76: How to Love Failure

Episode 76-Loving Failure.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:09] You're listening to the Time to Level Up podcast. I'm your host business life coach, Andrea Libros. I help women in business commit to their own growth personally and professionally. Each week, I'll bring you strategies to help you think clearly. Gain confidence. Make your time productive. Turn every obstacle into an opportunity. And finally overcome the overwhelm so that you can make money and manage life. Let's create a plan so you have a profitable business, successful career, and best of all, live with unapologetic ambition. Are you ready to drop the drama and figure out the how in order to reach your goals? You're in the right place. It's time to level up. Let's do this. Hello my friends and welcome back to the Time to Level Up podcast. I hope you guys are having a great week. I am recording this on a monday and it actually is feeling like spring time here finally, which is very exciting. I think everybody kind of has a new lease on life when spring is in the air. I think that's truly something real. Maybe even a.

Speaker2: [00:01:38] Fact.

Speaker1: [00:01:39] Not just a thought. If you've been following me. Speaking of following me, if you've listened to more than one episode of this podcast, I would so appreciate it if you would go in to Spotify or Apple Podcasts and rate and review the podcast. It is the way pretty much the only way in which new people, unless they have found another way in new people, will find the podcast as they are searching. So consider.

Speaker2: [00:02:12] It.

Speaker1: [00:02:13] Your good deed for the day because you're helping someone else find the podcast so that they too can level up. Kind of become this person that says, I've got this. I've actually been thinking about this, I've got this. So I think there's you becoming someone that feels like you've got it, and then there's you becoming someone who feels like they're crushing it. So maybe after you've got it, then you kind of work on crushing it. So stay tuned for a little more on that. But today, what we're going to do after you go and rate in review is talk about loving failure, like being in love with failing. Now, I know it sounds like a crazy thing. Who would want to fail? And this is a question I ask my clients why they're not doing something or why they're avoiding something. And oftentimes they say to me, Well, what if I fail? What if I fail? And another kind of thought around that is they're scared to fail. They might say, what if the person says, no, that's a variation of you, and or you interpret that as a fail often? Or what if it doesn't work? What if I don't make any money or no one buys something or someone says No, thanks. What if I don't get what I asked for? What if I don't reach the goal? All of those. Are you basically saying, what if I fail? But here's the good news. Here's the good news with some.

Speaker2: [00:03:53] Practice and.

Speaker1: [00:03:55] A little observation. Your your ability to use failure and fear. To your advantage becomes kind of second nature. So how can you use failure to your advantage to make it second nature? So today what we're going to talk about is we're not going to talk about how not to fail. This is what we're not talking about. We're not talking about how not to fail because how not to fail is really like setting up the expectation that you never will fail. And we talked about expectations a little bit and intentions in the last episode. And expectations can really get in the way of being intentional. And today, kind of we're going to talk about expectations in a different way as they pertain to failing. When we're intentional, remember, we keep our eyes on the prize when we have expectations. We're kind of setting ourselves up for failure in my book. So I'm going to share with you today how to do failure well, to be a failure expert and to actually experience failure in a positive way. And why this is actually good for you. Like failure is a good dose of medicine. So here we go. All right. So the first question to ask yourself is, why don't you want to fail? Is it because failing is scary? Why do you have a fear of failing? And a lot of times no one really has a great answer except what will other people think? Or I'll disappoint them. Okay. And notice that those sentences are all about them. They are not about you, they're about other people. So I often then go back and I say, Well, why do you not want to fail? Because that's really the root of the problem. I am all about getting to the root of the problem. Did you actually did you take my root quiz on my website? If you didn't, you should go take it. It's right in the top right corner when you go to the website or you can go to Andrea Lieber's backslash quiz. But I digress. Okay.

Speaker2: [00:06:27] Coming back.

Speaker1: [00:06:29] So, okay, if we know we don't want to fail, the next question is what exactly is failure? Well, you know me. I went to the Googles and I looked up the definition of failure. And here is what the Googles told me. There were three definitions. Number one, failure is lack of success. Number two, it's the omission of expected or required action. Number three, it's the action or state of not functioning. So how does one not have success, omit required actions or be in a state of not functioning? That would tell us how one fails. But if it's something that we don't want. It seems like it should be way more complicated. Those definitions like omitting or required action, they seem so elementary like what's the big deal with omitting something? It's like not the end of the world, right? What's the worst thing that can happen is one of my famous questions. Well. What I think is that it is not so elementary and it is not harmless, although it seems sort of harmless. I think it is more than that. What I found in talking to my clients is that most women stop intending to succeed or expecting anything to happen that is different than what's happening right now. One of my favorite sayings is when someone says, What can I bring? Like, What can I bring over? They invite we invite them for dinner.

Speaker1: [00:08:12] I always say, just bring low expectations. But again, I digress. So if we keep our expectations low, or if we don't expect anything great to happen, then really what happens is that we just keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, which leads us to having the same life or the same business. Now having someone over for dinner and then that person coming with low expectations and maybe you having low expectations, that's not all so bad. Maybe you just want to chill and you don't want anything to be different. You don't want anything to be different. But think about if I invited you over for a wedding, I think your expectations would be high. They would not be low. You would expect it to be different than the usual pizza on Friday night, right? So what happens is when we keep our expectations low and we keep doing the same thing over and over again, we don't go outside our comfort zone. And if we don't go outside our comfort zone, then we never have to deal with not meeting any expectations or not making our intentions. Come alive. And that, my friends, I think, is actually really too bad. That is a.

Speaker2: [00:09:32] Shame.

Speaker1: [00:09:33] Because success is always on the other side of uncomfortable doing something outside our comfort zone. That's where the success is. So many of my clients, when they come to me, they don't feel alive anymore because they're not putting themselves out there. They're afraid of failing and it keeps them from thriving, from living, how they were meant to live life.

Speaker2: [00:10:01] Which.

Speaker1: [00:10:02] Is full of adventure and risk. Like think of the cavemen, right? Their whole lives. They were it was risky. They could get eaten by bears. Okay. And avoiding all of that. It's not such a great way to live. That's not what we are meant to do as humans, because as humans we are meant to experience all emotions. All emotions. So if you ask me what's the root cause of failure, I would argue that it's the root cause are feelings that we don't want to feel. And when I ask, why are you avoiding starting something? The answer might be that I don't want to fail. Why don't you want to fail in? The answer here always comes down to not wanting to feel something. The reason we do something or don't do something is because we want to feel a certain way or not want to feel a certain way. So if you're not taking action on something or not doing what you know you're capable of, it is really you not wanting to feel the feeling that happens while you're taking the action or doing the thing. What you experience when you are in motion. Because usually that's kind of uncomfortable, right? Like running a marathon while you're doing it probably doesn't feel so great afterwards. You're proud. Now you might be a little sore too, but you're proud. Think of.

Speaker2: [00:11:35] That.

Speaker1: [00:11:37] So if you're not taking action. I'm going to tell you again that the reason is really because you don't want to experience the feeling that comes while you're doing it, not the feeling that comes after. Because usually after you're either proud or happy, you gave it a try. You feel good. So whether. You take action or not has to do with how you want to feel or not feel. So here's something interesting. When you don't meet your expectations. Then the only thing you will feel is what you choose to feel based on your thoughts. That you didn't meet the expectation. Because expectations in and of themselves don't have feelings. We make them mean something. We give a meaning to expectations. And then that meaning or that thought about the expectation, that's what creates the feeling. Right. Expectations in and of themselves aren't attached to feelings. It's the thought we have about them that creates the feeling. Whenever the action you take or don't take, whatever that results in, you get to decide what you want to think about it. You could think that it was amazing. I really gave it a whirl or I took the first step. Or you could choose to make it mean that you didn't hit the mark or you didn't reach the goal, and that you're a failure. All right. So if you take action and you don't get the results you want, you get to decide what you want to make it mean.

Speaker1: [00:13:23] It's sort of ironic that the whole reason you're avoiding failing is that you're avoiding something that you have complete control over. It's something that you create, that something is your reaction to the failing or to whatever the result is. You make the fail, so to speak, by your thoughts. So here's a different way to say that. You're avoiding something. You're in charge of a feeling and acting like the feeling is happening to you. We we often sometimes say failure happened to us or we had to experience failure. But that's not true. What happens is that we miss our expectation and then we decide to make it mean something that hurts us. We decide to make it mean something that causes a negative emotion. How we experience failure is really our choice. It can mean that the world is ending, or it can mean something positive. If we decide to make it mean something positive, then we don't dread experiencing it. And I'm going to give you an example. So you probably have heard that I created and put on an in-person event over two days called achieve more due less. And my intention was to bring 20 women together. For this experience, and I did end up bringing 20 women together. But what if only 11 had registered? And remember, at one point in the registration process, only 11 had registered, right? Because 11 had to register before I got to 20. But at 11, I could have started talking to myself and saying things like What a fail or only 11 signed up.

Speaker1: [00:15:24] Why am I doing this? Women don't want what I have to offer. This feels terrible. Why? Why it feels terrible is because I'm making the number 11 mean something about me. That there's something wrong with me, that I'm not good at this, that I'm making the wrong offer, that no one wants what I have. I am making this quote unquote, fail of only being at 11. And I'm putting fail in quotes, feel awful. So I start avoiding something that I'm the cause of, ironically, which would be continuing to work at getting more registrants or going ahead if there were only 11 in the end. Right. So I can continue. I avoid doing the work to change the fail because I am stuck in this state of awfulness. And again, I'm putting fail in quotes because I don't think 11 out of 20 is really a fail. And remember I got 20, but at some point I was only at 11. Right? So what's the alternative? Well, I could make it mean. This is awesome. 11 people want what I have. There must be nine more out there that want it, too. Let's keep going. I could love that place of failure. So how do you get better at this? How do you get better at loving failure of thinking that it's not so awful? Here's how you.

Speaker2: [00:16:55] Practice.

Speaker1: [00:16:57] So go back to that definition. Which one of them was omitting an action? And if that is truly the case, then what I might ask myself in the case of 11, what did I omit from marketing the event? What should I have included? Should I have included more video marketing? Should I explained better what we would be doing there? Should I reached out to more people? What action did I omit and how can I do things differently so that I now include that action? I can take different actions next time around marketing or around messaging, right? I can change something. So by assessing what did I omit? I can learn and then change for next time. Okay. So when you think about it that way, the failure experience doesn't feel so bad. It makes me want to learn and grow and try it again. It makes me want to be able to have the opportunity to ask those kinds of questions, to learn from what happened or didn't. I get to decide what I want to think when I don't meet my expectations or follow through with my intention of getting to 20, I get to determine how failure kind of hits me. So here's the thing success can only be found through failure, so I could only get to 20 if I went through 11. Failure is the currency of success. That's one of my favorite quotes. Failure is the currency of success. It's the way you earn success. And here's another great quote that I found is I was doing a little research for this podcast that if you want success, you have to double your rate of failure. I think the better you are at failure, the more willing you are to fail and the more success. You have eventually by going through that failure. The more success you will have in general, the more you've learned through failure, the more you can improve or get better at meeting your own expectations. And I have seen this in myself, and I've seen it in my clients once they start to love failing. That's really how you succeed. So here's a little coach with me.

Speaker2: [00:19:39] Homework.

Speaker1: [00:19:40] Could you make a list of 25 ways in the next month or two that you could fail? 25 ways you could experience failure. And decide ahead of time. What are you going to think about that fail? What are you going to take away from it? I would bet you money that you will find success faster if you create that list of 25 fails than if you don't. So. How can you love failure? That's my message for today. Who else needs to hear this message? And if you're listening to this while you're walking or driving. Send me a direct message, take a screenshot of the screen or the control panel in the car. Let me know. I love connecting with my audience and I miss that I realized how much I miss it. I love doing podcasts and I feel like I'm connecting and you're sitting right here with me, but it's not the same as seeing people in person, and I want to know that there are people out there. So send me a direct message. Let me know that you're listening to this episode 76 on Loving Failure, and I promise I'll write back. My friends, if you want to do more work on this, this is the kind of thing we do inside committed to growth. Which is a group of women who are high. They have high I call it high potential. They're high achievers. Their potential is limitless. And what they're learning to do, in fact, is actually fail so that they can succeed because all of this is really managing your thinking around it. Right. You have full control of this. So come join us inside committed to growth. I promise you it will be a life changing experience. And it's not just for a few months, although maybe you'll only be with us for a few months. The tools you will.

Speaker2: [00:21:48] Take.

Speaker1: [00:21:49] Will last you a lifetime. So it's an investment for your lifetime, not an investment for just the next few months. You can find out all about that at the work with me. Tab Ways to work with me tab on my website or you can always email me at Andrea Libros or direct message me and we can talk about all the ways in which we can work together. Okay, my friends, until next week. Remember, this is a way loving failure is a way to certainly level up your game and there's no better time than the present to start doing it. Have a great week. See you next time. Thanks for listening to the Time to Level Up podcast with me, your host, Andrea Libros. If you know someone who could benefit from listening to this episode, I encourage you to take a screenshot and share it with them. Okay, now what about you? You listen to the podcast and if you now know that you're ready to upgrade your life, upgrade your business, upgrade you, then stop being only a listener and start being a liver living that upgraded life. Head over to my website and schedule a call right there on that call. We'll start changing the way you think and act so that you can have the freedom to achieve the impossible in life and business and have the resources to do it. You deserve an upgrade. Let's do it.