Failing Does Not Make You a Failure

The fear of being a failure can be paralyzing -  maddeningly so. This week's episode might just be the thing you need to to hear to put things in a new perspective.  Listen in. 

Questions, comments, thoughts? You can always reach me at: kim@boldlystated.com. I love hearing from you. 

Transcript

Kim Bolourtchi: 0:00

This is Kim Bolourtchi and you're listening to Boldly Stated. Today we're going to talk about the fact that failing doesn't make you a failure. Now before we get going, a couple of housekeeping things. Last week, my brother listened to my podcast and made it halfway through and called me and said, I feel so bad for the seventh grade you and like, this is so depressing. And I said, you need to listen to the rest. I'm not telling it to be depressing. I don't want people to feel bad for me. That's not the point. Like, yeah, it sucked. But if I'm telling this story, I survived. And also, there's a larger point, and that is that we need to be aware of the arbitrary lines we're drawing between us. So he called me back afterwards and said, Yeah, yeah, I loved it. I loved it. Um, anyway, I promised him this week that I would do an uplifting podcast. So even though we're talking about the fact that failing doesn't make you a failure. And the topic of failure might seem as if it is a depressing topic. This is going to be a very uplifting podcast, Brett. So stay tuned. I also want to take a minute and shout out to Lisa for the awesome review on Apple podcasts. Thank you so much for taking the time to do that. It really does matter. People look to see what other people think about a podcast before they decide whether it's worth listening. So I am grateful for the love. Alright, let's talk. Failing does not make you a failure. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you actually have to fail pretty big in order to succeed. So this is one of the things that I explore with my college students in the program UNMUTED but with the 12 minutes or so that we have today, I want to show you why it is really important to distinguish between the idea of failing at a thing and labeling yourself as a failure. Now, let me just be really clear and tell you that failing sucks, it just sucks. And I am not going to sit here and try to convince you, it's actually better than you think. Because that's not true. And in fact, it's that game that we play with ourselves, that we try to talk ourselves into this idea that it's actually not going to be that bad, that actually makes it worse. So let's just get really real about the fact that failing it anything doesn't feel good. It's It's awful. It's disappointing. It's embarrassing at times, and it feels devaluing in moments. It's just it's not good. Okay, so that's out of the way we can agree that that failing sucks. Now, I want to challenge you for a second to think about a time you did something new or you tried something and you failed. And you thought to yourself, wow, I'm a failure. And you let that label sit with you, and you carried it sort of forward into your life or into the next thing that you did. Now, I don't know your particular story or circumstances. But based on my experience, a couple of things might have happened. One is that you made up your mind to never, ever do that thing again, because you don't ever want to feel that feeling. So you don't. Another thing that might have happened is that you allowed that label of failure to inform your ideas about what you're capable of moving forward. And it might have instilled this sort of seed of doubt about what you can do, or what you can't do. It might have convinced you to hold back. Or I suppose you might have blocked it out all together, and it just lives somewhere deep in your subconscious. And you're just praying that it doesn't come up at a wedding or some social occasion in the middle of someone's roasting toast. But kidding aside, it's probably safe to say that if you have labeled yourself as a failure in any context, you're going to avoid that in the future. But what if, instead of labeling yourself as a failure, you look at the thing you failed at doing as just a thing you failed at doing. So I went through this phase, I have this very creative side, and I went through this phase where I decided that I was going to put Swarovski crystals on bra straps. And I was going to sell them to stores and I was going to sell them to people and this was going to be this whole business. So it was called Bling Bras and I did marketing for it, I hired someone to do this beautiful portfolio and I started making these bras well. By the time I bought the bras bought the crystals and put them on one by one, it was hours. Like literally one bra would take like two hours to do. And the cost was exponential. And it wasn't long before it became very, very apparent that this was not going to be a successful business venture. And my first thought was, oh my G-d, I am a failure. Like how stupid that I invested all this money and bought all the supplies and did all this stuff without realizing there's not really a market for$200 bras. So it was really easy to go into this guilt spiral of I am a failure and to then expand it to I'm a failure at business, I'm a failure at marketing, I'm a failure at creative ideas, when, in reality, none of that is true. I had a really bad idea. And I failed at a particular venture. And yeah, I failed miserably. It was a complete clusterf*ck. But I learned a lot from it too. And here's the thing. When you label yourself as a failure, you're essentially branding yourself as, quote, someone who always fails. But the reality is that isn't true. You fail at a thing, we fail in a moment, it might be a long moment, right? It might be a big thing that we end up failing at, but it still is a thing. It's finite, it's defined. When you put the weight of a label like failure onto yourself, it is virtually impossible to shake that off. But if you can say, I failed at a thing, it isn't who you are, you're not taking it on as an identity, you're still just looking at it as a thing that happened, which is a very, very different perspective. And it is the perspective of a lot of really, really famous people who failed hugely before they succeeded. Michael Jordan was cut from his varsity basketball team as a sophomore and told he wasn't good enough. Walt Disney was fired from the Kansas City Star, because his editor said he had no imagination and no good ideas. Oprah Winfrey was fired from her anchor job in Baltimore for getting too emotionally invested in her stories. Steven Spielberg was rejected from the University of Southern California film school multiple times. Fred Estaire's early audition notes said can't sing, can't act, slightly balding, can dance a little. After his first movie, Harrison Ford was told by an executive that he would never ever succeed in the movie business. And Dr. Seuss had his first book rejected by 27 publishers. Now, if any one of these people had taken that initial failure, right, and it wasn't just one, I'm just giving you the ones that are documented, and said, I am a failure, they would have stopped. When we label ourselves as a failure, we stop. But here is the freaking crazy thing. You are never a failure until you stop until you quit, until you give up. And so you need to avoid classifying yourself labeling yourself or taking on the persona of failure and look at it as I failed at a thing. I am not a failure, I failed at a thing. Two really, really different concepts. So I want to invite you to think back to the example you came up with earlier in the podcast about the thing where you classified yourself as a failure. And think about it in terms of failing at a thing, rather than being a failure. And see if that puts it in better perspective. Remember, failing is not going to feel good. It just isn't. And that's okay. We don't need to lie to ourselves and tell us it's not that bad. Yeah, it is that bad. But the thing is, it's necessary. And it's just a thing. It's a thing that happens, it's a thing we learn from. And if we can stop making it this huge label that we adopt and absorb and identify with, we give ourselves the space to learn the lessons we need to learn. But the point is to keep going not to stop. You know, the Bling Bras business was a complete joke as far as making any money or as far as it being actually fun like I thought it would be. It just it was it was a mess. But I learned a lot about what not to do. I learned a lot about what doesn't work for me. I learned that if I feel creative, that I don't need to go start a business to be creative. I could just do a little project for myself. The point is it was a complete failure. But I learned a lot ab ut what doesn't work. I learned lot about myself and my impul iveness and desire to just, yo know, go full steam ahead so etimes without thinking things t rough or doing the proper r search. And it taught me ways hat I've been able to advise o her people as they move forward n their business journeys So yeah, it was it was a failur. It was a loss. But I also lea ned really valuable lessons rom it. And I honestly believe that this is true of all of it of every part of our journey, there is something valuable to be gained. And when we spend so much time avoiding failure when we're so afraid of failing because we get caught up in this idea that it makes us a failure, which is false. We miss so many chances to learn what we're capable of to learn what we really love to do to learn what we really don't want to do. And you know, when you don't do something well, it doesn't mean that you have to dig in and stay there until you do it. Well, you just have to leave it if you're going to leave it from a place of power, rather than from a place of giving up. And that's, that's really the difference, right? Like I didn't say, Okay, I have to make this business work, no matter what I'm going to dig in, I'm going to dig in, I realized this is totally not my jam, I am made for completely different things. And this was an interesting lesson in what not to do. But I walked away from it, taking the lessons with me, rather than beating myself up, as you know, Oh, my gosh, I'm a failure at all these things. So I want to encourage you, first and foremost, to separate the idea of failing at a thing from being a failure, you are not a failure, because you have failed at a thing, even if you failed it a lot of things. If you're failing at a lot of things, it means you're brave as hell, and you're going for it and you're putting yourself out there and you're figuring things out. Last point. You know, when I looked through the list of the famous people who quote failed the list that I gave you earlier, a lot of those people's failures were based on other people's opinions, opinions, who ended up being really wrong. You know, Walt Disney's editor that said he had no imagination wasn't creative. Well, I mean, I guess he's been proven wrong. Harrison Ford, who was told he'd never succeed in movies? Um, yeah, well, he's been proven wrong. So I want to say this to, you know, everybody has their own ideas about failure and about success. Please make sure that yours is being informed by you. And that you follow your own intuition that you follow your own bliss that you don't stop, because somebody else is judgmental, or somebody else has an idea or somebody else, you know, tries to make you feel bad for something that didn't work the way you wanted it to work, like push through that and just do what you were meant to do. Failing does not make you a failure. I promise. This is Kim Bolourtchi and you've been listening to Boldly Stated