26. Failure
I one time read that we actually like and admire people more when they mess up or fail, as long as we generally see them as being good (whether that be good at their job, a good friend, etc). We love to see other people being human, so it makes sense that we would like others more when we can see that they are not perfect. Yet perfection is something that so many of us strive for in our own lives.
Why do we think we have to be perfect even when we know that’s not realistic or even possible? This usually comes from our social conditioning. While it may be true that people could admire us when they see that we’re imperfect like them, that might not be the messaging we received in childhood or from the culture at large. But this drive to be perfect actually keeps us stuck in all kinds of ways in our lives, because failure is an essential piece of growth.
Failure has so many potential benefits. But in order to take advantage of them, we have to change how we relate to the idea of failure - what it is and what we make it mean about us.
Also, here’s the thing: never experiencing failure is not an option for those of us living the human experience, which is all of us. Even if you don’t go after failure, it will show up in your life sometimes. So why not learn how to work with it?
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If you want guidance in walking yourself through my deep dive strategy sessions, subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts! Make sure to follow the instructions here to receive an email from me with the PDF document!
If there are topics y’all want me to teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why guilt and shame never lead to sustainable long-term success.
What matters more than having a perfect track record.
The importance of letting ourselves be human when it comes to our failures.
How to allow yourself to fail without creating a bunch of drama around it.
Why growth is not possible without healthy servings of failure.
How the narrative in our head leads us to believe we’re failing when we’re not.
What those occasions where we fail show us about ourselves and our potential.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
Leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to receive an email from me with my deep-dive strategy session PDF document so you can walk yourself through it!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we are talking about failure.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. If you’re ready to take control of your career, create more meaning in your work, and finally, finally experience some lasting career satisfaction, this podcast is for you. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, this week we are talking about failure. And it's a topic I have a lot to say about. And I think it's related to what we talked about last week, which is risk taking, the reasons we don't take a risk, the risks of not taking risks, and the things we can accomplish when we do take a risk.
But before we get into failure, I want to take a moment to read a podcast review. This review is called Great Insights by Clairecg. And the review reads, “I listen to a number of coaching podcasts, but I can already tell that I'm going to be putting Kori’s at the top of my play next list every week. She has great insights and is covering topics that I'm working on and want to work on in my career, and my life. Excited to hear more.”
Thank you so much Claire CG for this review. And I'm pretty excited to be releasing new podcasts every week. And I hope that they are all super helpful for you. And if there's anything you want me to specifically talk about on the podcast, and this goes for everyone not just Clairecg, you can reach out to me at hello@korilinn.com and make a request for a podcast episode. I love hearing from y'all.
I do have some requests that y'all have already made that I haven't had a chance to record episodes on yet, those are forthcoming soon. But I'm always looking to hear more about what you want to learn and what would help you love your job more, whether you want to leave this job, launch a business, whatever you want. I'm all about being here to help you make your career dreams come true.
I'd also like to say welcome to our newer listeners. We've been doing the podcast for several months now and I know that we have some new people in the audience. And I'm so delighted you're here and I hope that the podcast is super useful for you. And like I was just saying, let me know if there's something you want me to cover specifically.
Okay, before we get into this week's topic, I want to tell y’all a little story and it's actually related. So I know I've mentioned on the podcast before having a running practice. And that is something that just kind of completely fell off my radar the last, I think it's been a few months now, honestly.
And I don't even really know what happened or like why I stopped. I do think at one point I switched from running to yoga and then, I don't know, somewhere along the way that practice kind of sputtered out.
And I'm sure that you can relate and have had this happen before. I know I'm not alone in having a habit that I'm working on that then I just stop working on. I know that this is really common and it's something I coach on a lot. Whether that's like a movement habit, like what I'm talking about, or a work habit, it's all the same stuff. The teachings are the same at the higher level and then we can just apply them to anything.
Then also my girlfriend has a workout routine too. And by the way, I got her permission to share this story with you, so don't worry, she knows I'm talking about her to y'all. But she has this workout routine she's been doing and she's very consistent. She has amazing consistency.
But then she hurt her ankle. And she was so bummed y'all, because she wasn't going to be able to do those exercises. With her ankle it just wasn't wise, right? It wasn't going to work for her body. She couldn't put weight on the foot that had the hurt ankle, and she was so bummed about like losing her perfect track record.
And again, I know that's so common for so many of us when we fall off from a habit we're working on, whether it's like me that we just kind of are like la, la, la and forget sort of, I don't know, that we're doing it. Or whether it's an outside force, like we have an injury or something else is interrupting our capacity to perform the thing even though we're still 100% committed like my girlfriend was. We can get so bummed out and we can make it mean so many bad things.
And I think we have this idea that for something to be worthwhile it needs to be like perfect. Like, we have this perfect track record, like I always run when I say I'm going to or I always work out on the scheduled workout days. And sometimes that's just not possible and sometimes that's because we're just imperfect humans with complex lives and complex drives and desires and we have a lot going on. And sometimes it's because, again, like we have an injury or something like that, an illness, you know, all those things.
And so I was talking to my girlfriend and she was like, “I'm going to like lose my perfect track record.” And she was just, like I said, so bummed. And I was like, “But now you get the opportunity to have something even better than a perfect track record.” And of course, she looked at me like I was crazy. And she was like, “What could that possibly be?” And I was like, “Now you have the chance to keep going.”
This is so important y’all, anything you want to do in your life, you want to be able to do, any habit you want to have it has to be able to allow for you to discontinue and then re-continue. Otherwise, you have to have a perfect track record.
And humans live for a long time so that's really not likely that over the whole course of our lives we're never going to get an injury, or we're never going to get an illness, or we're never going to have some other kind of interruption. Or we're never just going to like stop caring about prioritizing the thing for a while or get distracted.
And I think culturally a lot of us are like, “Oh, it's okay if I get injured or it's okay, if there's like some kind of outside force.” But I think it's just as important to let ourselves be human. And the other way we're like, sometimes we choose to prioritize certain activities over other activities and we do let some of our habits slide without really giving meaning to, in the way that I did. And we can still come back to it, right?
And the basic whole point of this is we don't have to be perfect to be good. And if being perfect is the measure of being good, as I often say on the podcast, then we're all fucked. Because we're all human, we're never going to have that perfection. And the more that we harp on the perfection, the more we see that as being like the desirable thing, the longer it takes us to get going again when we do have an interruption.
So my girlfriend and I were just actually talking last night, and she was saying how helpful that talk that I just told you all about was to her for helping her get back on board with her workout schedule now that her ankle is better. And we were talking about how that's so hard for some people, right? Because we get such negative self-talk about, you know, the period of time in which we weren't doing the thing, that then that kind of keeps us in the phase of not doing that thing.
I see this in all kinds of areas of people's lives, y'all. Here's how it goes, it's like we guilt and shame ourselves, you know, especially in the case of like I just fell out of the habit. Like people like me and what I'm talking about with the running, I fell out of the habit, then we're like, “Oh.” And we guilt and shame ourselves.
And then that guilt and shame, it's like we all grew up with this idea that if you guilt and shame yourself it's a good motivator. But what I know as a coach is it's not and it backfires. Like you can definitely use guilt and shame to kind of beat yourself up into a kind of like a burst of activity. But it's not ever going to lead to like a sustainable long-term motivation, or a sustainable long-term habit.
And then, you know, for the situation like with my girlfriend where I don't think it was guilt and shame for her, I think it was just disappointment. But even that, it's like disappointment is not a good motivator. I know sometimes we think it is but it's not because then it just makes us feel like shit. And we don't want to work out when we feel like shit. We don't want to go running when we feel like shit. We want to self soothe, we want to like watch some Netflix and have a bottle of wine, right?
So for her, it's like going from this idea of, “Oh, it's ruined and I'll never get it back.” To like, “It's not ruined I can just restart.” Revolutionary, helps her get back on to her habit much faster and helps the habit stay feeling good.
Because when we get into the guilt and shame cycle, or when we get into the disappointment cycle, then we build up this associative connection in our brain between the thing we want to do and a feeling of shame, guilt, or disappointment. And that's never going to make us want to do the thing, right?
If every time you think about your running habit you feel guilty and` ashamed you don't want to think about your running habit. You don't want to schedule running, you want to hide and pretend that that was like never a thing and you didn't care about it anyways. It will not get you back to doing the thing you were doing before.
And when we have grace for ourselves, it's much easier to get back to it, right? So like this week, well last week I decided and this week I actually started. Like I did restart my little, tiny running practice. And I had to let go of any guilt or shame I felt about dropping off from that in the first place in order to be able to restart and to be excited about restarting.
Because like, here's the thing, this will also probably happen again, right? And this is a blocker I see for a lot of people with their brains is they're like, and they call it like falling off the bandwagon, “If I fell off the bandwagon once I'm probably going to do it again.” And I'm like, “Yeah, I probably will.” So I need to feel like that's not the goal.”
If the goal is to never fall off the bandwagon again, then I'm screwed y'all. And then there's no point in me starting my reading practice again. But if the goal is I just keep coming back, I just keep coming back to the bandwagon, I just keep coming back to the practice and it's cumulative effort versus all in a row effort, like a streak, right?
If I have to be in a streak with no interruptions, that's just perfectionism. That's not setting me up for long term success. Whereas it's like, “Okay, how much more would I run if I'm allowed to like fall off the practice and come back, and fall off the practice and come back?” Over time I'm actually going to run a lot more and run more consistently.
So it's a different way of thinking about things than most of us grew up thinking about them. But it's really revolutionary and it will help you try and do all kinds of things that right now feel impossible because your brain is trying to set you up to be able to do them perfectly right away. And that's just, that's not real. That's not a real thing that's an option.
The real option is that we try and we're human about it, and we fuck it up sometimes. And then we keep going, and that's actually how we get to every big success we ever create in life. It's not by trying and doing it perfectly along the way until we hit the success.
Which leads into our topic for today, which again, is failure. So I read one time this stat about how when we mess up, but people also admire us, like in general if they like think we're pretty good at our job or like a pretty good friend and then we mess up, people actually like us more. We actually like other people more. And I think this is because we want other people to be human because we know that we're all human.
So when someone seems too perfect, we often don't like them as much, or we're like a little suspicious of them. And yet all of us, we're all like, “Oh, but I want to be perfect, though.” Which, I think, is super interesting, right? It's like, why are we doing that? Why do we think that we have to be perfect in order to be good enough? And do we want to keep that idea?
I think when there are people we admire and they mess up, we see them as more human. And we like that about them, it makes them more relatable. And while we may not always enjoy messing up, and while we may worry that it makes us look bad, I think it's fascinating that the opposite can be true for everyone else who's interacting with us. They may like us more. They may respect us more. And especially I find they may trust us more. Because when people seem very, very perfect, again, they're not relatable. And we're like, “Well, I'm not really, really perfect so I don't know if I trust that like you can help me or that you understand what my life is like, because your life seems so very different from mine when you seem perfect.”
Whereas when we mess up, or when we share what we consider our flaws or weaknesses or failures with people that can actually increase their positive regard for us. I just think it's a fun way to think about things. And I especially think it's useful since like, as I'm always saying, not ever messing up is not actually an option for those of us living the human experience, which is all of us.
And that brings us to this week's topic. Failure, yes, but also the potential side benefits of failure. And the reasons to go for failure, even when we have so much social conditioning that makes us want to run the fuck away from failure.
So not only is it possible that others will like you more when you mess up on occasion, but mess ups and failures always come with a side serving of growth. And growth isn't actually possible without side servings of failure.
Now, when we have a failure, we don't always take advantage of that side serving of growth, I see plenty of people leave the side serving of growth on the proverbial table. But if you want to grow, if that's part of what you're trying to do in life, if that's part of what you're trying to do in your career, that's always available to you when things go sideways.
For one thing, failure can show us where we have gaps in our skills. It can show us where we have opportunities to improve our processes and systems. When things fall through the cracks, we can think that sucks, and we can also think, “Okay, maybe it's time for new systems to make sure it doesn't happen again. How can I learn from this? How can I improve the way things happen here?”
Like, let's say you do a talk in front of your boss and you forget a full third of it. Like, we can totally think that sucks. Like you're allowed to think it sucks. If that happened to me, I would probably think it sucks.
But in addition to thinking it sucks, we can also think, “Okay, what can I do next time to help this go better? What can I do next time to ensure that I can remember more of my speech? How can I set myself up for better successes? What systems do I need? What skills do I need? What processes do I need? That's all super important.
Here's the other thing that's super important. I think we can even frame like, “Okay, I did the speech in front of my boss, I forgot a third of it.” That is still helping us get to a place where we do a better speech. Right? This is the part that people don't enjoy as much, but I think it's super essential.
Doing something badly is part of learning to do that thing well. To say it a different way, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. Because often when we're starting a new thing, we're not going to be great at it. We might do it poorly. But doing it poorly gets us closer to doing it well. Right?
Think of something, I'm like not a sports ball person, but think of someone who's learning to play basketball. Trying to shoot a basket and missing and missing and missing but still trying. And like changing how you try a little bit, again, changing up those skills, processes, systems. Practicing to acquire the skills and then like, you know, trying to change little things about how you're doing it. That is how you become better. Right?
Which actually, that already makes my next point. My next point is that failure is often a step forward on whatever path we're on, even if it doesn't feel that way at the time. Right? We all have these fantasies of being able to achieve our goals effortlessly and somehow arriving at the ability to do something we've never done before and like do it well on the first time.
And I know I have these fantasies and I am pretty sure I'm not alone. But in real life that's not what happens, or most of the time it's not. I mean, like maybe occasionally you try something and you're like a virtuoso at it the very first time. That's possible, but most of the time that's not going to be what happens. And if you have to be like a magical virtuoso to do something, what you are going to do in life is going to be very limited, right?
Most of the things that we want to do that we're not currently doing, we're not currently doing them because to try would mean not being great at them right off the bat. But who even cares? Why is it such a problem to not be great at things off the bat?
Like I know I have that come up for me too. But when I really slow it down, I'm like, “Wait, this is not a problem. This is just literal learning.” It's very straightforward. It's like math, we have to go through the steps like 1, 2, 3, to get to the steps 4, 5, 6 to get to the steps 7, 8, 9. And then we get to 10, right?
But that's often not how we're trying to do things when we're going after our goals. When we're thinking about taking risks, when we're thinking about potential failure most of us are not thinking, “Okay, this is a step in the right direction.” Instead, most of us are thinking this will be mortifying, and I will like literally die of shame if I don't do this thing well.
But the difference between these isn't in the “failure” it's in the perspective you take to trying things. Also, here's the thing y'all, failure is part of life. I was going to say it's part of trying, but what I've learned is that even if you're in a place where you're not pushing your growth edges, not trying that hard, you can still feel like you're failing. In fact, a lot of people do. Sometimes they feel even more like they're failing, especially if they're spending a lot of their time in their own head comparing themselves to other people. So it's like they're not even trying and growing. But they feel like they're failing all the time because of the narrative in their head about what they could be doing but they're not doing.
I felt like this all the time when I was in my 20s and I was in grad school, and I was trying desperately to figure out what I was going to do with my life. But I also wasn't doing a whole lot of anything about it besides like, let's be honest, crying and drinking a lot of whiskey.
So there was growth available there too, but it took me a long time to see it. And it took me a long time to begin trying things. But I want to point that out because I think so often, we're like, “Well I don't want to try things because I don't want to feel like a failure.” But if you're already feeling like a failure with the stories in your head while you're not trying, why not just try it and see what you can do and see what you can create?
All right y’all, let's recap. Failure is a part of life. Even if you don't try new things, you're probably going to fail at some stuff. And even if you're not failing at some stuff, if you're telling yourself all day long inside your head you're failing, you're going to have the emotional experience that you’re failing like I used to in my 20s.
But if you change your perspective on what it means to fail, if you change your perspective on what “failure” means about you, then failure can actually be a direct path to both growth and to achieving all your goals. Anything you want that you don't already have, being willing to try and fail and keep going is exactly how you get there.
So if you want to live your whole life not failing, that's not really going to work for also hitting all your other big goals, right? Like for getting the promotion, for getting to the position of VP of marketing, for learning the new software that you need to do even better in your job. We don't have to do growth in life, but most of us want to. And one key component of being willing to show up to growth is being willing to tolerate the experience of not being perfect at things we want to be good at.
That's how growth works. You start where you are with whatever level of skill you have, and then you keep trying and keep trying. And then you will get better. You will improve and that will move you towards your goals.
What you need to do though, to keep going is to have resilience. You got to create that resilience for yourself. And if you're telling yourself like, “I'm failing and it's terrible, and it means something bad about me.” Of course you're not going to want to keep going. Of course it's going to be a struggle to try anything you're not already good at.
So instead we’ve got to flip it around, right? We have to think about like how failure is moving you towards the thing you want. We got to think about how courageous you are to show up and do the thing, even if you can't do it perfectly.
I'm not saying that failure is always super fun. It's not, I've had a lot of failure in my life, in my career before coaching, and in my coaching business. I'm not saying it's like a super sexy, fun time all the time. But every time I failed it's brought me closer to becoming the person who can do the things I wanted to do, the things I wasn't able to do yet. And now I've done many of them. And if I had just stopped trying at my first failure or my 50th failure, I wouldn't be where I am now.
So I want you to think about like what could be possible in your life if you were willing to fail and keep going. What could be possible in your career if failure was the direct path to growth and not something to be avoided at all costs? What risks, to call back to last week’s episode, would you be willing to take if you were willing to fail and keep going.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I've got good news for you. I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call, I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category. So you can check that out on the testimonials page. All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. If you’re ready to take control of your career, create more meaning in your work, and finally, finally experience some lasting career satisfaction, this podcast is for you. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, this week we are talking about failure. And it's a topic I have a lot to say about. And I think it's related to what we talked about last week, which is risk taking, the reasons we don't take a risk, the risks of not taking risks, and the things we can accomplish when we do take a risk.
But before we get into failure, I want to take a moment to read a podcast review. This review is called Great Insights by Clairecg. And the review reads, “I listen to a number of coaching podcasts, but I can already tell that I'm going to be putting Kori’s at the top of my play next list every week. She has great insights and is covering topics that I'm working on and want to work on in my career, and my life. Excited to hear more.”
Thank you so much Claire CG for this review. And I'm pretty excited to be releasing new podcasts every week. And I hope that they are all super helpful for you. And if there's anything you want me to specifically talk about on the podcast, and this goes for everyone not just Clairecg, you can reach out to me at hello@korilinn.com and make a request for a podcast episode. I love hearing from y'all.
I do have some requests that y'all have already made that I haven't had a chance to record episodes on yet, those are forthcoming soon. But I'm always looking to hear more about what you want to learn and what would help you love your job more, whether you want to leave this job, launch a business, whatever you want. I'm all about being here to help you make your career dreams come true.
I'd also like to say welcome to our newer listeners. We've been doing the podcast for several months now and I know that we have some new people in the audience. And I'm so delighted you're here and I hope that the podcast is super useful for you. And like I was just saying, let me know if there's something you want me to cover specifically.
Okay, before we get into this week's topic, I want to tell y’all a little story and it's actually related. So I know I've mentioned on the podcast before having a running practice. And that is something that just kind of completely fell off my radar the last, I think it's been a few months now, honestly.
And I don't even really know what happened or like why I stopped. I do think at one point I switched from running to yoga and then, I don't know, somewhere along the way that practice kind of sputtered out.
And I'm sure that you can relate and have had this happen before. I know I'm not alone in having a habit that I'm working on that then I just stop working on. I know that this is really common and it's something I coach on a lot. Whether that's like a movement habit, like what I'm talking about, or a work habit, it's all the same stuff. The teachings are the same at the higher level and then we can just apply them to anything.
Then also my girlfriend has a workout routine too. And by the way, I got her permission to share this story with you, so don't worry, she knows I'm talking about her to y'all. But she has this workout routine she's been doing and she's very consistent. She has amazing consistency.
But then she hurt her ankle. And she was so bummed y'all, because she wasn't going to be able to do those exercises. With her ankle it just wasn't wise, right? It wasn't going to work for her body. She couldn't put weight on the foot that had the hurt ankle, and she was so bummed about like losing her perfect track record.
And again, I know that's so common for so many of us when we fall off from a habit we're working on, whether it's like me that we just kind of are like la, la, la and forget sort of, I don't know, that we're doing it. Or whether it's an outside force, like we have an injury or something else is interrupting our capacity to perform the thing even though we're still 100% committed like my girlfriend was. We can get so bummed out and we can make it mean so many bad things.
And I think we have this idea that for something to be worthwhile it needs to be like perfect. Like, we have this perfect track record, like I always run when I say I'm going to or I always work out on the scheduled workout days. And sometimes that's just not possible and sometimes that's because we're just imperfect humans with complex lives and complex drives and desires and we have a lot going on. And sometimes it's because, again, like we have an injury or something like that, an illness, you know, all those things.
And so I was talking to my girlfriend and she was like, “I'm going to like lose my perfect track record.” And she was just, like I said, so bummed. And I was like, “But now you get the opportunity to have something even better than a perfect track record.” And of course, she looked at me like I was crazy. And she was like, “What could that possibly be?” And I was like, “Now you have the chance to keep going.”
This is so important y’all, anything you want to do in your life, you want to be able to do, any habit you want to have it has to be able to allow for you to discontinue and then re-continue. Otherwise, you have to have a perfect track record.
And humans live for a long time so that's really not likely that over the whole course of our lives we're never going to get an injury, or we're never going to get an illness, or we're never going to have some other kind of interruption. Or we're never just going to like stop caring about prioritizing the thing for a while or get distracted.
And I think culturally a lot of us are like, “Oh, it's okay if I get injured or it's okay, if there's like some kind of outside force.” But I think it's just as important to let ourselves be human. And the other way we're like, sometimes we choose to prioritize certain activities over other activities and we do let some of our habits slide without really giving meaning to, in the way that I did. And we can still come back to it, right?
And the basic whole point of this is we don't have to be perfect to be good. And if being perfect is the measure of being good, as I often say on the podcast, then we're all fucked. Because we're all human, we're never going to have that perfection. And the more that we harp on the perfection, the more we see that as being like the desirable thing, the longer it takes us to get going again when we do have an interruption.
So my girlfriend and I were just actually talking last night, and she was saying how helpful that talk that I just told you all about was to her for helping her get back on board with her workout schedule now that her ankle is better. And we were talking about how that's so hard for some people, right? Because we get such negative self-talk about, you know, the period of time in which we weren't doing the thing, that then that kind of keeps us in the phase of not doing that thing.
I see this in all kinds of areas of people's lives, y'all. Here's how it goes, it's like we guilt and shame ourselves, you know, especially in the case of like I just fell out of the habit. Like people like me and what I'm talking about with the running, I fell out of the habit, then we're like, “Oh.” And we guilt and shame ourselves.
And then that guilt and shame, it's like we all grew up with this idea that if you guilt and shame yourself it's a good motivator. But what I know as a coach is it's not and it backfires. Like you can definitely use guilt and shame to kind of beat yourself up into a kind of like a burst of activity. But it's not ever going to lead to like a sustainable long-term motivation, or a sustainable long-term habit.
And then, you know, for the situation like with my girlfriend where I don't think it was guilt and shame for her, I think it was just disappointment. But even that, it's like disappointment is not a good motivator. I know sometimes we think it is but it's not because then it just makes us feel like shit. And we don't want to work out when we feel like shit. We don't want to go running when we feel like shit. We want to self soothe, we want to like watch some Netflix and have a bottle of wine, right?
So for her, it's like going from this idea of, “Oh, it's ruined and I'll never get it back.” To like, “It's not ruined I can just restart.” Revolutionary, helps her get back on to her habit much faster and helps the habit stay feeling good.
Because when we get into the guilt and shame cycle, or when we get into the disappointment cycle, then we build up this associative connection in our brain between the thing we want to do and a feeling of shame, guilt, or disappointment. And that's never going to make us want to do the thing, right?
If every time you think about your running habit you feel guilty and` ashamed you don't want to think about your running habit. You don't want to schedule running, you want to hide and pretend that that was like never a thing and you didn't care about it anyways. It will not get you back to doing the thing you were doing before.
And when we have grace for ourselves, it's much easier to get back to it, right? So like this week, well last week I decided and this week I actually started. Like I did restart my little, tiny running practice. And I had to let go of any guilt or shame I felt about dropping off from that in the first place in order to be able to restart and to be excited about restarting.
Because like, here's the thing, this will also probably happen again, right? And this is a blocker I see for a lot of people with their brains is they're like, and they call it like falling off the bandwagon, “If I fell off the bandwagon once I'm probably going to do it again.” And I'm like, “Yeah, I probably will.” So I need to feel like that's not the goal.”
If the goal is to never fall off the bandwagon again, then I'm screwed y'all. And then there's no point in me starting my reading practice again. But if the goal is I just keep coming back, I just keep coming back to the bandwagon, I just keep coming back to the practice and it's cumulative effort versus all in a row effort, like a streak, right?
If I have to be in a streak with no interruptions, that's just perfectionism. That's not setting me up for long term success. Whereas it's like, “Okay, how much more would I run if I'm allowed to like fall off the practice and come back, and fall off the practice and come back?” Over time I'm actually going to run a lot more and run more consistently.
So it's a different way of thinking about things than most of us grew up thinking about them. But it's really revolutionary and it will help you try and do all kinds of things that right now feel impossible because your brain is trying to set you up to be able to do them perfectly right away. And that's just, that's not real. That's not a real thing that's an option.
The real option is that we try and we're human about it, and we fuck it up sometimes. And then we keep going, and that's actually how we get to every big success we ever create in life. It's not by trying and doing it perfectly along the way until we hit the success.
Which leads into our topic for today, which again, is failure. So I read one time this stat about how when we mess up, but people also admire us, like in general if they like think we're pretty good at our job or like a pretty good friend and then we mess up, people actually like us more. We actually like other people more. And I think this is because we want other people to be human because we know that we're all human.
So when someone seems too perfect, we often don't like them as much, or we're like a little suspicious of them. And yet all of us, we're all like, “Oh, but I want to be perfect, though.” Which, I think, is super interesting, right? It's like, why are we doing that? Why do we think that we have to be perfect in order to be good enough? And do we want to keep that idea?
I think when there are people we admire and they mess up, we see them as more human. And we like that about them, it makes them more relatable. And while we may not always enjoy messing up, and while we may worry that it makes us look bad, I think it's fascinating that the opposite can be true for everyone else who's interacting with us. They may like us more. They may respect us more. And especially I find they may trust us more. Because when people seem very, very perfect, again, they're not relatable. And we're like, “Well, I'm not really, really perfect so I don't know if I trust that like you can help me or that you understand what my life is like, because your life seems so very different from mine when you seem perfect.”
Whereas when we mess up, or when we share what we consider our flaws or weaknesses or failures with people that can actually increase their positive regard for us. I just think it's a fun way to think about things. And I especially think it's useful since like, as I'm always saying, not ever messing up is not actually an option for those of us living the human experience, which is all of us.
And that brings us to this week's topic. Failure, yes, but also the potential side benefits of failure. And the reasons to go for failure, even when we have so much social conditioning that makes us want to run the fuck away from failure.
So not only is it possible that others will like you more when you mess up on occasion, but mess ups and failures always come with a side serving of growth. And growth isn't actually possible without side servings of failure.
Now, when we have a failure, we don't always take advantage of that side serving of growth, I see plenty of people leave the side serving of growth on the proverbial table. But if you want to grow, if that's part of what you're trying to do in life, if that's part of what you're trying to do in your career, that's always available to you when things go sideways.
For one thing, failure can show us where we have gaps in our skills. It can show us where we have opportunities to improve our processes and systems. When things fall through the cracks, we can think that sucks, and we can also think, “Okay, maybe it's time for new systems to make sure it doesn't happen again. How can I learn from this? How can I improve the way things happen here?”
Like, let's say you do a talk in front of your boss and you forget a full third of it. Like, we can totally think that sucks. Like you're allowed to think it sucks. If that happened to me, I would probably think it sucks.
But in addition to thinking it sucks, we can also think, “Okay, what can I do next time to help this go better? What can I do next time to ensure that I can remember more of my speech? How can I set myself up for better successes? What systems do I need? What skills do I need? What processes do I need? That's all super important.
Here's the other thing that's super important. I think we can even frame like, “Okay, I did the speech in front of my boss, I forgot a third of it.” That is still helping us get to a place where we do a better speech. Right? This is the part that people don't enjoy as much, but I think it's super essential.
Doing something badly is part of learning to do that thing well. To say it a different way, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. Because often when we're starting a new thing, we're not going to be great at it. We might do it poorly. But doing it poorly gets us closer to doing it well. Right?
Think of something, I'm like not a sports ball person, but think of someone who's learning to play basketball. Trying to shoot a basket and missing and missing and missing but still trying. And like changing how you try a little bit, again, changing up those skills, processes, systems. Practicing to acquire the skills and then like, you know, trying to change little things about how you're doing it. That is how you become better. Right?
Which actually, that already makes my next point. My next point is that failure is often a step forward on whatever path we're on, even if it doesn't feel that way at the time. Right? We all have these fantasies of being able to achieve our goals effortlessly and somehow arriving at the ability to do something we've never done before and like do it well on the first time.
And I know I have these fantasies and I am pretty sure I'm not alone. But in real life that's not what happens, or most of the time it's not. I mean, like maybe occasionally you try something and you're like a virtuoso at it the very first time. That's possible, but most of the time that's not going to be what happens. And if you have to be like a magical virtuoso to do something, what you are going to do in life is going to be very limited, right?
Most of the things that we want to do that we're not currently doing, we're not currently doing them because to try would mean not being great at them right off the bat. But who even cares? Why is it such a problem to not be great at things off the bat?
Like I know I have that come up for me too. But when I really slow it down, I'm like, “Wait, this is not a problem. This is just literal learning.” It's very straightforward. It's like math, we have to go through the steps like 1, 2, 3, to get to the steps 4, 5, 6 to get to the steps 7, 8, 9. And then we get to 10, right?
But that's often not how we're trying to do things when we're going after our goals. When we're thinking about taking risks, when we're thinking about potential failure most of us are not thinking, “Okay, this is a step in the right direction.” Instead, most of us are thinking this will be mortifying, and I will like literally die of shame if I don't do this thing well.
But the difference between these isn't in the “failure” it's in the perspective you take to trying things. Also, here's the thing y'all, failure is part of life. I was going to say it's part of trying, but what I've learned is that even if you're in a place where you're not pushing your growth edges, not trying that hard, you can still feel like you're failing. In fact, a lot of people do. Sometimes they feel even more like they're failing, especially if they're spending a lot of their time in their own head comparing themselves to other people. So it's like they're not even trying and growing. But they feel like they're failing all the time because of the narrative in their head about what they could be doing but they're not doing.
I felt like this all the time when I was in my 20s and I was in grad school, and I was trying desperately to figure out what I was going to do with my life. But I also wasn't doing a whole lot of anything about it besides like, let's be honest, crying and drinking a lot of whiskey.
So there was growth available there too, but it took me a long time to see it. And it took me a long time to begin trying things. But I want to point that out because I think so often, we're like, “Well I don't want to try things because I don't want to feel like a failure.” But if you're already feeling like a failure with the stories in your head while you're not trying, why not just try it and see what you can do and see what you can create?
All right y’all, let's recap. Failure is a part of life. Even if you don't try new things, you're probably going to fail at some stuff. And even if you're not failing at some stuff, if you're telling yourself all day long inside your head you're failing, you're going to have the emotional experience that you’re failing like I used to in my 20s.
But if you change your perspective on what it means to fail, if you change your perspective on what “failure” means about you, then failure can actually be a direct path to both growth and to achieving all your goals. Anything you want that you don't already have, being willing to try and fail and keep going is exactly how you get there.
So if you want to live your whole life not failing, that's not really going to work for also hitting all your other big goals, right? Like for getting the promotion, for getting to the position of VP of marketing, for learning the new software that you need to do even better in your job. We don't have to do growth in life, but most of us want to. And one key component of being willing to show up to growth is being willing to tolerate the experience of not being perfect at things we want to be good at.
That's how growth works. You start where you are with whatever level of skill you have, and then you keep trying and keep trying. And then you will get better. You will improve and that will move you towards your goals.
What you need to do though, to keep going is to have resilience. You got to create that resilience for yourself. And if you're telling yourself like, “I'm failing and it's terrible, and it means something bad about me.” Of course you're not going to want to keep going. Of course it's going to be a struggle to try anything you're not already good at.
So instead we’ve got to flip it around, right? We have to think about like how failure is moving you towards the thing you want. We got to think about how courageous you are to show up and do the thing, even if you can't do it perfectly.
I'm not saying that failure is always super fun. It's not, I've had a lot of failure in my life, in my career before coaching, and in my coaching business. I'm not saying it's like a super sexy, fun time all the time. But every time I failed it's brought me closer to becoming the person who can do the things I wanted to do, the things I wasn't able to do yet. And now I've done many of them. And if I had just stopped trying at my first failure or my 50th failure, I wouldn't be where I am now.
So I want you to think about like what could be possible in your life if you were willing to fail and keep going. What could be possible in your career if failure was the direct path to growth and not something to be avoided at all costs? What risks, to call back to last week’s episode, would you be willing to take if you were willing to fail and keep going.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I've got good news for you. I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call, I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category. So you can check that out on the testimonials page. All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, listen on Spotify and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher.
Previous
Previous
27. Habit Building
Next
Next