Hello and welcome to Episode 5 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. As always, I am so happy to be with all of you today. If you've been listening to this podcast or know my work, you know I'm a huge advocate for dreaming big and pursuing the biggest visions we can think about. Naturally, I also spend a lot of time thinking, why don't we do it?
Why do we play small? And, the truth is that there are many reasons why we play small. One of them, one of the most significant ones, is because we're scared of failing. So today, I want us to talk about the experience of failing. How does it feel to fail? Why are we so scared of it? Because failure is going to be part of our journey.
If we're visionaries, if we're pursuing goals, we are going to fail. Failure is not optional. It will happen. It will happen bigger if your dream is bigger. It will happen smaller if your dream is smaller. But no matter the size of the failure, it, we don't like the experience. We don't like how it feels. We try to avoid it.
It's part of being human. When I went to look for the definition of failure in the Merriam Webster dictionary, it said it was lack of success. And it defines success as the accomplishment of an aim or a purpose, which means that failure is that we don't accomplish that aim or purpose. Really, for me, failure is when things don't go the way we expected them to go, the way we wanted them to go.
And there's all kinds of failures. There are small failures we have every day. Oh, I decided that I was going to do three things today and I didn't do any of those because I got distracted because I was pulled into another meeting because I forgot that I had something else to do. We have failures in terms of the expectation of the time we thought it was going to take us to meet a certain goal.
I launched a new product and I thought I was going to break even in the first three months, but it really took me an entire year to break even. There's real failures. We put all our effort, our passion, everything we had into creating the most amazing pitch for a client, and they didn't buy it. They didn't take it.
And all our hard work was, we could say, for nothing, which is not true, but that's what our brain tells us. On the journey towards our goals, we are going to fail. Having a good relationship with failure is the key to really accomplish anything we want. The other thing is that failure will always hurt. We will learn how to manage it.
We'll learn how to navigate it. But because failure is not achieving what we thought we wanted to achieve, it always will create some type of discomfort in our body. Part of being visionaries is learning to navigate that discomfort. All of us hold back at times. We don't play big because we're scared of failing.
We typically do one of two things. The first thing is that we just don't go for it. As Brené Brown says, there are too many people in the world today who decide to live disappointed Rather than risking feeling disappointment. So, we play small, we come up with tons of excuses. Or the other thing we do is we try to be perfect.
Please, everyone. And that also holds us back because we end up not really showing it to the world or taking it to the next step. We keep it to ourselves, thinking, I'm going to make it perfect so that way I won't fail. Both of those strategies are failures in its own right. Because we don't move forward towards our dreams and the goals we have.
I know that today in social media we're bombarded with messages that say, don't let failure stop you, be resilient, all these things, and I agree with all of those. But what I want to do today is dive deeper into the experience of failure. What is it about failure that we really want to avoid? And to do that, I went to consult with my friend, Brené Brown, and her book, Atlas of the Heart, which I think everyone should have because it's a dictionary of our emotions.
It explains our human experience in the best way that I've ever seen. This book is organized by chapters. I went to the chapter that talks about places we go when things don't go as planned or when we fail. In that chapter, She talks about different emotions. The first one is disappointment.
Disappointment is unmet expectations. We thought we were gonna sell a hundred and we sold 60. We thought it was gonna take us a week and it took us a month. The more significant the expectation, The more significant the disappointment, part of failure is experiencing that disappointment in our bodies.
The other emotion that is related to failure is sadness. Sadness is the human response to loss or defeat. It's a lost pleasure. When we lose something that we wanted, we experience sadness. When we lose someone that we love, but also when we lose the possibility of what we thought was going to happen, we experience sadness.
In the book, she says, to be human is to know sadness. Owning our sadness is courageous and a necessary step in finding our way back to ourselves and each other. If any of you have seen the movie Inside Out, I think that is the message of the movie. That when we try to cover our sadness, we can't find a way to each other.
Instead, the movie, the girl decides to leave and she's trying to run away from this emotional experience that she's having. But once she comes home and she cries and allows her sadness and her parents hold her, she starts healing herself. When we fail, we inevitably feel disappointment and sadness. Those two are normal emotions that occur in all of us when we fail.
You know, what is the thing that we're most scared as human beings is to experience an emotion. Whatever we think we're scared is because we're scared of having That experience in our body, I believe that what makes us unstoppable is learning to experience those emotions in our body, remembering that disappointment and sadness will not kill us, and that they will come and they will go.
I have two young daughters, and when they fall and scrape their knees, I remind them that pain comes and pain goes. They know they can experience the pain of the knees being scraped, but that it's gonna go away as well. I think that's something we all need to remind ourselves, that disappointment and sadness will come, but they will also go.
I know this is not good news. Caro, you're encouraging us, go for our dreams, but you're telling us that we're gonna have to experience sadness and disappointment. I'm like, yes. And remember that even if you don't pursue your dreams, you will still feel disappointment and sadness. So what I'm trying to sell you here, it's better to feel it on the journey towards your dream, that to feel it and also know that you didn't even risk trying to get what you wanted.
Let's talk about other emotions that we also experience when we fail. One of them is regret. In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown explains that regret is similar to disappointment. The difference, we believe the outcome was caused by our own decisions or actions. So when we'd say, uh, it didn't happen because I didn't put that extra hour of work, or because I rushed into it instead of taking a moment to take a deep breath, or because I made a mistake, right, regret happens when it's in our hands.
So while regret can be a healthy way of learning from failure, Because we can look at the experience and say, Oh, here's where I missed. I also think that when we set up our goals in a way that success is a hundred percent measured by what's in our control, we can reduce the amount of regret we have.
What I mean by this is when I'm working with a client, And, for example, they're working on a pitch for a client. One of the questions I always ask them is, even if the client says no, how will you still feel proud and happy with the work you did? What would success look like on your own terms? Usually the answers we come up with was.
It was authentically me. I didn't do this pitch out of fear. I did it out of desire. I did the research I needed to do about my client and the situation they're facing. When we decide that the outcome is not only measured by how the other person responds, we can avoid regret and manage the disappointment and the sadness because we're like, you know what?
Yes, it didn't go the way I wanted to. But I feel proud of myself. I felt like I acted with excellency, with authenticity, honoring my values. And there is some satisfaction there. The last emotion that we experience when we fail is frustration. Frustration is when something that feels out of my control is preventing me from achieving my desired outcome.
It's when you have this dream and this goal and you're not getting the investors to give you the money to achieve it. Or when something happens like the pandemic or something that it's outside of your control and it's getting in the way of you being able to achieve your dreams, that's a failure and it feels frustrating because it feels that it's out of our control, that there's nothing I can do.
This is bigger than me. And it's true. That is part of our journey too. Many times there are things that are outside of our control that are going to get in the way of us achieving our, our goals, our dreams. And the question there again is do I stay in frustration or do I process the frustration and get back to my creativity, to my ability to be resourceful and find new options, new pathways, new solutions.
One of the reasons why I wanted to dive deeper into the experience of failure is because I want any of you who's pursuing a dream, in the moment that you fail, you can come back to this podcast and ask yourself, what am I feeling? Disappointment, sadness, regret, frustration. There is something powerful that happens when we name the emotion we're experiencing.
When we are feeling a lot of things and we don't know what's happening, it feels bigger and overwhelming. When we can go back and name it and say to ourselves, I am feeling disappointed. It doesn't mean that the disappointment goes away, but it means that we're engaging another part of our brain that is helping us manage that emotion.
So bookmark this episode. So you can come back and remember first, I'm not alone. If I'm failing and I'm failing big is because I'm risking big, because I'm going for the big. Biggest dreams. And second, I, here I have an episode that helps me understand the experience that I'm having. When I received the WhatsApp message or the email from a client that's telling me it didn't go the way I wanted.
I'm so bummed. I'm so sad. Remember that this is the part of the experience that most people don't want and why most people stay back, hold back, play it small. I applaud you for taking the risk and going big. This failure right now means that you are going for what you want, that you're stepping out of your comfort zone, that you're making your life more meaningful.
So, until now, I've been talking about the emotional experience of failure. Like I said at the beginning, this is normal. You experience disappointment, sadness, regret, frustration because you're a human being. This means your body and your mind are working as they should. I want to talk about another part, and it's the part where we make up a story that makes that failure even bigger.
And it can create shame, which is the worst emotion for all of us human beings. Shame is the emotion that will actually stop us and not let us continue towards what we want. But shame doesn't come from failure, shame comes from the story we create around failure. Shame happens when we tell ourselves, Oh, I'm failing because I'm not good enough.
Because I will never make it. Because I'm not smart. Because I'm not capable. Because there is something wrong with me. And that story, here's where I want to wave my red flags and be careful. Going into these stories can be the most damaging thing that you do to yourself and to your vision. I've been a coach for 14, 15 years.
In this journey, I've learned a lot about not only the art of coaching, but also being a business owner and selling my product and services. The first thing I attempted to do to sell my services was a webinar. I remember I thought about it. I put all the effort, all the energy, and I hosted it one evening.
And that same evening, someone that I really cared about said, Oh my God, that was so boring. It was you just talking. You didn't have slides. It was not interactive. And that comment felt like failure to me because I wanted everyone to love what I had done, especially this person that I really cared about.
What I did in that moment, instead of saying, well, I'm learning was I created a story that I was a fraud, that I had no business doing webinars or telling people about coaching or this self growth that I was going through that I thought was so valuable. And it took me three or four years to do a webinar again.
So navigate the shame that came, not necessarily from the feedback this person gave me, but from the meaning I gave to that feedback, from the story I created from that feedback. At that point in my life, I had been very blessed. Winning for me had been easy and failing in with that webinar because I did not get one single client from it.
And I got this feedback from someone I cared about, threw me off into a shame spiral, and it took me years to be able to get back and build the courage to do another webinar. Years later, I did another webinar to sell a group program. And I remember I did. Incredible marketing, advertising. I had over seven or a thousand people enrolled in this webinar.
Usually what I do is create content that I know is going to add value to people's lives that are gonna have them thinking in new ways. And I also offer my services so people can buy while they're watching the webinar. This time, not one single person bought. Well, one purchase came in and I was like, Oh my God, finally someone bought.
And it was my mom who so lovingly was supporting me. I was devastated. I was so disappointed. I had put everything into this launch, into this webinar, and I had only sold the one spot for my mom. But I had booked another webinar the next day and the story this time I told myself instead of like the first time that I said, I'm a fraud.
I won't be able to do this again. I have no business talking about coaching was, well, I'm committed to this tomorrow. There's another 3000 or 4000 people that are going to come to watch this webinar and I'm going to give them my best. I'm going to create a transformation in this 45 minutes or giving me regardless if someone buys or doesn't buy.
I'm committed to my purpose. I'm committed to this journey of helping people dream bigger, take care of themselves, and live more fulfilled lives. And the difference of that story meant that in this second time, I completed my goal. I filled my group coaching program because I didn't give up. So please, when you fail, take a moment and assess and become aware of the story you're telling yourself.
Thank you. Is the story you're telling yourself gonna keep you going or is it gonna create so much shame that you won't be able to recover and pursue your dreams? If currently you notice that because of a failure or because you failed in advance, meaning you never went for what you wanted, you've created a story that has caused shame.
Kati, you're saying dream big, but I don't feel capable of or I don't want to try this again because I gave up. I don't have the discipline. Any of those stories or beliefs that you have, I recommend that you listen to Episode 4 where I explain how to change a belief and download the guide that goes with it so you can start working on those beliefs and start changing those stories so you can continue moving forward towards what you want.
My clients fail and they fail often because all of them are committed to big dreams. So what I constantly work with them is number one, learning to experience the pure emotions from failure, disappointment, sadness, regret, frustration. And number two. We spend some conscious time thinking about the story they're going to create from that failure.
And I have to tell you, it's so beautiful to see them fail. Even in the middle of their disappointment and sadness, there is a sense of satisfaction, a smile on their face, even when it hurts, because the story they're telling themselves is, I'm a visionary. I'm failing because I'm living my life to the fullest.
I'm pursuing my biggest dreams and I'm being courageous enough to risk experiencing these emotions that are so uncomfortable. Right now, you have a choice. You can avoid failure in advance by living in disappointment, or you can decide to take the leap. Go for your dreams, hire a coach, and put it all in so you at least know that you're living your life to the fullest.
Remember, there is no success without failure. But we all can do failure and not die from experiencing it. I love being with all of you today. See you next time.
