Hi! I’m back with a new episode of the "Get Unstuck with Murielle Marie," podcast, where we explore what it means to be stuck and find inspiration to live our best lives. I'm your host, Murielle Marie, and in today's episode, I want to dive deep with you into the subject of failure, and how to not let it define you. I’m going to start by sharing some personal stories of failure - ahum - from my own life and entrepreneurial adventures. I’ll add in a few stories from my coaching clients and offer a bit of a philosophical perspective on why our failures don't define us. Plus, we'll explore how we can transform failures into positive experiences. Let's get started!
What’s the fear of failure and where does it come from? The fear of being wrong or making mistakes is often connected to perfectionism. And that’s certainly true. Being afraid of making a mistake or doing something “wrong” (quote - unquote) is something that we are conditioned into almost from the day that we’re born. As children we learn how to behave by being reprimanded for the mistakes that we make.
There’s also a neuroscientific and biological element to this: being able to learn from our mistakes is how our ancestors survived the planes of the Savannah, and how we have made it to today. So there are advantages to being able to recognize mistakes, learning from them and improving our choices and actions over time. However, and this is where things become tricky, for many (my former self included), the fear of failure can become so overwhelming that it gets us - and keeps us stuck. Being afraid to make mistakes is not only related to perfectionism; it's often a solid pull for staying where you are instead of trying to change your life. But the type of failure that keeps us stuck is a fallacy.
As I’ve mentioned, it's a construct we take with us from childhood, often given to us by caregivers or teachers. Since so much of our growing up centers around learning to play nice and avoiding mistakes when we finally reach adulthood, many have it drilled into our very core that taking any misstep is dangerous. If, as an adult, you’ve ventured out and made mistakes in your personal or professional life, that can add up to making it even harder to be willing to jump again and try new things. The fear that it might not work out can be a powerful block to achieve your dreams and goals.
But the reality is that we ALL, continuously, MAKE mistakes. AI, as a concept (yes, I’m going on a tangent here but bare with me for a second), is built on how our brain works (loosely). How does AI learn and become better? By making mistakes and improving its decision-making process based on what it learns from them. Of course, and this is why AI is so incredible and dangerous at the same time, since it has a capacity to make mistakes, it can also come to wrong conclusions and make big ones. There’s a really cool spreadsheet by the way, available online, and created by one of my favorite AI researchers, Victoria Krakovna. She has some great talks on YouTube as well (I’ll add some links in the show notes). The spreadsheet, which I’ll link in the show notes, is a running list of specification gaming in AI (AI systems coming up with "hacks" to solve problems). Those hacks, although clever, are mistakes or at least misinterpretations of the rules of the games. Needless to say, they’re usually not conducive to a game well played, although they are usually providing the AI system with a win. Google AI gaming hacks if you want to know more about it, it’s super interesting stuff!
Anyway, back to the fear of making mistakes and not making mistakes define us. AI systems don’t really care about the mistakes they make, they just want to learn from them. In a way, it’s the same with us - or should be. But because there is such an emotional component to making mistakes - mostly because of other people and “what they will think” - mistakes and failure are often hard to swallow. One thing that can help to handle the fear of failure better is to talk about it more openly. Think about it? When does one ever talk about all the things that didn’t work out for them to get where they are today? Seldomly! We have a tendency to highlight the success stories of our role models and to ignore or sweep under the carpet this other side of the success coin: that no big win ever happens without big learnings - and thus big mistakes as well.
To help demystify failure I’ll share with you a number of big mistakes I’ve made in my life. I feel secure and confident as a human being today, and as an entrepreneur. I wouldn’t feel this confident if I hadn’t made all the mistakes that I did. Each time - and some of them were really expensive, believe me - they allowed me to grow and add information and insights to my kno
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