available for you to see your life, no matter what difficulty you've been experiencing. 

And when you realize that the way you currently see things is the result of your social conditioning and your brain’s natural but not necessarily accurate programming, then you also realize that you can choose to tell the story differently, on purpose. 

There are two layers I want you to consider here. Layer one is keeping the idea of failure but letting go of the idea that failure means something has gone wrong. 

For most of us, it’s a given that failure is bad. This is a very deeply ingrained idea. And yet, lots of things that could be considered failure are not necessarily bad. And many of them are actually required in order to get to a place where success is possible.

Think of a baby learning to walk. The baby will not succeed the first time she tries. She will fall. She will fall many, many times. And it will be ok. She will fail until she succeeds.

And her failures are the only thing that lead to her success.

You might think that whatever is happening in your life is not like a baby learning to walk. But this is actually how all learning happens. As an entrepreneur, I have learned again and again that my willingness to fail and keep going and fail again and still keep going is the only thing that will lead to my success. 

Now let’s talk about the second layer. This one is more esoteric. The second layer of failure is this: failure is a subjective assessment. While it may seem like a fact to us sometimes, it is actually not. It’s only one way of looking at things.

And everyone has different ideas of failure. What’s a failure to one person is a Tuesday night to another. And you can keep the idea that something is a failure if you want to, but I would invite you to ask yourself - what is that belief getting you? And is that something you want to keep getting?

In light of this, I want to offer you a writing assignment. Like the word failure, it may not feel light and fun at first. But it is powerful, and it can totally change the way you feel as you go through life's difficult moments. 

The assignment is called rewriting reality, and it has three parts.

Pick something about your life that's been feeling difficult and write the story the way you currently tell it. No brightsiding, and go full out. Get every angry, terrible, agonizing detail on the page.

Then rewrite the story in facts. True facts. Not subjective assessments. These should be observable truths that everyone would agree on.

And if you want to be really, really wild, write the story a third time, telling only the good things.

Let me be clear: these are not things that make everything worth it or things that take the pain away or saying that things happen as they should. That's not what I'm about. 

This is just the part where you look and see what tiny good things you can find about the situation.

As an example, my mom died a few years ago. This is super sad for me and I wish it weren’t what’s real, but it is what's real. And also, I am a much stronger person because of the grieving I’ve done over her death.

That is the gem that I found in that experience.

And every experience has gems if you look hard enough.

That being said, if this part of the assignment makes you want to light your own hair on fire, feel free to ignore it for now. It’s for sure not about forcing yourself. It’s about being curious and seeing what you discover. 

You may or may not be going through something hard right now. But since you're human, you have for sure been through some hard things. And if they are still bothering you, this writing assignment can help. A LOT. 

Rewriting reality helps you see your own life differently. It helps you see your difficulties as stepping stones to your strengths. Because they are. We get strong when we do the things that are hardest for us. 

And this is the kind of work I do with my own clients all the time. The womxn I work with are incredible badasses. So are you. And, we also all need help sometimes seeing our own strength for what it is. We all need help figuring out how to tell our story in the way that feels best. 

And it's not just about telling the story a new way. It's about LIVING your story a new way. And 2020 is the perfect time to get started.