You're listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number four.
Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching. And now, your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.
Hi, everybody, it's Brooke Castillo. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited that so many of you are listening to the podcast and emailing me and letting me know how much you love it.
I have been thinking about doing this for a long time, and I'm really stoked that the time and energy I've put into doing it is paying off for all of you guys who are interested in my teaching and what's going on at the school. So thank you so much. And if you're listening to this and you haven't already, I'd really appreciate it if you'd go over to iTunes and give me a review.
That would be amazing. So today, we're going to talk about failure. And more specifically, we're going to talk about how to fail.
I think there's a lot of information out there about how not to fail and how to succeed. And I think there needs to be more talk about failure and how to do that properly. I would say that most people don't achieve their dreams because they don't want to fail.
And, you know, there's not a lot of consideration as to why. You know, I'll have a lot of people say to me, I have a real fear of failure. And I'll say, well, what does that mean?
What are you afraid of? What is failure? Why are you afraid of it?
And they'll think about it and come back and say, you know what, I've never really thought about it that way. So that's one of the things we do in coaching. We always try to get to the cause of all the issues.
We don't try and solve problems. We just try and solve the cause of problems. And one of the main causes of problems is not understanding why.
So the first thing I think that's important to do is to understand what is failure. How do you define it? So of course I went to Google because Google knows everything.
And I asked Google, what is failure? And I was totally surprised by the definition that came up. It said, the omission of expected or required action.
The omission of expected or required action. I love this definition of failure. If failure means we just didn't do our own expected action or something else didn't do our expected action, it just seems so benign.
It seems so, okay, well, that's what happened. There was an omission of action on either my part or your part. That's what we're calling failure.
Well, that's not a big deal, right? It's just something didn't turn out the way we had expected. So what most people do is they just stop expecting, and therefore, they never fail.
They keep their expectations really low. They just keep recycling the same life. They never go outside their comfort zone.
And then they never really have to deal with trying to miss their own expectation or not meet their own expectation. And I think that's such a shame. So many of the clients that I talk to, that is their main issue, is they just don't feel alive anymore because they're not putting themselves out there because they're afraid and they don't want to fail.
And I ask my clients all the time, why are you avoiding failing? What is the reason? And it always boils down to avoiding wanting to feel something.
So if failure is really just not meeting your own expectation or not taking the required action to meet your own expectation, then really what's going to happen when that happens is you are going to think some thoughts, it's going to create some negative emotion. So the real reason why we're avoiding any kind of missing the mark, any kind of not meeting our expectation, is because we don't want to feel what we're going to feel when that happens. And here's what's really interesting about that.
When you don't meet your own expectation, the only feeling that you're going to end up having is based on what you decide to think. So stay with me. So you set out to do something, and you have an expectation of the result, and you miss that expectation.
Now, at that point, you get to decide what you're going to make that mean. You get to decide what you're going to think about that, right? So if you think about that in a way that hurts your feelings, right?
If you think about that in a way that's dejecting and disappointing, then you're going to experience that negative emotion. And so ironically, the whole reason you're avoiding failing is because you're avoiding something that you have complete control over, which is your reaction to failing. Are you guys following this?
Because it's really important. You're avoiding something you are in charge of and acting like it's happening to you. So most people, when I talk to them about failure, will say that failure happens to me and then I have to experience it.
But that's not the truth. What really happens is we miss our expectation and then we decide to make it mean something that hurts. We decide to make it mean something that causes us a negative emotion.
So first of all, there can be work on that end of it, right? So when we don't meet our own expectations, we can decide to not make that mean the end of the world. We can decide to make that mean actually something positive.
And therefore, we won't be dreading experiencing that very thing that we're creating, which is our own negative emotion. So let me give you an example, because I know that this sounds interesting in theory, but you might not quite be understanding what I'm saying, especially if you're new to this work. So let's say I go as a coach to teach a class, and I start marketing a class, and I want to have five people in the class, let's say.
And so I go out there, and I start marketing it, and I'm really excited about it, and I put energy into marketing it. And three people sign up. And I'm like, oh, that's such a fail.
I only had three people sign up. I'm not good at this. I shouldn't even teach this class.
People don't want what I have to offer, right? So I'm never going to do this again, because this feels so terrible. Well, the reason it feels terrible is because I'm making it mean that there's something wrong with me, that I'm not any good at this, right?
That's why that certain quote unquote fail, right? That I'm calling a failure is so awful, is because I'm making it so awful. And so I start avoiding something that I'm actually the cause of.
Now, alternatively, I could go out and set to teach a class and say, I want to have five people in the class, and I could have three people show up, and I could be like, hey, awesome, three people want what I have to offer, right? I definitely didn't meet my expectation. I definitely didn't get five people when I really wanted five, but I got three, and I can keep moving forward from here, and next time I hope I'll get five.
And I wonder why I didn't get five. And if you go back to the definition, it's the omission of expected or required action. So I love thinking about it that way.
It's like I just didn't do something, right? I had no mission of my own action to not get five people in the class. So I can do that next time, and I can do it differently next time, right?
When I think about it that way, it actually doesn't make me want to avoid failure. It makes me want to learn and grow and try it again. So you can see that I'm the one that's determining what failure will be like to me by how I decide to think about it when I don't meet my own expectation.
Now, I really do believe that success is one of those things that is acquired by failure and by being willing to fail. And there's a wonderful quote that says, if you want success, you need to double your rate of failure. And I really do believe in that because I think the better you get at failing, the more willing you're going to be to do it, the more you're going to learn and the better you're going to get at meeting your own expectations.
And if failure is not meeting your own expectations, then I would define success as meeting your own expectations. And the best way to meet them is to practice meeting them and to make lots of mistakes and learn what doesn't work. And that is something that when you think about failure, when you think about taking action in that way, then you're not so wrapped up in what it means to not have it all done perfectly.
A lot of people will say to me that they're perfectionists, and they'll say that I just want to do it all right, and I'm not willing to do it if I can't do it perfectly. And I have this sense that I think perfectionism is for scared people. I think it gives them an excuse to not take the action, to not put themselves out there and to not fail, to not meet their own expectation.
And the reason why they don't want to not meet their own expectation is because they know that they're going to beat their own ass when that happens. They're going to beat themselves up, right? So if you were to make a deal with yourself and say, hey, I'm going to go out there and try and do this, and there's going to be for sure a chance that along the way, I'm not going to meet my expectation.
I'm going to fail, and I'm going to fail many, many times. But here's the thing, when I fail, I'm going to have my own back. I'm going to treat myself with respect.
I'm going to honor myself. I'm going to use that as an opportunity to learn and to take care of myself. And I'm going to use it as an opportunity to love myself more instead of loving myself less.
And I will refuse, when I don't meet my own expectation, to say mean things to myself, to beat myself up, or to quit. Now, if you set yourself up for that ahead of time, before you start any kind of action, you're going to be much more willing, first of all, to take the action, and second of all, to take the risk that most success takes, right? To put yourself outside of your comfort zone, to try something you haven't done, is pretty risky.
What are you risking? Failure. You could fail.
But if you know that if you fail, you're going to take care of yourself, you're going to be much more willing to do it. And if you're much more willing to fail, you're going to double your rate of failure, maybe triple it, you're going to have a much higher chance of ultimately getting success. Now, let's talk about the benefits of failing.
Let's talk about young kids failing. I love the example, although it's a little bit overused, I still love it so much, I'm going to use it here. I love the example of a little child learning how to walk, because they do some epic fails.
Like you look at those kids trying to walk, and it is not pretty. They are eating it like every third step, right? And what's fascinating, what I love about that is when they fall, one of the reasons that they're not walking well is because they don't have the strength.
And when they fall, those little kids and they have to push themselves back up, that pushing themselves back up is what gives them the strength to ultimately be able to walk. So if they stopped trying to walk because they were failing, then they would never have the opportunity to get strong enough to be able to walk. So it's through the failing, through the falling down, that they get strong enough to do it.
And I just think that's brilliant. And it was interesting because I just finished up a master coach training, and we were talking about this idea of confidence, and we were talking about how we define confidence and where confidence comes from. And one of the things that I said that I think confidence is, is your willingness to fail in front of other people.
And we talked about how most people want to get their confidence from their past. They want to say, I'll be confident at something after I'm competent at it. So we gave the example when we were talking in class about pouring a glass of water.
And we feel very confident when we're pouring a glass of water, because we've done it so many times, we know that we're very good at it. So if we spill or we miss the glass or knock it over, we don't turn that into a reason to not do it or to quit. And we don't even really consider that a failure.
I failed at the glass pouring today, right? We don't make it mean anything negative. And so we're willing to do it because it's not a big deal.
If we fail, we know we're not going to quit and never try to do it again, or make it mean that we're not competent or we don't know what we're doing, right? But how do you feel that same sense of confidence with something that you've never done, right? That was our conversation.
So you have to find confidence actually in your future. Well, how do you find confidence in your future when you're starting out doing something you've never done before, right? So everything that you're going to be doing, you know, you're going to be failing.
So your confidence has to come from your ability to fail. And knowing that you're not going to give up, and knowing that you can fail and get better and get better every time. So confidence, like I was thinking about this for me, like I like to try new things.
I like change. I like putting myself out there on that leading edge of my comfort zone. And I was trying to figure out why I like to do that personally.
And it's because I'm very willing to fail, and I'm willing to fail in front of other people. And that's why failure just isn't one of those concepts that you just talk about, you know, after you don't do well on a math test, right? Failure is something you have to consider as something you want to include in your life.
It's not something to avoid. It's actually something to pursue and to get very good at. So if I feel confident about my ability to fail, you can see how I'm probably going to try new things, put myself out there, and probably be successful.
Because as I fail, and as I plan to fail, I will continue to do it. Right? Does that make sense?
So the other way, actually, one of the students in the class actually brought up this idea of believing in our capacity to learn. And instead of using the word failure, maybe using the word learning. You know, there's the old quote that Edison has where he's like, no, I didn't fail a thousand times.
I learned a thousand things that didn't work. And that's how we can kind of look at our own quote unquote failures as just learning opportunities, seeing them as, okay, we didn't meet our expectation, we didn't take correct action, so we just need to adjust that, right, and change it until we do meet our own expectation. And kind of when we think about that word failure, think about it in a way that is positive, think about it in a way as something we want to move towards instead of something that we want to move away from.
I actually like the idea of practicing failure. I like the idea of failure being a skill that we develop, right? So if we are good at falling down, right, we actually learn how to fall down really well, then we're going to have confidence going into our future.
So I hope that that like kind of tickled your mind as much as it did ours. Like, I was so excited when I was talking to my class about this, and we were, you know, all of us were kind of really getting into it, because the idea that failure could be something that we embraced was like, it like got us excited. It got us thinking about our future instead of avoiding it so much, right?
So you get good at it, right, by doing it often. And one of my favorite authors and mentors and podcast interviewees that I love to listen to is Ramit Sethi. And he has a website called I Will Teach You To Be Rich.
And I am definitely not his target market. I think he targets like 25-year-old men. But I love him.
I think he's hilarious. And he talks about his customers in a way that just kills me. It just cracks me up.
And he's very, he's kind of defiant, and he's a rebel, and he's, he scolds. And I just love him. But anyway, one of the things that he talks about that like really was a game changer for me is he says that he has a file on his computer.
And he wants to make sure that he fills that file full of five failures per month. And if he's not failing epically five times per month, he's not working hard enough and he's not doing enough. And he also said this when he was talking about a program that he was selling.
And he said, if I don't have at least a 10% return rate, I'm not selling enough. And that kind of made my mind explode. I was like, what do you mean a 10% return rate?
I mean, I'm someone who I have a very successful business and I don't really have a return rate. I don't have people that want refunds from me. So to think if I'm not doing at least 10% return rate, I'm not selling enough was like a totally different perspective for me to look at.
So anyway, since I got this idea from him that we should fail five times a month, I started doing that. I'm like, okay, I'm going to put myself out there. I'm going to try new things that are highly likely to fail and see, you know, if I can get my five failures.
And what it did for me that was so awesome is when I failed, when I did something that didn't work, I didn't do this big disappointment, regret, shame dance. I was like, oh, failure number one. I can put that in my file now.
It really changed my whole perspective. It was like one fail down, four to go. And ever since then, I've been really accumulating my fails as like badges of honor, as, as like workouts, as things that are making me stronger.
And it really is working. It's something that I am getting so much better at. And I have so much more confidence when I try new things, because the worst thing that can happen ultimately is that I fail.
And the worst thing beyond that is how I would feel about my failure by what I would decide to make it mean. And I know that I'm not going to make it mean anything negative now. I'm going to make it mean, hey, a three out of five done.
So it's really upped my excitement, my anticipation, my momentum towards the future because of that willingness that I now have to fail. Now, I want to be really clear about one thing when it comes to failure. And I think it's important to separate failure outside of your comfort zone by taking risks, by putting yourself out there versus failing by just not showing up.
And here's what I mean by that. If you launch a new class for your coaching business, or you go on a date with someone, you know, meeting someone new, or you put yourself out, you go to, you know, a bar and you want to meet somebody new, right? Maybe you're not on a date, but you're putting yourself out there and you're introducing yourself to someone.
I mean, and they could reject you. You could consider that a failure, right? Those sorts of things are outside of your comfort zone fails, right?
That you're putting yourself out there, that you're trying something new. You are the toddler learning how to walk. That's the failure that I really want to encourage you to do a lot more of.
And I want you to be willing to try. Now, there's another failure that comes from just not showing up. It comes from setting yourself up by sabotaging.
And that's something I don't want to encourage you to do more of. Here's what I mean by that. Let's say, we'll go back to my example of the five-person class, and you put yourself out there, you offer a class, five people sign up for it, and then you don't show up for it.
You're late to the class. You don't prepare for it. You do a terrible job delivering it.
You don't have any enthusiasm or excitement. You don't have anything valuable that you share with them. You're just kind of like blah, and you don't show up.
That kind of failure and that kind of sabotage is definitely not something you want to do, because it still is a failure, right? Because you omitted the required action that it took to produce it, and it was well within your comfort zone to do so. You just didn't show up for yourself, and you didn't show up for your clients, or you didn't show up for the date.
You didn't show up. That's a very different kind of failure. And by the way, that comes from the way that you're thinking about whatever it is you're attempting to do.
And that's not something that I want to encourage you to do over and over again, because what that is, is that's just spinning within your own discomfort, within your comfort zone, right? So you're in your comfort zone, you know that you're capable of doing something, and you're just sabotaging, sabotaging, sabotaging. And typically, the thoughts that drive that type of action are, there's something wrong with me, I'm not worth it, this isn't worth it, nobody's going to like me, you know, why should I even show up?
So when you find yourself in that kind of failure, what needs to happen is you need to take a look at your mind and find out what's going on with you, right? It's another invitation to tap in to the work that you need to do ahead of time. Okay?
And that's not something that you want to repeat. And you know, you'll hear people say a lot, you know, the first time you make a mistake, it's no big deal, you learn from it, but don't make the exact same mistake again. And that's the same thing I would say about failure.
I think if you do something and you don't meet your own expectation, and then you try it again the exact same way and get the exact same result, I would consider that staying within your comfort zone failure. I would say that is self-sabotage, and that's a different thing. Do not repeat it.
Failure is putting yourself out there into the unknown, doing something that you don't know. Now, a couple of things I want to share with you that you may not be able to discover in yourself, okay? These are things that I find in my clients that they say, oh my gosh, I had no idea I was doing this.
And one of the things that we avoid failure by doing is by being confused. Okay? We say we're confused, we don't know how, and we say, I don't know.
And really what we're doing is avoiding putting ourself out there into the world in a way where we don't know if we'll meet our own expectation. And we're afraid of how we will treat ourselves on the other side of that. So please be careful.
If you notice yourself not taking action, not putting yourself out there in kind of failures way, if you're telling yourself the reason you're not doing it is because you're undecided, you don't know, or you are confused. Just know that is the sweetest way to avoid failure. And you need to be on to yourself.
You need to pay attention. You need to have a look at that because when you avoid failure, you're also at the very same time avoiding success. It's spinning yourself really away from what you want, but telling yourself the reason why is because you're confused.
Being confused, saying I don't know and being undecided is just a way of hiding. So tell yourself the truth about it. I never say to myself, I don't know how to do something.
It doesn't serve me to say it. What I say is, I'm figuring out how to do something. I am going to figure out how to do something, or I'm learning the steps to understand this, right?
Saying it in that way doesn't stop me. It keeps me going. I don't say, I don't know.
I say, I'm figuring it out. Okay? I don't say, I'm undecided.
I say, I'm going to decide, and I know there's no right decision. And when I make a decision, I'm going to go out there, and I'm willing for it to be the quote unquote wrong decision. I'm willing to fail.
Okay? So just notice that little smoke screen of confusion, and I don't know that prevents you from taking action that would lead to failure, because the reason you don't want to fail is because you don't want to feel the feelings that you would cause yourself to feel when you're thinking that way. Okay.
So I hope that that makes sense. I hope that this has totally changed your mind on the way that you think about failure. I hope that like I am your biggest failure cheerleader.
I hope that you're like, oh, Brooke would be so proud of me. I epically failed today and I totally would be. And one of the things I'd love for you to do is go to my website, thelifecoachschool.com, go to thelifecoachschool.com/numberfour, because this is episode four and you will find there the show notes, but you'll also find a place where you can comment.
And I would love to hear about your epic fail. And it would be great if you could give me one that you do after this podcast. So go out there and just attempt something that you're pretty sure you're going to fail at and then share it with me and tell me what you did, how you didn't meet your own expectation and then how you felt afterwards.
Now that you've listened to this podcast, I would love to know how you treated yourself on the other side of failure. So thank you so much for listening. I'll look forward to seeing you on the website.
And until next time, five failures. See you then, bye.
Thank you for listening to The Life Coach School Podcast. It would be incredibly awesome if you would take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes. For any questions, comments, or coaching issues you would like to hear on the show, please visit us at www.thelifecoachschool.com.
