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How would life be different if you were willing to fail and disappoint others? If you simply stopped avoiding it? Would you work less? Try to perfect less? Would you be more decisive? A balanced and successful life includes failures and disappointments. Our goal is not to avoid failure and disappointment, but it’s to build up a tolerance so we no longer avoid them. In this episode, we are going to talk all about failure & disappointment. What they mean, what our brains want us to think they mean, and ultimately learn how to build up a tolerance to feel them.
Topics In This Episode:
What is failure, really?
A new way of thinking about failure & disappointment
Failure is NOT an emotion
Why we want to feel icky emotions that come from failing and disappointing others
The #1 thing that magnifies failure & disappointment
3 things you can do to start building up a tolerance for failure
Show Notes:
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Transcription
Intro
How would life be different if you were willing to fail and disappoint others? If you simply stopped avoiding it? Would you work less? Try to perfect less? Would you be more decisive? A balanced and successful life includes failing and disappointing others. Our goal is never to NOT fail & disappoint, but it’s to build up a tolerance for failure so we no longer avoid it. In this episode, we are going to talk all about failure & disappointment. What they mean, what our brains want us to think they mean, and ultimately learn how to build up a tolerance to feel them. You ready? Let’s get to it.
Welcome to the ambitious and balanced working mom podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you’re looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home then this is the place for you. I’m your host Rebecca Olson, let’s get to it!
2 emotions that cause imbalance in life.
There are two emotions that many ambitious working moms avoid and because they avoid them they often do things that cause imbalance in their life. Failure and disappointment - really it’s about disappointing others.
Think about this for a moment, if you were willing to feel failure & disappointment what would you do? Spend less time perfecting things, say no to more people, be more vocal in meetings, maybe ask for a raise, change companies, keep work during work hours, and be unavailable during the evenings…strange isn't it, most of these things feel like what one might DO if they had a balanced life.
A lot of the things that we need to do, the actions we need to be taking or not taking in order to create a balanced life, the only reason we don't do them is because we fear failing & disappointing others. So, to create a balanced life, you are going to have to deal with the possibility of failure and disappointment.
I am going to break down this episode into 4 parts:
Definitions of both failure & disappoint
Debunk a common misconception about these emotions
The problem with fearing an emotion
How self-judgment magnifies fear
What exactly is happening when we fear failure & disappointment.
The basic definition of failure is when you don’t hit the desired result. You put together a presentation in order to land a client and you don’t. When you try to make it home by 6 pm for dinner and you get stuck in the office. When you try to meet a deadline for a deliverable and you have to push the deadline back. Failure is when you don't hit the desired result.
In a lot of ways, the definition of disappointing someone is kind of the same as failure. At least our brain sees it that way, because when you really dive into it, if you disappoint someone what you're saying is that you failed them. That you did not meet the desired result and thus they are disappointed. If you did meet the desired result then they wouldn’t be disappointed, right?
When you tell your child you will make it home in time for their soccer game today and you get stuck at the office, you feel like you failed as a parent and you disappointed your child. When you push back a deadline and your boss is disappointed you feel like you failed. The fear of failure and the fear of disappointing someone often go hand in hand and feel like the same thing.
Ok, so here is the second point I want to make about failure:
It’s not actually that we fear failure, it’s that we fear the feelings that come with failing.
Failure in and of itself is not a feeling, it’s a result. Though, we often like to say that we “feel” like a failure, when what we are actually saying is that we are feeling all the feelings that come when we don’t meet the desired result.
Think about it. Let's say you didn't meet the deadline for a deliverable. How does that make you feel? Disappointed in yourself? Frustrated with yourself? Guilty? Usually not meeting a deadline for deliverables is not life or death. People might have to wait for you, but it's not like you are not going to get it to them as soon as possible. So in the big scheme of things failing to meet a deadline isn’t often that big of a deal…but, those feelings that came with failing, stick with you for days sometimes.
Disappointing someone is a result of something we did or didn’t do.
The same is true when we disappoint someone. Disappointing someone is a result. It happens as a result of something we do or don't do. But we can’t actually make someone disappointed. We can't take that emotion and stick it in their body. They create their own emotions just like you create your emotions and if they feel disappointed it's because they're thinking something that makes them feel that way. We can't create other people's emotions. So when we say we fear disappointing someone it's not really that we fear them experiencing an emotion, it's that we fear all of the feelings we will feel if they were to be disappointed.
Let me give you an example. Your kids ask you to take them to the park, but you don’t have the energy to take them and so you say no and your kids are disappointed. How did you feel because they were disappointed? Did you feel guilty? Maybe like you weren't a very good mom? Frustrated with yourself for being so tired?
Why we shouldn’t be scared of feeling emotions.
OK but let's talk about this for a moment. If it's true that what we fear is our feelings, then what we're saying is that we fear the literal vibrations that pass through our bodies when we are experiencing an emotion. Sounds a bit silly when you say it like that doesn't it and I don’t want to make this all woo-woo because it’s not really.
Emotions pass through our bodies in a series of vibrations. Literally, our cells move when we are experiencing emotions. You would be able to see it under a microscope. This is our biological response to feelings.
So, what if we were simply willing to experience those vibrations instead of avoiding them or pushing them away? Literally what if you were willing to just feel any feeling, no matter how icky?
I've been practicing feeling my emotions over the last few years in an effort to gain more balance and joy in my life, and two things have stood out to me as I've been working on this:
Feelings pass much faster when I simply allow them. Sometimes in a manner of seconds or a minute. It's actually the avoidance or the resistance of feelings that make them linger. When we simply feel the feeling and allow all of the vibrations to happen it moves through our body faster and we move on. I think a great example of this is our toddlers. What happens after a toddler tantrums? They tantrum, they get all of this emotion out, they cry, they stomp their feet, they feel other feelings, and then what? They move on. Usually rather quickly too. If your toddler is anything like mine, oftentimes after a tantrum they’re like, “OK that's done, can I have some milk? Do you want to play with me?” once all of the emotion is out of them they move on. The same is true for us as adults, if we allowed ourselves to feel all of the emotions.
The second thing that has stood out to me is I am more present. When I’m focused on allowing my emotions, I'm directing my brain to what's happening inside of my body. And when your brain and your body are in the same place at the same time that is the essence of being present. So as I have practiced feeling my emotions I have essentially been practicing being present which is one of the signs of having a balanced life.
Separating self-judgment.
Now, there are two types of emotions that happen when we fail and disappoint. One set is the disappointment and frustration that come from the failure itself. The other set doesn't come from the failure but comes from the judgment about yourself from failing. You make the failure mean ultimately that you're not good enough. You extrapolate this one moment as meaning something much deeper than it really is as if it is commenting on your personal character and worth. That is self-judgment. And self-judgment creates a different set of emotions that often feel like shame, guilt, and inadequacy.
These self-judgment emotions are completely optional because self-judgment is completely optional. You get to decide what failure or disappointment means. You can decide it means you aren’t good enough or you can decide it means you have something to learn.
It strikes me that most of what we fear in failure and disappointing others are not the set of emotions that come with not getting to the desired result, but the emotions that come with self-judgment – beating yourself up – the thoughts that make us feel inadequate and not good enough. These seem to be the ones that stick with us the longest and hurt the most.
Treat yourself with compassion.
So, part of building up a tolerance for failure is learning to treat yourself with compassion when it happens. Think of the way you would treat your child if they studied hard for a math test and still got a C. Or someone who practiced endlessly to make the soccer team but still didn't make the cut. Would you judge them? Would you tell them how terrible a person they are and how they should have done better or worked harder and that their effort wasn't enough? Of course, you wouldn't! You give them lots of love and hugs and remind them of how much they are loved and how great they are. We want to treat ourselves in the same way when we fail with lots of love and hugs and reminders of how great we are.
Ok, so let’s recap a moment. Fear of failing and disappointments is what causes lots of the actions that create balance. Actions like perfectionism and procrastination and saying yes to too many things and working late when we don't want to. So if we want to create a balanced life we have to work at building up a tolerance for failure and disappointment.
Feelings are just vibrations in our bodies.
The first thing to build up that tolerance is recognizing that what we fear is not missing the mark or getting it wrong but all of the feelings that come from it. And feelings are just vibrations in our bodies.
To practice allowing those feelings I like to simply close my eyes in the midst of them, imagine them pulsing through me and say it's OK, I can handle this, my body is literally designed to house these feelings and vibrations.
The last thing we want to do to build up a tolerance for these emotions is to end any self-judgment associated with them. To recognize that failing or disappointing someone doesn't make us a bad person. Disappointing our kids doesn't make us bad moms. Not getting it right all the time doesn't mean we're bad employees, or we're not committed. Building up a tolerance for failure and for disappointment is not allowing ourselves to make up stories about who we are because we didn't reach the desired goal.
That’s all I have for you today ambitious working moms, catch y'all next week.
Let’s get to it.
