341 Holly Worton ~ The Importance Of Failure + How To Make The Most Of It

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Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 341. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode: today I am going to talk about failure. This is something that kind of been on my mind lately and so I wanted to explore it with you. I think this is a really, really, important topic to discuss and I can’t believe I haven’t talked about this before!

I did do an episode with Jo Casey, many episodes ago, number 220, which was called Why You Need Resilience In Your Business and, that is available at: http://HollyWorton.com/220 and it does have a downloadable transcript, but that was very business-related and as you know that is not really my thing anymore. I think resilience is super-important, failure is really important, but I feel like this is something I should have been talking about more. So, because it has been on my mind, we are going to talk about that today.

So, what are you going to learn? I am going to talk about: what is failure and what isn’t it? I am going to talk a little bit about when to give up and when to stick it out and things you need to consider. I am going to lake about why failure is a good thing and what is it good for? Then I am going to talk about timing and having patience because these are kind of the aspects of failure that have been on my mind for some time.

So, let’s get started: what is failure? Failure, I have been googling it, pretty much everywhere it is defined as lack of success. However, it is lack of success thus far. Just because you haven’t experienced success in a certain project, a certain goal…yet, doesn’t mean that it is a failure, doesn’t mean that you are not going to proceed next week, next month, next year, further down the line. And, so, that is why I have a problem with the world failure, because it is really only a failure if you give up; but yet, if you give up, or you choose to abort your plan/project/goal, I don’t think that is failure either, it just means that you have decided to terminate that project and move on to something else, or to focus on something else. There is a saying in NeuroLinguisticProgramming (NLP), it is a NLP pre-supposition, that says, “there is no failure only feedback”, and I think this is a really, really, important way of looking at failure. Failure doesn’t mean that you haven’t succeeded, and that you are not going to succeed, it just means that you haven’t succeeded yet, and it is feedback that something is not working or that you haven’t been going at it long enough. It is just feedback, it is information that can be really useful, if you can learn to analyse the situation and see what is going on.

So this has been on my mind lately because I have just been thinking about timing and patience, which has always been an issue for me, because I recently had my website redesigned and if you haven’t seen it yet, I have been instagramming about it and sharing it online and it is a really, really, gorgeous website. It was designed by my friend Alice Jennings; I am going to link to her in the show notes so you can check her out. She doesn’t just do web design, it is a part of her business, it is not the only thing that she does, but she did a fantastic job with my site and I am really, really, happy with it. So much so that I can’t stop going to my website and just looking at how pretty it is, because, it just feels like it really fits me. So my previous website I had done I think like three years ago, and it just didn’t feel like it fit me anymore, it just felt really uncomfortable and every time I looked at the branding and the website I just thought: ugh, this isn’t right, it doesn’t fit me. But I didn’t have a clear vision of what did fit me, I didn’t have a clear vision of what I wanted until, all of a sudden I did, something just clicked, I knew the look and feel I wanted for my website, I realised I had been collecting a series of stock images and photos that I liked and got in touch with Alice and she started putting it together. And in less than two weeks, really this took ten days from start to finish, it was done. So, now I have something that I feel it really accurately represents who I am and what I am doing today, whereas my previous website just did not look and feel like me. So this has got me to thinking that everything feels like it is kind of finally coming together, and I feel like I have said this to you many times in the past, but I think that is because I go through so many changes, and phases, and things keep coming together and then evolving and evolving and evolving. I feel like not only is my website coming together but also my message and what I want to be known for, I am still getting clarity on that, but it is getting there.

And, this has taken time. So I was just looking through my journal and thinking about all the things that I have been doing over the last decade of my life. All the big changes I have made, all the projects I have worked on, all the failures I have had. And I go back and look at all the different iterations of my business over the years and I trained as a coach and I was trying to build my coaching business, then I was trying to build a social media business, and then I did and then that evolved. I had all these different versions of my business over the years and I kept pivoting and changing as I got to know myself better and as I realised what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to help people, and what I wanted to do with my life. But I couldn’t have got to where I am today if I hadn’t had all those phases. I had to do the thing, I had to take action, I had to throw myself into each project, each business, so that I could get the experience I needed to refine and get to where I am today. If I just sat back and waited to take action until I had 100% clear vision, back in 2011, I don’t know what I would be doing today, I would still be sitting there. I needed to take the action, I needed to have the failures, the businesses that didn’t work, the projects that didn’t work, in order to get to where I am today and I needed that experience, to get to where I am today. There are so many points on my journey that I really felt like, not giving up so much, as just felt totally…I felt like a failure, I felt bad about myself and I used these businesses and projects that didn’t work out as a way to kind of beat myself up and confirm that I am not good enough. But it really wasn’t that, it was just that the things that I was doing weren’t quite right for me and they needed to change, and they needed to change again, and they needed to change again, and they needed to refine again.

So, I am telling this story from a business perspective and I aware that not everyone listening has a business or wants a business. This can apply to anything else in your life, it can apply to school, to studies, it can apply to a career, it can apply to relationships. We have our projects, we have our plans, we have our goals, we work towards them, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t. The question comes up: how do you know when to give up and how do you know when to stick it out? Seth Godin wrote a book many years ago, I think it is from 2007-ish, called The Dip. It is a little book that teaches you when to quit and he has a bunch of different theories about how to know when you need to give up and when you need to keep going and you are just experiencing a dip, which is then going to go up.  So that’s a really good book if you want to read that, I really like Seth Godin and it is a really short, easy, fast-to-read book that has really good information in it.

But, I would say, questions to ask yourself, is this goal, is this plan, is this project that you feel like you are failing in, is it adversely affecting the rest of your life? So if you are trying to run a business and it is taking up all of your time, you are neglecting your family, you are spending all your extra money on it, you are getting into debt and that is affecting your family, that is adversely affecting the rest of your life. Now, if you have a plan, that you are going to sacrifice x amount of money and x amount of time, for x period, then that makes sense to stick it out until a certain point, but there needs to be a point where you think: how much longer am I willing to affect the rest of my life, by sticking with this project? Only you are going to know the answer to that. If your goal, your plan, your project, is causing problems with the rest of your life it is something to consider. You also need to stop and ask yourself: is this goal, is this project, still important to you? Because our priorities change over time, you know, what’s important to me today is not necessarily what is important to me a year ago. And, I look over my plan for this year, for 2020, all that stuff is still really important to me, but some things are more important than others and my priorities change as I work through my projects and work on my goals, and as I move through the year. So stop and ask yourself, is this still important to you? Is it still a priority? Is it as high a priority as you think it is? Is there something that you would rather do instead? Is there something that it would be easier for you to do instead?  Is there a similar thing you could do that wouldn’t be quite so hard, that maybe you would enjoy more? Are you just being stubborn, stuck on this course? Are you really seeing the situation the way it is? Maybe you could get a second opinion from a coach or a mentor? Will you regret quitting, if you quit, if you give up, are you going to regret it? Maybe you just need a break, sometimes when we have been going at something for a while and it is really, really, stressful, maybe we just need to take a break sometimes, either go on holiday, take a weekend away, or just take some time away from the project. That could be a week, it could be a month, then come back to it with fresh eyes, because that can give us a new perspective.

How can you get help? Again you could hire a coach, you could hire a mentor, you could get a second opinion. Hiring a professional is a great way of breaking through a plateau. As you know, probably, I have been fasting, doing intermittent fasting for almost a year-and-a-half now, and I was doing really well with my weight loss, at the beginning of it and then I hit a plateau and I got stuck for a year. And I was going online and I was asking other people and I was getting advice, and none of it is was working, and then finally I thought: if this were another area of my life, if this were business, what would I do to break through this plateau? I would hire a coach. And so I googled “fasting coaches” and I found a fantastic fasting coach and I am working with her now and she is helped me break through the plateau and move forward with my goals. And I am learning lots of new things about fasting that I didn’t learn from the internet, because this is her area of expertise. So get professional help, whatever that means. Is it a coach, is it a mentor, is it therapy? I don’t know. But hiring a coach who is an expert in this project or goal that you are working on can really help you break through a plateau and achieve your goals.

So these are some questions that you can ask yourself to see if you want to stick it out or if you want to give up. I don’t think there is anything wrong with giving up, sometimes our goals change, our priorities change, and what we thought we wanted to do is no longer what we really want to do and there is no harm in stopping our work towards a goal, there are plenty of things that I have given up and changed and adjusted over the years. But maybe it requires a pivot, in focus, rather than quitting, you know, all of these questions are things that you need to explore and really only you can answer these questions. But again, getting professional help really is a good thing.

But failure is good thing, it is good for experience. All these different iterations of my business that I have had over the years, have given me a lot of experience. It has helped me know what I enjoy and what I don’t enjoy, what I want to do and what I don’t want to do, and it has given me practical business experience. The more years that I have in business the more different kinds of businesses that I have, the more I learn, it gives you experience. It gives you knowledge, it gives you resilience. Resilience is like a muscle and the more you practice using it and the more you practice being resilient in your life, the easier it will be to be resilient in other areas of your life. And I think it is important to learn resilience, because I think a lot of people give up before they need to, they give up just because they feel like a failure, they are not actually making a conscious decision to terminate the project or goal, and I think, to me, that’s the difference. Giving up implies just quitting, because it is too hard, whereas sitting down, evaluating the situation and making a conscious decision to cease your work, your goal, your project, that’s a big difference. So resilience is good for future projects, for all areas of life, I think it is really important to cultivate resilience.

And growth, failure is good for growth, growing as individuals. Growing is personal growth, personal development, it can help not always with our self-esteem, but it can help our self-confidence. Failure depends on how you use it. So, you can use it to learn, you can you use it to grow, or you can use it to beat yourself up. You can use it to grow your self-confidence, your self-esteem, your self-worth, or you can use it to diminish yourself, it is all about what you make it. Failure in and of itself is not good or bad, it is what you use the experience for.

So I would like to suggest that you make a list of all of our failures, over the last year, over the last ten years, over your lifetime maybe. Make a list of all your failures and then look at what you have learned from those experiences. What did working towards those goals, or those projects, give you? What did you learn, what did you experience, how did you grow? Because when we actually write these things down, in our journal, or wherever, we explore them, it helps us to see the situations for what they were. I think a lot of times when we have this stuff just swirling around in our heads, it can look kind of dark and murky and shameful and embarrassing, but when we get them out and we put them on paper and we see all the good things that have come from these failed projects and plans, it helps us understand how these failures have enriched our lives, what we have learned, what we have gained. And, if we hadn’t attempted to work towards these plans and projects, we would be missing these things that we have gained from the failure. So I really do believe that it is better to try and fail, than not try at all, because we get so much from failure.

I was just looking over my ten-year review and one of the questions that I explored was: what mistakes did you make and what did you learn from them? And one of the things I wrote down was, honestly, almost everything was good because I learned something from it, and it gave me experience. There are very few things that I regret, really there is only one thing that I wrote down that I regretted…and even that I learned from it. Everything all my mistakes, all my failures, I have learned from them and so they were useful. So it is really, really, helpful to sit down and look at these failures and see how they have helped us, otherwise our mind gremlins can use them to beat ourselves up. What lessons have you learned as a result of these apparent failures?

And in regard to timings, because this is another big part of what I have been thinking about. When I said earlier that I feel like things have been coming together and everything is coming together, a lot of things that I had been working towards, that I had been planning, that I had been wanting for so many years, I am seeing in my life now. I am being, doing, having, all these things that I really, really, wanted you know five years ago. I really wish that I hadn’t thrown away all of my old Leonie Dawson planners that I used to use, because she used to have, well she still does the planner every year, but in the planner she has this list of 100 things that you want to do. And, a lot of those things are now happening in my life. So they didn’t happen the year that I wanted to do them, I didn’t make them happen the year that I planned them, but they were still things that were important to me and so now, years down the line, I have achieved, or am doing, or have, those things. So I think it is important to recognise that life doesn’t always happen in the timeline that we would like it to happen. We don’t always get things when we want them, but I think if there are things that are still important to us and we keep working towards them, they can definitely happen. I am seeing evidence of that in my life today.

So that is why I think being patient is so important, I think patience is part of resilience, or maybe they go hand in hand, because patience is something that I have really struggled with. And because I have been so impatient over the years I have gotten really frustrated with myself for not achieving things, for not necessarily doing all the things that I wanted to do. A lot of things didn’t happen in the timeline that I wanted but they are happening now. And honestly I don’t know what makes some things happen faster than others, maybe it is the priorities that we put them in, the effort that we put towards them, or maybe it is how aligned they are with our soul and what our soul wants to experience, I don’t know, it is probably a combination of those things. But I think patience, respecting the fact that timing isn’t always what we want it to be, I think taking into consideration both of those things can help us have the resilience that we need to continue working towards our plans, and projects, and goals, even when we feel like we are failing.

So, I think I am going to wrap this up. I think this is a really important topic, perhaps I will revisit this with someone else. I really look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic, as always I love getting emails from listeners because it helps me to know what is important to you and helps give me ideas for future episodes. So please let me know how you feel about failure, how you feel about failure in your life, and if this episode has given you a different perspective on your past failures and how maybe you are feeling about current things in your life that maybe aren’t feeling very successful. I think a lot of time we need a string of failures before we can achieve success in something, I don’t think that is always the case, sometimes we achieve success right off the bat, but a lot of times it takes trial and error and failure is a big part of that trial and error. So really I would like to invite you to look at your past failures, see what you have learned from them, and see how they have enriched your life.

So that’s it for now, next week I will be back with another solo episode. As always, I would love to hear your feedback. So you can email me at: [email protected] or find me online and get in touch there.

Thank you so much for listening and remember to visit: https://hollyworton.com/341 for the show notes on this episode, and so you can see the pretty new website! It is so lovely! Thank you, thank you, thank you and have a great week.