#73 - Why FAILURE is a NECESSARY Part of the Process
Summary
If you're a perfectionist...an Enneagram type 3 achiever...this is probably the episode for you! ;-) For MOST of us, failure is something we're NOT a fan of. Especially in the process of trying to achieve our goals. And when we struggle, it can be REALLY easy for us to compare, to judge our worthiness and our value and to really get down on ourselves.
This is an episode that was very inspired by my students and some of our conversations about failure. And recently, I had a 16-year-old student who said to me: "I feel like I learn more when I make a mistake..." and you best believe I got fired up and went into straight PREACHER mode. Because this student? She'd learned a lesson that many adults have yet to learn. And I was SO pumped.
So, in today's episode, we're going to get REALLY REAL about failure. About the lessons that failure can teach us. How, like this student said, you truly do learn SO MUCH MORE when we make mistakes, when we fail. Failure? It's our BIGGEST TEACHER! It's an INSTRUMENTAL teacher. And I'm going to break down for you how you can learn to appreciate failure for exactly what it is and how it can help us!
For show notes, head to coachellyn.com/podcast and, of course, post on instagram and tag me @coachellyn so that I can shout you out and say thank you!
WHAT I TALK ABOUT…
The importance of learning to persevere + be resilient
The lesson of “Learning When You Make Mistakes”, as taught by my 16-year-old student…
Most adults haven’t learned the importance of failing forward and it can hold us back
How sometimes we judge ourselves, compare ourselves, etc. based on our failings…
How failure can be a powerful teacher + tool…
Some Action Steps:
Identify what the “failure” is…
Reflect + Evaluate the “failure” by asking:
What went well? What was helpful in the process that helped move you form?
What didn’t go well? And how can you improve on that in the future?
Identify the core lessons + action steps. Look back at your answers to your previous questions.
Commit to implementing them! It’s all fine and dandy to identify what went wrong, but we have to implement the lesson! That’s the key…
Resources in this episode:
Book a transformation call here
Join the Growth Tribe Academy or learn more here
TRANSCRIPT:
Intro…
[inaudible]
Hey everyone and welcome to the growth tribe podcast where we're all about growing ourselves to create lives we effing love on our term. I'm Ellyn and I'm a former biomedical researcher turned coach who fell in love with personal growth when it empowered me to transform my health, quit my PhD, travel the world, and start my own business, but do not get me wrong. I'm still figuring my shit out too, and I'm so pumped to share what I'm learning along the way. We've got amazing interviews, big stories, tips, tricks, and no bullshit action steps that we can all learn from. So with that, welcome to this episode of the growth track.
Bumper…
Today's episode is brought to you by the growth tribe Academy. If you are an avid growth tribal listener than grow, you've got to check out the growth tribe Academy and the Academy. We're putting all the tools and resources you need to take your growth to the next level, all in one convenient space. You'll get access each month to a growing library of personal growth content. Basically Netflix for personal growth. You'll get video content, monthly live coaching, and of course a community of growth oriented needs to support you all for a super affordable monthly price because my goal is to make this stuff accessible. We cover everything from setting better boundaries, healthy living habits, self-compassion values, and so much more. If you want some more information, go ahead and check out the show notes and coach ellen.com/podcast with that, let's get into this week's show.
Main Episode…
Hey everybody and welcome back to the growth tribe podcast. Today is an episode for my perfectionist out there. This is something that you're going to totally resonate with because we're talking failure today and I don't know about you, but I often joke that I am a recovering perfectionist. If you've ever taken the Enneagram, I am an Enneagram type three which means that I'm an achiever, I'm very outcome driven. I would give anything to skip the messy middle of pursuing any goal or achieving any result in life. But obviously that's not how the world works and that's not how we appreciate the results, nor is it how we grow into the results that we want. So with that, we're going to get into this week's content, which we're talking really about how to fail forward, why failure is such a necessary part of the process. And actually this is really inspired by a lot of the conversations that I've had with my students lately. So most of you might know that my full time job is I'm a professional tutor. I work for a company that primarily works with students doing test prep for the ACT and the SAT.
Um, for those of you that are international, those are our admissions tests to college for high school students in the U S and let me tell you, I work with a lot of students that are perfectionists. That's one of the big things that comes up in some of our first sessions together. And it's often one of the things that I will ask them about very, very early on, just as I watched them work, as I watched their process, I've gotten very good at identifying behaviors of people who identify as perfectionist. Um, and with these students in particular, what we're looking at is they do not like getting answers wrong and their goals often revolve around, you know, how many questions they're getting. Right. So, you know, this often comes up as, you know, in a session we'll set goals at the beginning of every session and it's, you know, I want to get every question right today.
And with these students I often have to work with them on reframing that approach. But then on Sunday of this week, I had a couple really, really profound conversations with my students. One of them, she was super, super frustrated. She didn't feel like she was progressing fast enough and she was comparing herself to some of the people in her life. You know, her cousins who are the same age as her and who were being more successful on the sat than she was. And she was comparing her scores, comparing how easy the exam was for her and asking these questions of like, am I just really stupid? Which really I feel like adults can relate to as well. You know, if your self talk is pretty negative, that's oftentimes maybe how you talk to yourself. And this was something that was coming up a lot for my student student and it was, you know, it was heartbreaking to see her really judge herself and compare herself in such a profound way.
Um, because she has made strides but she wasn't recognizing that progress or what it was because she wasn't at the outcome she wanted yet she hadn't achieved the thing she wanted yet. So I had to explain to her a really, really important lesson that she was learning now about perseverance and about being resilient and about her learning, how she had to learn and stick with things when, you know, they didn't come naturally to her. And these are lessons that oftentimes people might not learn until later.
I actually had to tell her about the fact that, you know, I'll be fully transparent. I didn't struggle that much in high school. High school was very easy for me. The sat, the act, it was very easy for me, but when I got to college I had to learn a lot of the lessons that this particular student was learning.
Now I had to learn in college when I've made this huge transition, how to overcome setbacks, how to overcome obstacles, how to course correct and change, change my strategy when things weren't working. That was made my transition to college a lot harder. And she is learning these lessons now about how to persevere in the face of resilience and how instead of doing that in college, she is learning all of these valuable things now and how hugely that was going to benefit her. And then I had another conversation later in the day with another student, again, struggling, working through some very, very difficult practice problems. And she was, you know, getting a little frustrated. She was getting, she'd gotten a few questions right? But then she started to get a few questions wrong and she got frustrated. So we talked through them like I do. It's all of my students when we're working on ACT/SAT. And we asked you why is this a wrong answer? Okay, what did we learn from this? What's the takeaway here? How can we apply it to future questions?
And as we had some of these conversations, she said something that I will truly never forget. And it was so profound to me because it's a lesson that many adults don't learn. And that was, she said, I feel like I learned more when I made mistakes than when I got questions right. And I wouldn't have straight up preacher mode. I was so freaking excited about the student and this the thing that she just said, because we don't often learn that lesson. We don't often learn that lesson. And so way later in our life, and here's the 16 year old who've just realized, Oh my God, it's okay to make mistakes because look how much I learned from them.
And again, it's a lesson that often we as adults haven't learned or if we have learned it, we're struggling to apply it. We're in a culture that 1000% validates our status and our worthiness based upon achievements based upon outcomes. People get raises for hitting sales goal. You know, you get social validation for your material possessions. Um, people get into incredibly high level colleges and graduate programs because of how they scored on an exam, a standardized exam that a thousand percent, it's often written to trick you. I often joke with my students, the sat and the act test writers are jerks because they're designing these exams and these questions are asking to trick you. And in a lot of ways we validate people who don't fall for the tricks. But what happened to me and what happens to so many people protection, perfectionist, excuse me in particular, is that when we hit roadblocks or obstacles, if we haven't learned these lessons about learning from our mistakes, about persevering through, about resilience, that we haven't learned these lessons early in our life.
When we hit a road block, we don't know what to do. You know, when we hit, uh, an obstacle, we beat our heads against it instead of finding ways around it. You know, we basically proved the definition of insanity. Sometimes we're doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results, trying to force something to work that's not meant to, and sometimes what happens if we can't figure it out, we give up or we may sometimes judge ourselves based upon that failure. You know? For those of those of you out there who are perfectionists, does this resonate with you? I'm curious because I find so often for me, when I was in college and graduate school when things weren't going right, that's what happened to me. I would judge myself upon that failure. Maybe I'm not meant to do this. Maybe I'm just not as smart as my fellow students, whatever, but I would judge the failure as a representation on me and my worthiness.
But that right there is the power of failure there. There's power in failure, there's power in mistake mistakes because the power's in the lessons we learn. The power is in our ability to reflect, which is a step that a lot of us don't often take. And we're going to talk about how you can take that step a little bit more in just a second. But the power is in our ability to identify what's working and what's not. You know, the power is in our ability to problem solve, to come up with new things, to try so that we can get our goals so we can achieve the thing that we want. We have to learn the lessons there. And the power is also in the learning to persevere and be resilient through struggle because, and this is what we often, that perfectionist mindset that like can I skip the messy middle mindset that I often have as an Enneagram type three that perfectionist often have, is that we somehow think we can get through it without perseverance and resilient and make no mistake.
Perseverance, resilience, grit, all of those things, those are learned behaviors. Confidence is a learned behavior and you learn those things by doing them. So the power in that failure in bouncing back from that failure or mistake is in learning some of these mindset tricks. Failure is a thousand percent necessary. It's a part of the process of achievement. But we have to take advantage of the failures and mistakes and we have to glean from those failures and mistakes, the lessons that they can teach us. That's the power. It's how can we take the failure and the mistake and pull the lesson from it. So now I want to get to the action steps. I'm not going to leave you guys without action steps. So how can we turn our failures and our mistakes into action steps? So firstly let's identify what the failure is or what the mistake is that you're thinking of.
Maybe it's in your business, your health, your relationships, whatever, but identify where that failure is. And now this is the part where we're going to do that reflection step, that step that people often skip and we're going to evaluate our failures and mistakes. So whether you grab a journal, whether you just sit down and think about this, whatever the first step we ask is what went well here, because there probably is something that went well. You know, what was helpful in the process that helped move you forward? You know, maybe it was a support system that you had, maybe it was scheduling something into your calendar so you made sure you did it. Maybe it was having an accountability buddy or a new technique you read in a book that was really, really helpful when you implemented it. But make note of what works. I think celebrating the victories along the way is super, super important.
And I'm not gonna lie the first time I did this podcast cause it didn't record the first time, I forgot that step. Celebrating the victories along the way. So identify the things that went well. And then the second step is asking yourself what went wrong? Or what can I improve? So you know, for an some examples, did you royally screw up a presentation because you didn't prepare? Okay, how can you better prepare next time? So identify the thing that went wrong and how can you improve it. Another example is maybe you missed it, you're writing a book and you missed a book deadline because you weren't working on it consistently. Okay, how can you improve your consistency and commitment next time? Do you need to time block in your calendar? Do you need to set some boundaries around when you're, I don't know, full time job ends or when your kids have access to you, whatever, where, where can you tweak things so that you can improve your consistency and a commitment for next time?
So look at these things, ask some of these core questions and then from that, identify the core lessons and the core action steps and then commit to implementing them. So that second step, those questions that we ask, that's really starting to do the identification. What can I learn here? What's the lesson? What's the action step? The thing that I need to do moving forward. And the third step is implementation. So it's all fine and dandy to identify what's the thing that needs to change here? What's the thing that I need to keep doing? Because show up, you got to commit to doing the thing, the implementation step. It's actually these last two pieces. We can often, especially as perfectionist, identify the failure, the mistake, but then we stopped there. We just beat ourselves up for it instead of taking something from it instead of learning from it.
So I challenge you to do step two, steps two and three. I challenge you to reflect, figure out what worked, figure out what didn't work, translate that into a lesson or an action step and then take those action steps and implement them in to your life. If you need some extra help identifying these action steps or implementing them into your life, please let me know and you can head on over to coachellyn.com/transform schedule a complimentary session. Um, and we can talk about what that might look like for you. Whatever you can definitely check out our growth tribe Academy. We're actually talking about implementation. Um, we did it in one of our past months on, so you can definitely check that out. Lots of ways to get that or just start ping pong ideas off of the people in your life. Seeing if there's someone who will support you and hold you accountable or you know, group of girlfriends that you can meet with and you can support each other and give each other ideas whatever.
But turning that mistake or that failure into something you can take action on. That's how you learn from it. That's how you take advantage of failure, being that necessary part of the process and not just something that reflects back on you in terms of your self worth. We've got to stop identifying ourselves by our failures because failures are crucial. Failures are such important steps in the process. And I'll actually wrap this up by telling you guys a quote that is the quote of my week this week. That is something that was inspired by that student who recognized how much she learned from her mistakes. And that quote is sometimes the outcomes we want don't teach us the lessons that we need. I'm going to say that again. Sometimes the outcomes we want don't teach us the lessons we need. All of those perfectionists out there, myself included, and again, I always say we in these podcasts because I'm in this with you guys.
I experienced this stuff. Sometimes I struggled to implement it, but if you're a perfectionist, if you're an Enneagram type three whatever, if you catch yourself thinking, okay, I wish I could just fast forward to where I achieved the thing where I get the outcome that I want. I challenge you to reframe this because that outcome, once again, isn't going to give you the lesson that you need. It might be the outcome you want, but learning the lesson, digging into the messy middle and learning the lessons that the messy middle is meant to teach us. That's what the point is. That's the point of this whole crazy thing called life. That's the point of personal growth. That is the point that failure is necessary. There's power in it, but we have to step back and open ourselves up to the lessons that that failure teaches. That's all I've got for you guys today. I hope that this was a little motivational kick in the bootay. I hope that some of these action steps were simple and tangible things that you can implement to learn from the failures and the mistake of your own life. Make that failure a crucial part of your process, a crucial part of learning lesson and growing yourself as a person. Fail forward a thousand percent. Hell yeah, fail forward because failure is so, so powerful of a teacher and it is always something that's going to come up as we're growing ourselves and as a researcher yourself.
So let's start to take advantage of those things, learn those lessons so that we can make Epic transformation and Epic growth in our life. Okay, that is all for now guide all I've got for you today. You have a great rest of your week and I will talk to you next time.
[OUTRO]
Before you go. One last thing, I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the growth tribe and thank you so much for your support. Have you been enjoying what you're hearing and you want to help me? And all of our wonderful guests get their message out. There are a few things you could do. You could send an episode that you really loved to a friend that you really think would appreciate it. You could subscribe and give us a five star review on iTunes, or you could take a screenshot and post it in your Instagram or Facebook story. I love stories and I would love nothing more than the opportunity to shout you out and send you a massive thank you. Once again, thank you so much for listening and thank you for being a part of the growth tribe.
