What happens when you fail? Does it always negatively impact your self-worth? What should you do with failure? In this episode, I give you a personal of one my greatest failures and the errors I made that prevented my ability to recover from it. I show you a new way of looking at failure, and the emotions behind it, so that you can acknowledge what happened and finally let go. Learn how to acknowledge your failures, what you need to do in order to move on, and use my 5-step tool to turn any failure into something that builds self-worth.
transcript
I want to talk about how to deal with self-worth after you have tried, given effort, time, energy, everything you had to something and it failed. So, how do you deal with failure and still build self-worth? First, I want to talk about the actual feeling that comes up because sometimes people think, "Okay, I failed that must be shame." And a lot of this self-worth work actually gets put in the shame bucket and it's really separate emotions and you need to treat them differently.
So instead of looking at shame as part of failure, what I want to do is give it a different spin because in my life and with my failures, I know the worst ones, the epic ones, the catastrophic ones. Yes, there was shame, but that wasn't the pain. The pain was sadness. So let's talk about sadness.
Acknowledge Sadness
From feeling slightly bombed or having a bit of the blues to being hurt or having intense emotions of sorrow, despair, heartbreak, or grief. Sadness comes in many forms. And a variety of intensities. When you're home for that 85th, Friday night alone, eating pizza in your pajamas while the rest of the world seems to be out, having a great time, making friends falling in love, getting married and having babies without you.
That lonely achy, outcast feeling? That's sadness. When you really thought someone liked you and you found out that they don't at least not in that way. That heartbreaking chest pain, despairing, hopeless feeling. Sadness. When your mom died decades ago and you're in the vitamin aisle, minding your own business until some woman passes you with your mom's signature perfume, wafting behind her. And that one tiny moment, it's like you lost your mom all over again. That tidal wave of grief stricken, bereavement that thwacks you across your gut and buckles your knees. That's sadness.
And when you have a failure. Whether it's a work failure, a project failure, a friendship failure, a marriage failure. And you have that pit in your stomach where you don't even want to look at it and you're embarrassed and you're ashamed and you just feel like laying down and giving up. That's also sadness. So sadness is the feeling that comes up when you lose something of value. The pain is caused by clinging to something that is already gone.
Sadness evolve to help you cope with letting go. Loss is supposed to be painful. Otherwise we wouldn't try so hard to keep our loved ones and tact, our social bonds healthy. Or anything that matters to us. We wouldn't work for it. Loss is tragic. It means that you have invested in something that you no longer have.
So sadness is an invitation to receive at once you to seek comfort. Caretaking and help. Sadness is a natural response to loss. And it wants you to spend less and receive more to replenish your resources. When you repress and deny sadness, you lose valuable information that tells you to slow down rejuvenate and recover. In your body, sadness feels slow and heavy. It literally makes the physical space around your heart hurt.
Acknowledge Grief
Now if it's a really catastrophic failure, you might actually need to look at grief. Which is a very intense version of sadness.
Grief comes up after an unwillingness to accept or to honor the loss or the profound transition that you're going through. It wants you to release that, which has died into the next world. So you may live more fully in this one. It transports you to the deepest places when you have no choice, but to let go.
Even if your mind doesn't see this failure as something that you should grieve or as something that you've lost or something that's really has sadness attached to it. Our bodies and our emotions have a visceral understanding of death and loss. So it goes way into our bones. When we have some sort of failure, there's this deep sense of soul loss or heartbreak that comes with failure.
Sometimes when you refuse to grieve and you refuse to be sad about it, it's a really a way of keeping a dead. Entity a dead relationship, a dead project, a dead business, whatever that is. To keep the dead alive. So if you look at failure as something that happened, and it's something that needs to be grieved and let go of you have a profoundly different experience than when you're just trying to skip over the top of it.
If you don't grieve your losses. They will hang around in your psyche and haunt you. Really it's like you're living with this ghost of something that didn't happen and you're continuing to live in this kind of fantasy morning haunted place rather than fully embodying your life.
So instead of seeing failure, as something to be ashamed of. I want you to see it as sadness and grief. And it's the consequence of having loved something. Now, when you smacked up in the middle of a failure, I bet you don't sit there and think, wow, I really love this. This is all about love. Probably doesn't feel like that. You might feel angry. You might feel afraid. You might feel all kinds of other things.
However to switch this from something where it's not building self-worth to something that really helps empower you. And not in a cheerleader way, like truly, I don't ever want to give you some topical antidote about, okay, just tuck that failure in your back pocket and you're going to be fine. No, that's not what I'm about.
What I want you to do is really understand the mechanism behind it, how it gets stuck, and then how you move on. And when you move on, that's how you build self worth. So sadness and grief are the consequence of having loved something.
That love might not be the first thing you think of when you fail. Often, we just want to recategorize it. Turn it into a learning lesson, make it go away. You know, manifest something different and just kind of skip over the top of it. So instead, what I want you to do is look at this another way.
Failure: A Personal Story
One of my most profound failures was a yoga studio as a, it was a retreat center. It was called Yoga Church and I loved it dearly. So I very, very much understand this idea of failure. Loss sadness, anger. Depression, all the things that show up like that.
The loss was brought on by several factors. Some of them personal and some of them financial and mostly it was brought on by me way over-giving and under earning and not being able to keep it financially viable. I loved yoga so much. And I invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into this retreat center. It wasn't just a failure. It was like, I lost this business. And also heartbreak and also all my money and also my belief that things were going to be okay.
It felt like I'd been betrayed by this thing that I had loved so dearly, I felt like I had been betrayed by yoga itself. I offer this backstory to demonstrate why and how. These past three years have been oddly healing for me and why I see failure in a different way. I can now see that I was always going to lose that retreat center. Always. I was always going to lose yoga as I had known it to some extent. This might sound nihilistic, but it's not. It's oddly comforting. It's even hopeful for me. There was never anything I could have done to alter the ultimate course I needed to take. This has made my loss feel less personal. And it also begs the greater question of what's happening at a global level to this thing that I love so much.
How I used to look at failure. First I'd be ashamed. I'd hide I'd retreat. Second, I'd turn it into some life lesson. So in this yoga center lesson. What I wanted to do very badly. And what I did do at first was like, oh, I'll take that experience and I'll make myself better or I'll take that failure and I'll make it into something successful. What that is, is really identifying with my ideal image rather than my true self.
And then third I'd use that ideal image. To create some story. And as soon as I'm doing that, I'm over in the worthless cycle.
Then I'd see it as something that shouldn't have been lost. And what I want you to know is if you're in the middle of a failure and you're arguing with the fact that you shouldn't have failed, if that's the loop in your head, what you're doing is arguing with reality and you lose because reality wins.
It happened, it failed. As long as you're hooked into that cycle of like, it shouldn't have happened, this is what I could have done. This is what I should do next. Then you're not really stepping into your true self you're over in that idealized world.
So I'd see it as something that shouldn't have been lost. I'd argue with reality. And in that ideal image I'd be in the worthless cycle. Which meant I would take worthless action, which reinforces my sense of worthlessness. I'd hide. I'd repackage myself. I'd move. I wouldn't grieve it. I wouldn't acknowledge my sadness. And then I'd stay on that top level skimming the surface and trying to just get to that next hit of maybe that easy artificial optimistic feeling rather than actually deal. So what I want you to see is there's a different way to deal with failure. And this is what I have come to. Not because I was brilliant, but more because the world beat it into me and taught me this is all you can do with failure.
4 Steps to Recover After Failure
So first recognize the sadness or the grief or both.
Second. Recognize that sadness. And grief are associated with love that was lost.
Third. I want you to use that love story to move into the worthy cycle. Tell yourself. The thing I really loved was, or I really wanted it to work. I really loved that part of it. I really loved the people in it, or I really loved that building, or I really loved that old house, whatever this is, that feels like a failure. Find the love.
And fourth, I want you to kind of think about my little yoga thing, where, where I was so devastated about this failure. And then on the flip side of having gone through the pandemic… it's just fascinating because I can see now I was always going to fail. There was no other way. And what I want to offer you is instead of arguing with the failure, there is so much surrender and humility and peace. If you can just see it as it was always going to happen. And when you see it, as this was always going to fail, it was always going to fail in this way.
4 Powerful Questions to Help You Overcome Failure
Then you can ask these really powerful questions.
What part was actually lost?
What part can never be lost?
What part do I have a duty to continue?
And what part should I ultimately let go?
So those are the questions that I ended up asking myself about my yoga experience. And so what part was actually lost? I lost a building. Okay. What part can never be lost? My ability to teach my ability to connect with people. That was what I really loved. I loved connecting with people. So what part do I have a duty to continue?
That's the hardest part. So that's kind of that spin instead of going, oh, how can I repackage this failure as some sort of success? It's like, what part do I have a duty to continue? Even if you suck at it, even if you're going to fail again, even if it's hard, even if you're embarrassed, what part do you have a duty to continue?
That is a powerful question for me. And I think it's going to really help you as well. And then what part should I ultimately like go? That's the loss. That's the grief. And you let go because you loved it and it's supposed to hurt when you lose something that you love. So then you take a worthy action based on those answers and you can use these five steps to really build self-worth instead of tanking it.