September 14, 2025 • 43 mins
Have you ever felt derailed by failure in your life?
Perhaps it was the end of a relationship, the loss of a job, a public embarrassment, or a mistake that cost you more than you felt ready to lose.
Or maybe you don’t experience failure much. It’s possible you tiptoe around failure, making sure that you’re never too far out on a limb so as not to fall.
In that case, you might feel blocked or stuck, too insulated to experience failure but too protected to receive real freedom or joy.
In today’s episode I talk about failure: why we avoid it, how we survive it, and how to make meaning of failure in our lives. I normalize it, de-stigmatize it, and invite you to do something that might feel counterintuitive to you; to move toward failure, rather than away.
What might failure be trying to show you in your life right now?
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
about a topic that I have given so much thought
to over the course of the last year of my life,
or probably more than a year, probably more like three
to five years of my life. And it's a topic
(00:45):
that I feel like gets kind of worn out a
little bit. It's talked about a fair bit and can
become almost kind of cliche. But I do want to
circle back to it because I have some more things
I want to say about this topic than I feel
like I've heard people say, and so I want to
dive into the topic of failure, which, again I think
(01:06):
this is a topic that I have avoided talking about
because it's not really a super fun topic or a
fun idea, and it's something that nobody likes to experience.
It's something that every single one of us experiences. And
so I'm like, why not dive in to talking about
this topic because you will be hard pressed to make
it through your life. You'll be hard pressed to make
(01:27):
it through this week without experiencing some type of failure
in your life. And if we have the wrong idea
about failure, I think it can really steer us in
a kind of dangerous direction as far as it goes
for writing our stories, for making meaning out of our life.
And yeah, if you have the wrong idea about failure,
I think it can get a little tricky and sticky.
(01:49):
It can get you really stuck as far as it
goes with creating meaning from your life or writing your
own story. And so I want to just come back
to this topic. I want to reframe the idea of
failure a little bit. I want to talk about how
failure operates inside of stories because I think there's a
great analogy here, and I guess here's the great place
to start, because this is where the idea all came from.
(02:10):
Over the weekend, I was helping my daughter and my
son both learn how to ride their bikes without training wheels.
This is like such an iconic childhood moment. It was
so weird. It was almost like an out of body
experience watching them learn how to ride their bikes, because
I'm sure you can do this too, But I can
take myself back to the very moment where my dad
(02:33):
was holding on to the seat of my bike. Well,
I learned how to ride without training wheels. I can
take you back to the moment when he let go
and what it felt like to realize, oh my gosh,
no one's holding on anymore, and just that kind of
wobbly feeling of wondering, you know, how long can I
keep the bike up? Am I balancing on my own?
It's almost like you want to crank your neck all
(02:54):
the way around to look to make sure that you're
caregiver or your person. The person who was teaching you
was still holding on you, so terrified at the idea
of them letting go. And so it was such a bizarre,
out of body experience to watch both of my kids
learn how to do this. My daughter is five, she
just turned five in July. My son will be four
in December, so they're really close in age. And because
(03:15):
they're so close in age, they love to compete with
each other. They love to learn how to do things
at the same time. It's almost like, I mean, it
isn't exactly this, but it's almost like, yeah, they want
to be potty trained at the same time, they want to,
you know, learn to ride their bike at the same time,
they want to learn to walk at the same time.
They're seventeen months apart, so it hasn't been the same time,
but it does feel like there's this dynamic of Charlie,
(03:39):
the younger one, wanting to keep up with his older sister,
and the older sister always wanting to prove that she's older,
and so she's wanting to kind of compete. They're wanting
to see who can run the fastest, who can run
the farthest, who can do this first, who can do
that first? And so that dynamic created some perhaps even
extra pressure around this already pretty pressure packed idea of
(04:00):
learning to ride a bike with no training wheels. And
I will make this small caveat if you have young
kids you know this. But if you have young kids,
or if you've been around young kids, you know that
there are bikes now that we didn't have when we
were littler. At least I didn't know about them, called
balance bikes or I think Strider is like the main
brand that people use. And kids who use these balance bikes,
(04:21):
which is a bike without petals, they basically put their
feet on the ground, sit their booty on the seat
of the bike, and then they just use their feet
to run like a little roadrunner, and then the bike
takes off. If kids use these balance bikes from the
time that they're very young, they will automatically learn how
to keep their balance on a bike. And most kids
(04:42):
can use a balance bike and then switch to a
regular bike and they'll take off on their first try.
So the reason I even bring that up is that
for kids who have used these balance bikes, when it
comes time to learn to ride a regular bike with
no training wheels, it's not really even that big of
an event. For the most part, from what I've seen
and what I've heard from my friends is that kids
(05:02):
who use the balance bikes can kind of transition to
a regular bike with no training wheels with no issues
at all. They just kind of take off on the
first time. My kids have been adamant that they did
not want the balance bikes. In fact, last year at Christmas,
they both sat down and told Santa, under no uncertain terms,
that they wanted bikes with pedals and that the bike
had to have pedals and if it didn't have pedals,
(05:24):
they were going to be really upset. And so you know,
Santa Air quote, Santa brought them bikes with pedals. So
they both had these bikes, which, by the way, not
a sponsor or anything, but Guardian Bikes are such an
amazing brand of bikes. My kids have both loved them.
If you have little kids and you're looking for a
great bike for your kids, Guardian bikes have been amazing.
They're really well built, they're great for kids. They transition
(05:47):
well from training wheels to no training wheels, and they
also transition kids from one size to another size that
they have multiple seat sizes that you can switch out
so that the kids can grow with the bike. Total
side note again sponsor, but I just really love Guardian Bikes.
So we go out to the park yesterday, we bring
the kids bikes. Their bikes have training wheels on them,
and it's my daughter who starts the conversation. She's like, Dad,
(06:09):
I'm ready, do you think you can take the training
wheels off of my bike? And of course Charlie, the
younger one, is like, wait, now, let's take the training
wheels off her bike. I want to take the training
wheels off my bike too, And so we went very
quickly from just going on a bike right in the
park to all of a sudden the kids wanting to
take their training wheels off, which Matt and I were
both super pumped about. So we get to the park,
(06:30):
Matt takes the training wheels off of the bikes. We're
talking to the kids about what this is going to
be like and how it's going to go and what
they need to know. One of the things that Matt
had them do, which I thought was a really smart idea,
was start off riding in the grass because inevitably, you
know that when you're learning how to ride a bike
without training wheels, you're probably going to fall, and so
(06:51):
until you learn how to balance the bike, chances are
just very high you're going to fall on one side
or the other. So Matt's idea was like, if they
learned to ride in the grass, sure it might be
a little bit harder to pedal, but when they fall,
inevitably they're less likely to skin their knee. The fall
is not going to, you know, feel so earth shattering
to them, and then hopefully they'll keep practicing and keep
(07:13):
learning how to ride their bikes. So I thought that
was a great idea, a great suggestion on his part.
Nell is the first one to get on the bike.
It feels like so iconic, so like perfectly exactly what
you would expect a first ride with no training wheels
to be. You know, she's wobbly, she tips over a
couple of times, and we're just kind of trying to
talk her through it, to explain to her how this
(07:35):
is going to work. And then Charlie's like, my turn,
my turn, I want to try. I want to try,
And so we set Charlie up the same way and
immediately he's on the grass, and they're just two different
kids with two different personalities. Nella was really excited about
the idea of trying in the grass, and Charlie was like,
I want nothing to do with this. I do not
want to be on the grass. It feels too hard
to pedal, and I don't even really want to try.
(07:57):
I just want to go on the cement. So Matt
sets him up on this. We're fully expecting that Charlie's
gonna take a big spill. Immediately, Matt holds onto the
back of Charlie's seat kind of like coaxes him along
for like a step or two or three, and then
let's go of the seat, and Charlie just takes off
on the bike. And Nella's watching this happen. You know,
(08:18):
she's tried three or four times to get the bike going,
and she's been able to peddle the time or two,
but she just keeps tipping over. Meanwhile, Charlie, I wish
I could show you the video, he just gets on
the bike. Every kid's different, every kid's strengths are different.
There are plenty of things where Nella outperforms Charlie, but
this was just one of those things where Charlie took
off and he's just riding his bike into the distance,
(08:39):
you know, just like tens twenties thirty yards away from us,
and Matt and I both just looked at each other
with our mouths open, like our jaws on the floor,
like what did we just witness? What just happened? And
you could see Nella's face drop immediately. She's just like,
why did Charlie ride his bike with no trouble, and
(09:01):
I can't do it. And she immediately turned inward, and
I could tell her inner critic was going. I could
tell she was being so hard on herself. She was like,
I give up. I don't want to learn how to
ride my bike anymore. I want to put my training
wheels back on. I don't like this. I don't like this.
And she was so upset. First of all, watching this
whole thing unfold with my daughter was so fascinating to me.
(09:23):
I don't know if you have had this experience, if
you have children, or maybe you've had this experience watching
other children, like watching nieces and nephews or just children,
your friend's kids or something. But there's something about especially
when a little child looks so much like you. Because
my daughter is so much like me. She's got my genetics,
she's got my same genetic makeup. But I had this
(09:44):
experience before even having my own kids, where I would
really connect with one of my friend's little kids and
feel like, ooh, they remind me of myself in a
certain way. So I don't know if you've had that experience,
but my daughter is like the epitome of me, you know,
She's just like me in a tiny little body. She's
her own person, she has her own way of seeing
the world too. But there are so many things she
does and says that remind me so much of myself,
(10:05):
and this is one of them. This is one of
those things about my daughter that just reminds me so
much of me. And maybe you see part of yourself
in this too. But this idea that watching someone else
succeed at something that she doesn't immediately succeed at. If
she perceives that she has failed at this thing, it
completely derails her and she doesn't want anything to do
(10:27):
with that activity anymore, to the point where she will
actually opt out of something she enjoys doing because she
can't be immediately successful at it. I've watched her do this,
and I'm not throwing her under the bus. I'm genuinely
saying I'm like this too. But I've watched her do
this with playing games we've played, you know, go Fish
and a bunch of other little kid games dot dot
(10:47):
Goose and stuff. She does not want to play the
game unless she can win, like, unless she can be
on the top, unless she's the winner, unless she's number one.
She has no interest and I see myself in this quality.
It is not a particularly flattering quality. I'm not saying
I'm proud of this quality, but I absolutely can fully
resonate and identify with that feeling that I only really
(11:09):
want to do things that I'm going to be ultra
successful at. Like unless I'm the best at it, I
want nothing to do with it. I have vivid memories
of being in high school on the tennis team, which
I was never really a tennis player. I was never
trained as a tennis player, but I was on the
dance team, and my dance team instructor happened to also
(11:29):
be the tennis coach. And with dance, I was always
great at dance. I started dancing when I was four.
I was in a dance company all growing up, so
on the dance team, I was captain of the dance team.
I was one of the strongest dancers on the team.
I felt like, I, you know, was in my element
on the dance team. But when the dance coach asked
me if I would come try out for tennis, she
(11:50):
had me come try out for tennis. I was I
came into it completely cold. I had never been trained
in tennis at all. I had, you know, maybe held
a tennis recket once or twice in my life before
for fun, but I knew nothing about tennis. And when
she had me try out, she brought me on the
team because she was like, oh, actually, for a beginner,
you're pretty darn good. So she put me on the
singles team and I started practicing, and I got a
(12:14):
lot of praise and attention and accolades for it at first,
but then when I started playing matches, of course, inevitably
there were many matches where I did not win the match,
where I did not win the tournament, where I did
not win the game because A because this is life.
B because I wasn't really a tennis player. I was
just learning how to do this. We were a new
(12:35):
team and she was a new coach, and we were
just kind of getting our feet under us. So tons
of reasons why my quote unquote failure could have been
perfectly understandable and acceptable and even expected, and yet for me,
the failure became such a problem that it actually turned
me off to wanting to play tennis. And so Kelly
(12:58):
was my dance coach who was also the tennis gout coach,
and then eventually She was replaced by another tennis coach
named Eric. Both tennis coaches, so both my would have
been my sophomore and my junior year of high school.
I played tennis, and both coaches would talk to me
about this problem I had where I would go out
and start a match and the minute that I realized
(13:18):
I was losing the match, I would emotionally, physically, mentally
give up, and you could just watch it happen. It
was just like, Nope, don't want to be here anymore.
Ali has checked out. The inner critic is turned on
so loud that radio is just blaring inside of my
mind that I'm a failure, I'm failing at this. You
know I'm no good, I'm nothing. Everyone else is better
(13:40):
than you. That the discomfort of feeling those feelings was
so intense that I would just rather move on to
an activity that I know I'm great at. And this
feeling came back to me again, has come back to
me again many times in my life. Actually. But another
example that I'll share is when I started doing improv
classes at Third Coast Comedy Third Coast Comedy Club in Nashville, Tennessee.
(14:13):
I can't say enough good things about that place and
the program that they run and the improv classes specifically
were such a lifeline to me and such a gift.
And the people that I met there were so amazing
and the teachers are incredible, and I just can't say
enough good things about Third Coast Comedy. I started taking
improv there just thinking I was going to do you know,
(14:34):
the level one first session. It's like eight weeks, I think,
and just doing this to want to sort of get
out of my comfort zone, challenge myself, do something different,
maybe get a little more comfortable with Like speaking off
the cuff was a big issue when I first started,
because again, like whatever this thing is, the perfectionism, the
need for things to be the best, the need for
(14:54):
everything to be perfect, was holding me back. It was
getting me really stuck in a lot of different parts
of my life, and I thought, okay, improv could probably
help me break through those barriers by learning to just
trust that whatever the first thing that's going to come
out of my mouth is is something we can work with,
you know, the idea of yes, and that whatever comes
(15:15):
out of your mouth, we can take that and we
can build off of it and we can work with it.
This was a creative concept that I had a really
hard time leaning into because of my perfectionism and my
inner critics. So I thought, oh, improv is going to
be really great for that, And of course it was,
but not before improv leaned on all of my insecurities
(15:36):
and all of my hang ups around perfectionism and needing
to be the best. Because let me just be clear,
and I have said this before openly publicly, that of
my improv class, of the I don't know like twelve
to fourteen people who I finished with that I also
started with people who I met along the way, either
(15:57):
in level water, level two, and we ended up going
all the way through level six together. We performed together
many times, and of that group, I was for sure
not the strongest performer, like not even close to the
strongest performer, maybe perhaps the weakest link or one of
the weakest links in terms of people who just had
natural talent toward improv comedy. It was not my natural talent.
(16:18):
It is not my natural talent. But and it also
taught me these skills that I was wanting to learn,
which is an ability to just kind of let whatever
comes out of my mouth come out and figure it out.
And roll with it along the way. So I started
in level one and realized very quickly that in order
to break through that inner critic and to kind of
(16:40):
slough off that perfectionism so that I could feel a
little less stuck, I was going to have to bump
up against it. And that's exactly what happened. I wanted
to quit so many times during that first session especially,
but many many times throughout the process I talked about
kind of taking my off ramp here and letting the
real performers move forward. And it was a practice of
(17:02):
self acceptance for me to choose to stay in this
thing that was fun, even though I wasn't very good
at it. And maybe this is part of what I'm
getting at with this topic of perfectionism, is we get
so obsessed in our culture, or at least I get
so obsessed in my own self with being good at
(17:23):
something that I forget how much it matters to have
fun with it, to just play, to just practice, to
just see what rolls off the tongue, to just use
whatever comes out. Maybe it's not perfect, maybe it's kind
of a mess up, you know, maybe it's kind of
a screw up. What comes out of your mouth, but
to let it come out of the mouth, and to
(17:44):
practice with it and play with it and see where
you can take it, and see how you can grow
upon something that's there is an incredibly vital practice to
our vitality as human beings. And I think we really
lose sight of this, or at least I lose sight
of it. And I was watching my daughter over the
weekend have this kind of meltdown over not being able
(18:07):
to ride her bike. Immediately, by the way, first try
with no training wheels. You want to just logic with
her and be like, this is your first try. You've
only ever ridden a bike with training wheels. You tried once,
and you actually did get some pedals in, Like you
did ride your bike with no training wheels. You just
didn't ride for ten miles with no training wheels, and
that's normal because you just took your training wheels off.
(18:30):
But that logic and reason doesn't compute with her, because
her brain is going my brother just took off on
his bike with no training wheels and I didn't, and
so something must be wrong with me. And so then
she goes down that negative spiral and how much I
can't even explain to you how much I can resonate
(18:51):
with that, and I can self identify, and I know
that I find myself in that headspace so often when
I feel that I'm not the best at something, I
wonder how much freedom it would bring to me and
to my daughter and to all of us if we
were able to say, being the best at something isn't
really the point, It's not really why we're here. Why
(19:12):
we're here is to experience, to express, to create, to practice,
to play, to have fun, to have some pleasure, to
have some joy, to feel it all, to let it
all happen, to let it unfold, to see what's possible,
Like that's why we're here, and yet we get so
(19:36):
fixated on this idea of it being perfect. I see
this come through a lot with authors who I'm working
with who are working on books, especially first time authors,
but not just first time authors, people who are working
on their second and third and fourth books have this same.
I have this. I've written fourteen books, and I still
have this. When I sit down to write a book,
the first question they want to ask is is this
(19:58):
any good? So they'll say to me, can I just
tell you what my ideas I want to know if
this is any good? And what I wish I could
say to every single person who's asking themselves that question
about a creative project, whether it's a book or something else,
is it doesn't really matter if it's any good. The
more important questions I would ask you is does it
bring you joy? Are you having fun? Are you giving
(20:19):
it a chance? Are you practicing with it? Are you
playing with it? Are you you can you find that
little thread of like obsession, almost like ooh, yes, we're
gonna unpack this, We're gonna solve this, We're gonna figure
this out, We're gonna explore, We're gonna get curious, we're
gonna understand more. I'm gonna ask a lot of questions,
(20:40):
can you find that thread? Instead of the obsession about
being the best, being perfect, getting it right, never failing,
never falling, never tipping over. I think we would experience
a lot more pleasure and joy in our creativity and
in our lives in general if we could take this
approach rather than the approach of I just took my
raining wheels off, I should be able to take off
(21:01):
and fly all but myself without any help immediately. It's
such a human struggle. It's such a human struggle and
yet it's so heartbreaking and it's so unfair. So if
we take the bike analogy and we use this as
an example of failure and we call failure tipping over, well,
(21:21):
I don't know we could even play with this analogy
a little bit. It's like, what would the failure would
actually really be giving up, It would be choosing not
to ride the bike ever. Again, the failure is not
tipping over. The failure is deciding, yeah, I'm never going
to ride a bike again because my brother got it
faster than I got it, So there's an element of
(21:42):
comparison there. I think that was the first, you know,
takeaway for me around this idea of failure, because for me,
failure has shifted from season to season. I've been through
many big failures in my life. One failure that was
so hard for me to get over was my divorce,
and now, looking back, I don't even think of that
experience as a failure anymore. I think of it as
(22:02):
one of the most pivotal and important learning experiences of
my entire life story, and it's such a huge part
of who I am and how I've become who I
am that I really embraced the entire experience. But at
the time when I made the decision to actually file
for divorce and calling myself divorced and the divorce being final,
(22:25):
that felt like such a massive failure. It felt like
the bike tipping over. It was just like, I'm looking
around me at all these other people who have been
able to make their marriages work, and what does it
say about me that I couldn't make my marriage work?
And I don't see it at all that way anymore.
I've been able to completely rewrite the story. I don't
see it as a personal failure that you my marriage
(22:46):
fell apart. There were so many elements that played a role.
And thank God for that whole experience because it's made
me who I am, and I've learned so much about
life and human nature. And my relationship with my now
husband is deeper and richer because of it, which sounds
weird because it in some ways doesn't have anything to
do with the previous relationship, but in other ways it
(23:07):
absolutely does. Because that experience deepened my compassion, It deepened
my self understanding. It really was unawakening. It drove me
to understand myself better and to heal from past experiences,
and so because of that, I'm able to have this
really deep and loving and stable, sturdy relationship with Matt
(23:28):
that I would definitely not be able to have if
it weren't for that experience. So I don't see that
as a failure now, but at the time, it really
did feel like the bike tipping over and watching everyone
else ride their bike off into the distance, and meanwhile
I can't even get off this tiny patch of grass.
You know, my bike just keeps tipping over every couple
of feet. And the failure for me the last handful
(23:48):
of years, and I have talked about this at length,
so I will not belabor the point, but you know
that there was a big business failure that Mat and
I experienced, and that was a really hard pill for
me to swallow. It's been a really stressful financial situation
for the last four issh years that ramped up toward
the end. The last twelve months or eighteen months have
(24:08):
been the most stressful, and I actually feel like just
in the last couple of weeks we're experiencing a lot
of relief of that pressure and a closure of the
story that we didn't know if or when it would come,
and it's coming now. And so because of that closure,
I'm able to look back on this experience with a
lot more relief and compassion for the entire thing. I
(24:29):
know even more healing is coming in this story. The
more that I talk about it, the more that I
tell it, the more time that passes, the more you know,
the more I'm willing to shift the narrative around failure.
But this is the freshest failure quote unquote air quote
failure in my story is the last four years and
this business quote unquote failure where the bike tipped over
(24:51):
massively and I skinned up my whole leg. So, if
I'm carrying the analogy further, it's almost like the bike
tipped over, I broke a bone. I'm in the hospital.
They're having to put pins in my leg to put
the bone back together whatever, And I'm wondering, like, am
I ever going to get back up on a bike again?
Is it even worth it to get back up on
a bike again. I'm feeling demoralized, I'm feeling frustrated, I'm
(25:13):
feeling despair, I'm feeling hopeless, and the question is lingering
am I going to be able to overcome this failure.
Am I going to be able to get back on
the bike again? And I'm proud that I can finally
say my answer to that is an unequivocal yes, that
I will absolutely get back on the bike again, and
that this wasn't a life ending injury or a career
(25:34):
ending injury or anything like that. That I will get
back on that bike and I will ride it again,
but not without reframing what failure means and what it's for.
And I think that's the big thing that I want
to drill into in this episode is Yes, it's amazing
if we could all make this shift from thinking we
need to win or be the best or be perfect
(25:55):
at something and shift into more like practice, play, just create,
to express, just go, just try. But inevitably when you try, inevitably,
when you express, inevitably, when you open your heart and
share yourself with the world, there are going to be failures.
There are going to be physical broken bones. Like you
will have physical experiences in your life of you know,
(26:19):
your your body being broken. You'll have emotional experiences in
your life of feeling broken. You'll be let down, broken hearted, betrayed,
you know, abandoned, You'll lose loved ones. I love the
way Cheryl Strade says that she says most things will
be okay eventually, but not everything. Acceptance is a small
(26:39):
quiet room, So most things will be okay eventually, but
not everything. And there are things that are going to
happen in your life that you are going to feel like,
I cannot recover from this. It's too disappointing, it's too
life altering, it's too tragic, it's too upsetting, it's too hopeless.
There's just no way that I'm going to come out
on the other side of this with myself intact. And
(27:04):
the fact of the matter is you very well may
not come out on the other side of this failure
with your sense of self intact. Your sense of self
may need to be rearranged on the other side of this,
because these experiences are so life altering that they require
us to come back to the story and rewrite the story.
And I think this is what I want to drill
in on, is that the purpose of failure is about
(27:26):
helping us to rewrite the narrative. Because, again going back
to the analogy of my daughter on the bike, the
narrative that she's writing for herself in this kind of
from an adult perspective, you can realize that riding a
bike this is like uneventful, it's not a big deal.
You're going to learn how to ride it. It's just
going to take you a couple of tries. But from
her perspective, this is everything. It's she's five, this is
(27:48):
the biggest thing she's ever done. She's like, I'm a failure.
My brother did it immediately, something must be wrong with me,
And that's the narrative that's running in her head. And
until she rewrites that narrative, she will not be able
to get back on that bike. She won't be able
to enjoy the feeling of the wind in her hair.
You know that first feeling. I'm sure you can remember it.
(28:08):
Take yourself back there to the feeling of your caregiver
letting go of the seat of that bike and you
just flying like you're just You're like, I'm on my own,
I'm free. And she will not be able to have
that experience until she's able to rewrite the narrative that
just because her brother learned quicker than her, that she's
a failure. And so my question for you, and my
(28:31):
question for myself. Is what's the narrative that's playing in
your head about this quote unquote failure? What do you
make it mean about you? And notice how I said
about my marriage falling apart and filing for divorce, that
I made it mean about me that other people could
make marriages work but I couldn't make my marriage work.
I wasn't strong enough. This had something to do with me.
(28:52):
And I think that's pretty universal and human. I don't
know if you relate to that at all, but I
would say, yeah, pretty reversal and human to have something
happen like that and to say, just like my daughter said,
like why can Charlie do it and I can't do it?
There must be something wrong with me. And I just
want to invite us to come back to the narrative.
(29:13):
And here's something to know about stories that I think
you'll find really comforting regardless of where failure is showing
up in your life right now. Here's something to know
(29:33):
about stories that I think you'll find really comforting, regardless
of where failure is showing up in your life right now.
Something to know about stories is that stories are jam
packed with failure. Every single story that's ever been told
from the beginning of history until now is jam packed
with failure. The story is so full of failure that
(29:55):
once the failure is gone, you know the story is over.
That's your clue that the story has concluded and a
new story is beginning. And then the new story begins
with another failure, a failure in another part of your life.
So failure is so baked in to the recipe of
what our lives are created from that expecting failure to
(30:18):
come is like such an important part of the puzzle here.
Instead of going like, oh, why did my brother ride
and I couldn't ride, I'm a failure. It's like failure
is an expected part of learning to ride a bike.
Falling over is to be expected, And maybe because falling
over is to be expected, one good tactic would be
to start writing in the grass. To take something that
(30:40):
you know you want to do but you're worried you
might quote unquote fail at, and to put some compassion
around it, to put some kind of gentleness around it,
to do it in a safe way or a safe place,
so that if you fall in when you fall, because
you probably will fall, that you fall onto something a
(31:01):
little bit more forgiving than the cement. So maybe there's
a secret that you need to share. You know, you
need to share it. This is just something that you
can't stop thinking about. It's like something you've got to do.
And maybe instead of sharing the secret on Instagram, maybe
you call a therapist and share it with a therapist instead.
Or maybe you call up your best friend and share
it with your best friend instead. Maybe you start in
(31:23):
a way that's a little more gentle so that the
failure doesn't feel so painful, so that you can get
back up and keep trying again and again and again
and again until you get it right. Maybe you have
a creative project do you want to work on. Maybe
you have a book idea, and instead of making an
announcement to the world that you're writing a book, maybe
(31:46):
you just find one person that you love and trust
that you could say, you know, I've always wanted to
write this book, and here's what it's about. What do
you think? And maybe that would be a really safe
and secure way to give that by make a first
spin and just see how things go, and maybe you
tip over, maybe you fall, but you've given yourself a
(32:08):
little bit of a soft place to land, so that
that fall doesn't completely derail you, but inevitably, even if
we start out with a soft place to land, the
fact of the matter is, we're all gonna have to
ride our bike on the cement at one point. And
it's just an iconic part of childhood. It's a core memory.
It's something that we're all going to experience, to fall
in the cement, to scrape up your knee, to maybe
(32:28):
break a bone, to go to the hospital to get
a cast, to you know, none of those experiences are
comfortable or necessarily fun, and none of us sit around
going like, oh, I can't wait until I experience my
first really big heartbreak. And yet when you talk to
older folks, folks who are in the second half of
their life, who are zooming out from their life, the
(32:49):
moments that we will point to, and I'm like, barely,
barely barely in the second half of life. But I'm
forty two. So I'm on the back half of my life,
on the back nine, as they say, even though I'm
not a golfer, but there's a golf analogy for you.
I'm on the back nine of my life, on the
second half of my life. And when I look back
at the first forty years of my life, and I
think about what really matters. I think about the parts
(33:11):
of my life that I really care about and moments
that I just think are so pivotal to who I've
become as a person into what I was meant to do.
Here I point to the moments where I failed and
where there was a lot of pain involved and a
lot of loss and a lot of suffering. But that
has contributed so much to the person who I am today,
(33:32):
to my sturdiness, my stability, my compassion, my understanding, my
self understanding, my acceptance, my healing. Like the pain, as
Rumy says, is the medicine. The answer you're looking for
is inside of the cave that you don't want to
go into. It's inside of the thing that you're most
(33:54):
afraid of. And so maybe most of us are tiptoeing
around our lives trying to avoid this feeling failure, going well, nope,
I'm never riding a bike again because my brother was
faster than me. And what if the answer is actually
get back on the frickin' bike and just given another try.
And I was listening, I was overhearing my husband coaching
(34:16):
Nella on how to do this, you know how to
make the bike go. And one of the things that
he told her that I thought was such an amazing
piece of advice that can carry over to every single
one of us, and especially for those of us who
have this perfectionism tendency and who want to give up
when things are not going our way, when things don't
(34:37):
seem like they're going very well for us. One of
the things that he said to her that I loved
is when you feel yourself get wobbly, pedal faster. And
I was telling him about this later. I was like,
that's such a brilliant piece of advice and what an
amazing analogy for life. It's like, you feel yourself start
to get wobbly wobbly, and the answer we sometimes think
(34:59):
is to stop doing what we're doing. It's like I'm
trying to write a book, I'm trying to start this relationship.
I feel really crazy. I don't know what's going on.
I'm losing hope. I'm not sure I can make this
happen for myself. And instead of going like, Okay, well
I'm done, I'm just not gonna try anymore, maybe the
answer is actually go faster, pedal faster, Lean into the discomfort,
(35:21):
lean into the pain, lean into the feelings of not enoughness,
like go fully there and allow yourself to feel that
and rewrite the narrative. Rewrite the narrative, pedal faster and
move through those feelings of discomfort until you feel yourself
find your stride. I loved that analogy so much because
(35:45):
I have a tendency to sit myself out when I
feel like I'm not getting the result I want. It's
like I almost pout. I think is a little bit
of what it is. My therapist told me something that
I loved. My therapist is ultra a practice, which is
great for me because I'm not ultra practical. I'm very
like esoteric and spiritual and airy. This is part of
(36:06):
like I think the transition that I'm going through in
my life is like becoming a little more grounded. But
so my therapist is super super grounded. He's very, very practical.
And one of the things he told me when I
was kind of complaining to him about how the last
couple of years have gone, I was saying, I'm having
a hard time trusting myself and trusting my intuition because
I've always been so good at knowing what the next
step is to take. And every time that I've been
(36:27):
challenged to take a step, I've always taken the step,
and things have always worked out for me, and the
ground has always risen to meet me, and I've always
felt really secure and protected, and you know, everything has
just kind of unfolded and gone my way in life.
And he was like, I just want you to know
that that is not normal. In other words, what you're
describing is a sense of luck slash in maybe entitlement
(36:51):
or privilege that not every single person experiences. And there
were so many awarenesses that came out of that single
piece of advice, but one of them was like, maybe
part of what's happening for me right now is my
vision is broadening, and I'm realizing that not everybody shares
the same privileges that I share in life, and maybe
(37:12):
my compassion is deepening inside of that. And there's so
much meaning and so much purpose and so much happening
inside of this story for me, that that's where all
the goodness is. This really was never about getting it perfect,
about things going our way, about you know, making the
money we thought we were going to make isn't this
isn't about the financial crisis. I mean it is and
it isn't. But the analogy being that maybe the answer
(37:36):
is not to set yourself out like, hmm, it didn't
go my way. I didn't get what I wanted, So
I'm just going to sit down and pout that my
intuition was wrong. No, maybe maybe it's about peddling faster.
Maybe it's about continuing to show up and continuing to
live in my life with my whole heart even though
things didn't go my way. Because guess what wake up call?
(37:59):
Things off times don't go our way in life. We
cannot move through this life expecting that everything is going
to always go our way. Failure is an absolutely essential
part of life. It is baked into the recipe of
what it means to be a human being, and in
some ways we need to rebrand failure to not be
this horrible thing that all of us are trying to avoid,
but to be something that we learn how to take
(38:21):
in and metabolize and move with and receive for all
the gifts that it has to offer us. So I
don't know for you what's coming up, Like maybe there's
a failure in a certain part of your life. Maybe
you've sat yourself on the bench of a part of
your life because you've had some kind of failure. Maybe
(38:42):
you've had a relationship failure, maybe you've had a hundred
relationship failures, and so you've kind of sat yourself on
the bench of romantic love or relationships or even friendships
because you're just like, yeah, I've been burned one too
many times, I've been betrayed, things haven't gone my way.
You know, I've failed at this and that. So I'm
just going to kind of sit myself on the bench
of this part of my life. Or maybe for you
(39:05):
like me, it's more related to career and finances and
you know, feeling empowered in that part of your life.
Maybe you've had a failure or two like I have
in the last couple of years, and so you're just like, yeah,
I'm just gonna sit myself on the bench of this
part of my life and just kind of like throw
my hands up. I guess there's nothing I can do.
I guess I tried everything and it didn't work. Instead
(39:27):
of going like, well, failure is just a part of
how we learn. This is just falling over as a
part of learning how to ride a bike. I got
to get myself back up and you know, get myself
back in the saddle, so to speak, or maybe it's
more creative for you. I think this is another area
where a lot of people experience a quote unquote failure,
which sometimes isn't even really a failure. It's just a
(39:49):
feeling of failure where you start to work on something
and it doesn't turn out on the page the way
that you wanted it to or the way that you
pictured in your head, and so you write, you know,
sentence or two and you're just like, oh, oh, this
is hard. Okay, moving on to something that I feel
good about myself when I do like I'm going to
(40:09):
go help people, or I'm going to go clean my house,
or I'm going to go, you know, take care of
my kids, because when I do those things, I feel
good about myself. Or I'm going to go back to
work and you know, get attention there. I'm going to
go to church and volunteer because when I do that,
you know, everyone goes like, we love you. You're amazing,
You're the best. And here's another element of failure that
(40:29):
I think we need to be in tune with is
watch out for the ways that you avoid failure and
move toward accolades. You move toward outside validation and away
from the feeling like you have let someone down or
you let yourself down. I think this is a big
(40:50):
mistake that so many of us make, and I have
made this one hundred times in my life, is continuing
to do something because you get attention and validation for it,
and choosing no to do something because you don't get
those things. It's like that is your drug and you
need it to keep going. And so you don't do
your creative work, or you don't do your self care,
(41:11):
or you don't do whatever, because no one goes like
good for you, good for you booking yourself a massage,
like you know, I don't know. Even that kind of
sounds like someone might be patronizing you a little bit,
but it's like, yeah, I'm so proud of you for
taking care of yourself. I'm so amazed that you put
yourself first. Yes, Like more of that, good on you,
(41:33):
high five, Like let's get you an award, you know,
like no one does that. So it can be difficult
to move away from validation and toward failure. But I
think sometimes that is exactly what we need to move
away from validation and toward failure, toward the thing that
most scares you, toward the thing you're most afraid to
(41:55):
fail at and to fall at. Because on the other
side of that ex experience of tipping over is the
experience of utter freedom and the wind in your face
and the wind in your hair, and that first feeling
a freedom when the person who had their hand on
your seat let's go and you're just off. I hope
some part of this resonates with you. I hope you
(42:16):
find it helpful. I hope that you can urge yourself
and encourage yourself to move toward your failure instead of
away from it, to rewrite the narrative that's playing in
your head to accept and receive that failure is a
baked in part of life. It's an absolutely expected part
of what we are put here to do, what we
are meant to experience on planet Earth. And I hope
(42:37):
that moving toward failure, moving through quote unquote failure, helps
you experience the freedom, the joy, the utter bliss that
comes from facing down your demons and showing yourself what
you're made of. Until next week, I'll see you back
here on the Write Your Story podcast
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
about a topic that I have given so much thought
to over the course of the last year of my life,
or probably more than a year, probably more like three
to five years of my life. And it's a topic
(00:45):
that I feel like gets kind of worn out a
little bit. It's talked about a fair bit and can
become almost kind of cliche. But I do want to
circle back to it because I have some more things
I want to say about this topic than I feel
like I've heard people say, and so I want to
dive into the topic of failure, which, again I think
(01:06):
this is a topic that I have avoided talking about
because it's not really a super fun topic or a
fun idea, and it's something that nobody likes to experience.
It's something that every single one of us experiences. And
so I'm like, why not dive in to talking about
this topic because you will be hard pressed to make
it through your life. You'll be hard pressed to make
(01:27):
it through this week without experiencing some type of failure
in your life. And if we have the wrong idea
about failure, I think it can really steer us in
a kind of dangerous direction as far as it goes
for writing our stories, for making meaning out of our life.
And yeah, if you have the wrong idea about failure,
I think it can get a little tricky and sticky.
(01:49):
It can get you really stuck as far as it
goes with creating meaning from your life or writing your
own story. And so I want to just come back
to this topic. I want to reframe the idea of
failure a little bit. I want to talk about how
failure operates inside of stories because I think there's a
great analogy here, and I guess here's the great place
to start, because this is where the idea all came from.
(02:10):
Over the weekend, I was helping my daughter and my
son both learn how to ride their bikes without training wheels.
This is like such an iconic childhood moment. It was
so weird. It was almost like an out of body
experience watching them learn how to ride their bikes, because
I'm sure you can do this too, But I can
take myself back to the very moment where my dad
(02:33):
was holding on to the seat of my bike. Well,
I learned how to ride without training wheels. I can
take you back to the moment when he let go
and what it felt like to realize, oh my gosh,
no one's holding on anymore, and just that kind of
wobbly feeling of wondering, you know, how long can I
keep the bike up? Am I balancing on my own?
It's almost like you want to crank your neck all
(02:54):
the way around to look to make sure that you're
caregiver or your person. The person who was teaching you
was still holding on you, so terrified at the idea
of them letting go. And so it was such a bizarre,
out of body experience to watch both of my kids
learn how to do this. My daughter is five, she
just turned five in July. My son will be four
in December, so they're really close in age. And because
(03:15):
they're so close in age, they love to compete with
each other. They love to learn how to do things
at the same time. It's almost like, I mean, it
isn't exactly this, but it's almost like, yeah, they want
to be potty trained at the same time, they want to,
you know, learn to ride their bike at the same time,
they want to learn to walk at the same time.
They're seventeen months apart, so it hasn't been the same time,
but it does feel like there's this dynamic of Charlie,
(03:39):
the younger one, wanting to keep up with his older sister,
and the older sister always wanting to prove that she's older,
and so she's wanting to kind of compete. They're wanting
to see who can run the fastest, who can run
the farthest, who can do this first, who can do
that first? And so that dynamic created some perhaps even
extra pressure around this already pretty pressure packed idea of
(04:00):
learning to ride a bike with no training wheels. And
I will make this small caveat if you have young
kids you know this. But if you have young kids,
or if you've been around young kids, you know that
there are bikes now that we didn't have when we
were littler. At least I didn't know about them, called
balance bikes or I think Strider is like the main
brand that people use. And kids who use these balance bikes,
(04:21):
which is a bike without petals, they basically put their
feet on the ground, sit their booty on the seat
of the bike, and then they just use their feet
to run like a little roadrunner, and then the bike
takes off. If kids use these balance bikes from the
time that they're very young, they will automatically learn how
to keep their balance on a bike. And most kids
(04:42):
can use a balance bike and then switch to a
regular bike and they'll take off on their first try.
So the reason I even bring that up is that
for kids who have used these balance bikes, when it
comes time to learn to ride a regular bike with
no training wheels, it's not really even that big of
an event. For the most part, from what I've seen
and what I've heard from my friends is that kids
(05:02):
who use the balance bikes can kind of transition to
a regular bike with no training wheels with no issues
at all. They just kind of take off on the
first time. My kids have been adamant that they did
not want the balance bikes. In fact, last year at Christmas,
they both sat down and told Santa, under no uncertain terms,
that they wanted bikes with pedals and that the bike
had to have pedals and if it didn't have pedals,
(05:24):
they were going to be really upset. And so you know,
Santa Air quote, Santa brought them bikes with pedals. So
they both had these bikes, which, by the way, not
a sponsor or anything, but Guardian Bikes are such an
amazing brand of bikes. My kids have both loved them.
If you have little kids and you're looking for a
great bike for your kids, Guardian bikes have been amazing.
They're really well built, they're great for kids. They transition
(05:47):
well from training wheels to no training wheels, and they
also transition kids from one size to another size that
they have multiple seat sizes that you can switch out
so that the kids can grow with the bike. Total
side note again sponsor, but I just really love Guardian Bikes.
So we go out to the park yesterday, we bring
the kids bikes. Their bikes have training wheels on them,
and it's my daughter who starts the conversation. She's like, Dad,
(06:09):
I'm ready, do you think you can take the training
wheels off of my bike? And of course Charlie, the
younger one, is like, wait, now, let's take the training
wheels off her bike. I want to take the training
wheels off my bike too, And so we went very
quickly from just going on a bike right in the
park to all of a sudden the kids wanting to
take their training wheels off, which Matt and I were
both super pumped about. So we get to the park,
(06:30):
Matt takes the training wheels off of the bikes. We're
talking to the kids about what this is going to
be like and how it's going to go and what
they need to know. One of the things that Matt
had them do, which I thought was a really smart idea,
was start off riding in the grass because inevitably, you
know that when you're learning how to ride a bike
without training wheels, you're probably going to fall, and so
(06:51):
until you learn how to balance the bike, chances are
just very high you're going to fall on one side
or the other. So Matt's idea was like, if they
learned to ride in the grass, sure it might be
a little bit harder to pedal, but when they fall,
inevitably they're less likely to skin their knee. The fall
is not going to, you know, feel so earth shattering
to them, and then hopefully they'll keep practicing and keep
(07:13):
learning how to ride their bikes. So I thought that
was a great idea, a great suggestion on his part.
Nell is the first one to get on the bike.
It feels like so iconic, so like perfectly exactly what
you would expect a first ride with no training wheels
to be. You know, she's wobbly, she tips over a
couple of times, and we're just kind of trying to
talk her through it, to explain to her how this
(07:35):
is going to work. And then Charlie's like, my turn,
my turn, I want to try. I want to try,
And so we set Charlie up the same way and
immediately he's on the grass, and they're just two different
kids with two different personalities. Nella was really excited about
the idea of trying in the grass, and Charlie was like,
I want nothing to do with this. I do not
want to be on the grass. It feels too hard
to pedal, and I don't even really want to try.
(07:57):
I just want to go on the cement. So Matt
sets him up on this. We're fully expecting that Charlie's
gonna take a big spill. Immediately, Matt holds onto the
back of Charlie's seat kind of like coaxes him along
for like a step or two or three, and then
let's go of the seat, and Charlie just takes off
on the bike. And Nella's watching this happen. You know,
(08:18):
she's tried three or four times to get the bike going,
and she's been able to peddle the time or two,
but she just keeps tipping over. Meanwhile, Charlie, I wish
I could show you the video, he just gets on
the bike. Every kid's different, every kid's strengths are different.
There are plenty of things where Nella outperforms Charlie, but
this was just one of those things where Charlie took
off and he's just riding his bike into the distance,
(08:39):
you know, just like tens twenties thirty yards away from us,
and Matt and I both just looked at each other
with our mouths open, like our jaws on the floor,
like what did we just witness? What just happened? And
you could see Nella's face drop immediately. She's just like,
why did Charlie ride his bike with no trouble, and
(09:01):
I can't do it. And she immediately turned inward, and
I could tell her inner critic was going. I could
tell she was being so hard on herself. She was like,
I give up. I don't want to learn how to
ride my bike anymore. I want to put my training
wheels back on. I don't like this. I don't like this.
And she was so upset. First of all, watching this
whole thing unfold with my daughter was so fascinating to me.
(09:23):
I don't know if you have had this experience, if
you have children, or maybe you've had this experience watching
other children, like watching nieces and nephews or just children,
your friend's kids or something. But there's something about especially
when a little child looks so much like you. Because
my daughter is so much like me. She's got my genetics,
she's got my same genetic makeup. But I had this
(09:44):
experience before even having my own kids, where I would
really connect with one of my friend's little kids and
feel like, ooh, they remind me of myself in a
certain way. So I don't know if you've had that experience,
but my daughter is like the epitome of me, you know,
She's just like me in a tiny little body. She's
her own person, she has her own way of seeing
the world too. But there are so many things she
does and says that remind me so much of myself,
(10:05):
and this is one of them. This is one of
those things about my daughter that just reminds me so
much of me. And maybe you see part of yourself
in this too. But this idea that watching someone else
succeed at something that she doesn't immediately succeed at. If
she perceives that she has failed at this thing, it
completely derails her and she doesn't want anything to do
(10:27):
with that activity anymore, to the point where she will
actually opt out of something she enjoys doing because she
can't be immediately successful at it. I've watched her do this,
and I'm not throwing her under the bus. I'm genuinely
saying I'm like this too. But I've watched her do
this with playing games we've played, you know, go Fish
and a bunch of other little kid games dot dot
(10:47):
Goose and stuff. She does not want to play the
game unless she can win, like, unless she can be
on the top, unless she's the winner, unless she's number one.
She has no interest and I see myself in this quality.
It is not a particularly flattering quality. I'm not saying
I'm proud of this quality, but I absolutely can fully
resonate and identify with that feeling that I only really
(11:09):
want to do things that I'm going to be ultra
successful at. Like unless I'm the best at it, I
want nothing to do with it. I have vivid memories
of being in high school on the tennis team, which
I was never really a tennis player. I was never
trained as a tennis player, but I was on the
dance team, and my dance team instructor happened to also
(11:29):
be the tennis coach. And with dance, I was always
great at dance. I started dancing when I was four.
I was in a dance company all growing up, so
on the dance team, I was captain of the dance team.
I was one of the strongest dancers on the team.
I felt like, I, you know, was in my element
on the dance team. But when the dance coach asked
me if I would come try out for tennis, she
(11:50):
had me come try out for tennis. I was I
came into it completely cold. I had never been trained
in tennis at all. I had, you know, maybe held
a tennis recket once or twice in my life before
for fun, but I knew nothing about tennis. And when
she had me try out, she brought me on the
team because she was like, oh, actually, for a beginner,
you're pretty darn good. So she put me on the
singles team and I started practicing, and I got a
(12:14):
lot of praise and attention and accolades for it at first,
but then when I started playing matches, of course, inevitably
there were many matches where I did not win the match,
where I did not win the tournament, where I did
not win the game because A because this is life.
B because I wasn't really a tennis player. I was
just learning how to do this. We were a new
(12:35):
team and she was a new coach, and we were
just kind of getting our feet under us. So tons
of reasons why my quote unquote failure could have been
perfectly understandable and acceptable and even expected, and yet for me,
the failure became such a problem that it actually turned
me off to wanting to play tennis. And so Kelly
(12:58):
was my dance coach who was also the tennis gout coach,
and then eventually She was replaced by another tennis coach
named Eric. Both tennis coaches, so both my would have
been my sophomore and my junior year of high school.
I played tennis, and both coaches would talk to me
about this problem I had where I would go out
and start a match and the minute that I realized
(13:18):
I was losing the match, I would emotionally, physically, mentally
give up, and you could just watch it happen. It
was just like, Nope, don't want to be here anymore.
Ali has checked out. The inner critic is turned on
so loud that radio is just blaring inside of my
mind that I'm a failure, I'm failing at this. You
know I'm no good, I'm nothing. Everyone else is better
(13:40):
than you. That the discomfort of feeling those feelings was
so intense that I would just rather move on to
an activity that I know I'm great at. And this
feeling came back to me again, has come back to
me again many times in my life. Actually. But another
example that I'll share is when I started doing improv
classes at Third Coast Comedy Third Coast Comedy Club in Nashville, Tennessee.
(14:13):
I can't say enough good things about that place and
the program that they run and the improv classes specifically
were such a lifeline to me and such a gift.
And the people that I met there were so amazing
and the teachers are incredible, and I just can't say
enough good things about Third Coast Comedy. I started taking
improv there just thinking I was going to do you know,
(14:34):
the level one first session. It's like eight weeks, I think,
and just doing this to want to sort of get
out of my comfort zone, challenge myself, do something different,
maybe get a little more comfortable with Like speaking off
the cuff was a big issue when I first started,
because again, like whatever this thing is, the perfectionism, the
need for things to be the best, the need for
(14:54):
everything to be perfect, was holding me back. It was
getting me really stuck in a lot of different parts
of my life, and I thought, okay, improv could probably
help me break through those barriers by learning to just
trust that whatever the first thing that's going to come
out of my mouth is is something we can work with,
you know, the idea of yes, and that whatever comes
(15:15):
out of your mouth, we can take that and we
can build off of it and we can work with it.
This was a creative concept that I had a really
hard time leaning into because of my perfectionism and my
inner critics. So I thought, oh, improv is going to
be really great for that, And of course it was,
but not before improv leaned on all of my insecurities
(15:36):
and all of my hang ups around perfectionism and needing
to be the best. Because let me just be clear,
and I have said this before openly publicly, that of
my improv class, of the I don't know like twelve
to fourteen people who I finished with that I also
started with people who I met along the way, either
(15:57):
in level water, level two, and we ended up going
all the way through level six together. We performed together
many times, and of that group, I was for sure
not the strongest performer, like not even close to the
strongest performer, maybe perhaps the weakest link or one of
the weakest links in terms of people who just had
natural talent toward improv comedy. It was not my natural talent.
(16:18):
It is not my natural talent. But and it also
taught me these skills that I was wanting to learn,
which is an ability to just kind of let whatever
comes out of my mouth come out and figure it out.
And roll with it along the way. So I started
in level one and realized very quickly that in order
to break through that inner critic and to kind of
(16:40):
slough off that perfectionism so that I could feel a
little less stuck, I was going to have to bump
up against it. And that's exactly what happened. I wanted
to quit so many times during that first session especially,
but many many times throughout the process I talked about
kind of taking my off ramp here and letting the
real performers move forward. And it was a practice of
(17:02):
self acceptance for me to choose to stay in this
thing that was fun, even though I wasn't very good
at it. And maybe this is part of what I'm
getting at with this topic of perfectionism, is we get
so obsessed in our culture, or at least I get
so obsessed in my own self with being good at
(17:23):
something that I forget how much it matters to have
fun with it, to just play, to just practice, to
just see what rolls off the tongue, to just use
whatever comes out. Maybe it's not perfect, maybe it's kind
of a mess up, you know, maybe it's kind of
a screw up. What comes out of your mouth, but
to let it come out of the mouth, and to
(17:44):
practice with it and play with it and see where
you can take it, and see how you can grow
upon something that's there is an incredibly vital practice to
our vitality as human beings. And I think we really
lose sight of this, or at least I lose sight
of it. And I was watching my daughter over the
weekend have this kind of meltdown over not being able
(18:07):
to ride her bike. Immediately, by the way, first try
with no training wheels. You want to just logic with
her and be like, this is your first try. You've
only ever ridden a bike with training wheels. You tried once,
and you actually did get some pedals in, Like you
did ride your bike with no training wheels. You just
didn't ride for ten miles with no training wheels, and
that's normal because you just took your training wheels off.
(18:30):
But that logic and reason doesn't compute with her, because
her brain is going my brother just took off on
his bike with no training wheels and I didn't, and
so something must be wrong with me. And so then
she goes down that negative spiral and how much I
can't even explain to you how much I can resonate
(18:51):
with that, and I can self identify, and I know
that I find myself in that headspace so often when
I feel that I'm not the best at something, I
wonder how much freedom it would bring to me and
to my daughter and to all of us if we
were able to say, being the best at something isn't
really the point, It's not really why we're here. Why
(19:12):
we're here is to experience, to express, to create, to practice,
to play, to have fun, to have some pleasure, to
have some joy, to feel it all, to let it
all happen, to let it unfold, to see what's possible,
Like that's why we're here, and yet we get so
(19:36):
fixated on this idea of it being perfect. I see
this come through a lot with authors who I'm working
with who are working on books, especially first time authors,
but not just first time authors, people who are working
on their second and third and fourth books have this same.
I have this. I've written fourteen books, and I still
have this. When I sit down to write a book,
the first question they want to ask is is this
(19:58):
any good? So they'll say to me, can I just
tell you what my ideas I want to know if
this is any good? And what I wish I could
say to every single person who's asking themselves that question
about a creative project, whether it's a book or something else,
is it doesn't really matter if it's any good. The
more important questions I would ask you is does it
bring you joy? Are you having fun? Are you giving
(20:19):
it a chance? Are you practicing with it? Are you
playing with it? Are you you can you find that
little thread of like obsession, almost like ooh, yes, we're
gonna unpack this, We're gonna solve this, We're gonna figure
this out, We're gonna explore, We're gonna get curious, we're
gonna understand more. I'm gonna ask a lot of questions,
(20:40):
can you find that thread? Instead of the obsession about
being the best, being perfect, getting it right, never failing,
never falling, never tipping over. I think we would experience
a lot more pleasure and joy in our creativity and
in our lives in general if we could take this
approach rather than the approach of I just took my
raining wheels off, I should be able to take off
(21:01):
and fly all but myself without any help immediately. It's
such a human struggle. It's such a human struggle and
yet it's so heartbreaking and it's so unfair. So if
we take the bike analogy and we use this as
an example of failure and we call failure tipping over, well,
(21:21):
I don't know we could even play with this analogy
a little bit. It's like, what would the failure would
actually really be giving up, It would be choosing not
to ride the bike ever. Again, the failure is not
tipping over. The failure is deciding, yeah, I'm never going
to ride a bike again because my brother got it
faster than I got it, So there's an element of
(21:42):
comparison there. I think that was the first, you know,
takeaway for me around this idea of failure, because for me,
failure has shifted from season to season. I've been through
many big failures in my life. One failure that was
so hard for me to get over was my divorce,
and now, looking back, I don't even think of that
experience as a failure anymore. I think of it as
(22:02):
one of the most pivotal and important learning experiences of
my entire life story, and it's such a huge part
of who I am and how I've become who I
am that I really embraced the entire experience. But at
the time when I made the decision to actually file
for divorce and calling myself divorced and the divorce being final,
(22:25):
that felt like such a massive failure. It felt like
the bike tipping over. It was just like, I'm looking
around me at all these other people who have been
able to make their marriages work, and what does it
say about me that I couldn't make my marriage work?
And I don't see it at all that way anymore.
I've been able to completely rewrite the story. I don't
see it as a personal failure that you my marriage
(22:46):
fell apart. There were so many elements that played a role.
And thank God for that whole experience because it's made
me who I am, and I've learned so much about
life and human nature. And my relationship with my now
husband is deeper and richer because of it, which sounds
weird because it in some ways doesn't have anything to
do with the previous relationship, but in other ways it
(23:07):
absolutely does. Because that experience deepened my compassion, It deepened
my self understanding. It really was unawakening. It drove me
to understand myself better and to heal from past experiences,
and so because of that, I'm able to have this
really deep and loving and stable, sturdy relationship with Matt
(23:28):
that I would definitely not be able to have if
it weren't for that experience. So I don't see that
as a failure now, but at the time, it really
did feel like the bike tipping over and watching everyone
else ride their bike off into the distance, and meanwhile
I can't even get off this tiny patch of grass.
You know, my bike just keeps tipping over every couple
of feet. And the failure for me the last handful
(23:48):
of years, and I have talked about this at length,
so I will not belabor the point, but you know
that there was a big business failure that Mat and
I experienced, and that was a really hard pill for
me to swallow. It's been a really stressful financial situation
for the last four issh years that ramped up toward
the end. The last twelve months or eighteen months have
(24:08):
been the most stressful, and I actually feel like just
in the last couple of weeks we're experiencing a lot
of relief of that pressure and a closure of the
story that we didn't know if or when it would come,
and it's coming now. And so because of that closure,
I'm able to look back on this experience with a
lot more relief and compassion for the entire thing. I
(24:29):
know even more healing is coming in this story. The
more that I talk about it, the more that I
tell it, the more time that passes, the more you know,
the more I'm willing to shift the narrative around failure.
But this is the freshest failure quote unquote air quote
failure in my story is the last four years and
this business quote unquote failure where the bike tipped over
(24:51):
massively and I skinned up my whole leg. So, if
I'm carrying the analogy further, it's almost like the bike
tipped over, I broke a bone. I'm in the hospital.
They're having to put pins in my leg to put
the bone back together whatever, And I'm wondering, like, am
I ever going to get back up on a bike again?
Is it even worth it to get back up on
a bike again. I'm feeling demoralized, I'm feeling frustrated, I'm
(25:13):
feeling despair, I'm feeling hopeless, and the question is lingering
am I going to be able to overcome this failure.
Am I going to be able to get back on
the bike again? And I'm proud that I can finally
say my answer to that is an unequivocal yes, that
I will absolutely get back on the bike again, and
that this wasn't a life ending injury or a career
(25:34):
ending injury or anything like that. That I will get
back on that bike and I will ride it again,
but not without reframing what failure means and what it's for.
And I think that's the big thing that I want
to drill into in this episode is Yes, it's amazing
if we could all make this shift from thinking we
need to win or be the best or be perfect
(25:55):
at something and shift into more like practice, play, just create,
to express, just go, just try. But inevitably when you try, inevitably,
when you express, inevitably, when you open your heart and
share yourself with the world, there are going to be failures.
There are going to be physical broken bones. Like you
will have physical experiences in your life of you know,
(26:19):
your your body being broken. You'll have emotional experiences in
your life of feeling broken. You'll be let down, broken hearted, betrayed,
you know, abandoned, You'll lose loved ones. I love the
way Cheryl Strade says that she says most things will
be okay eventually, but not everything. Acceptance is a small
(26:39):
quiet room, So most things will be okay eventually, but
not everything. And there are things that are going to
happen in your life that you are going to feel like,
I cannot recover from this. It's too disappointing, it's too
life altering, it's too tragic, it's too upsetting, it's too hopeless.
There's just no way that I'm going to come out
on the other side of this with myself intact. And
(27:04):
the fact of the matter is you very well may
not come out on the other side of this failure
with your sense of self intact. Your sense of self
may need to be rearranged on the other side of this,
because these experiences are so life altering that they require
us to come back to the story and rewrite the story.
And I think this is what I want to drill
in on, is that the purpose of failure is about
(27:26):
helping us to rewrite the narrative. Because, again going back
to the analogy of my daughter on the bike, the
narrative that she's writing for herself in this kind of
from an adult perspective, you can realize that riding a
bike this is like uneventful, it's not a big deal.
You're going to learn how to ride it. It's just
going to take you a couple of tries. But from
her perspective, this is everything. It's she's five, this is
(27:48):
the biggest thing she's ever done. She's like, I'm a failure.
My brother did it immediately, something must be wrong with me,
And that's the narrative that's running in her head. And
until she rewrites that narrative, she will not be able
to get back on that bike. She won't be able
to enjoy the feeling of the wind in her hair.
You know that first feeling. I'm sure you can remember it.
(28:08):
Take yourself back there to the feeling of your caregiver
letting go of the seat of that bike and you
just flying like you're just You're like, I'm on my own,
I'm free. And she will not be able to have
that experience until she's able to rewrite the narrative that
just because her brother learned quicker than her, that she's
a failure. And so my question for you, and my
(28:31):
question for myself. Is what's the narrative that's playing in
your head about this quote unquote failure? What do you
make it mean about you? And notice how I said
about my marriage falling apart and filing for divorce, that
I made it mean about me that other people could
make marriages work but I couldn't make my marriage work.
I wasn't strong enough. This had something to do with me.
(28:52):
And I think that's pretty universal and human. I don't
know if you relate to that at all, but I
would say, yeah, pretty reversal and human to have something
happen like that and to say, just like my daughter said,
like why can Charlie do it and I can't do it?
There must be something wrong with me. And I just
want to invite us to come back to the narrative.
(29:13):
And here's something to know about stories that I think
you'll find really comforting regardless of where failure is showing
up in your life right now. Here's something to know
(29:33):
about stories that I think you'll find really comforting, regardless
of where failure is showing up in your life right now.
Something to know about stories is that stories are jam
packed with failure. Every single story that's ever been told
from the beginning of history until now is jam packed
with failure. The story is so full of failure that
(29:55):
once the failure is gone, you know the story is over.
That's your clue that the story has concluded and a
new story is beginning. And then the new story begins
with another failure, a failure in another part of your life.
So failure is so baked in to the recipe of
what our lives are created from that expecting failure to
(30:18):
come is like such an important part of the puzzle here.
Instead of going like, oh, why did my brother ride
and I couldn't ride, I'm a failure. It's like failure
is an expected part of learning to ride a bike.
Falling over is to be expected, And maybe because falling
over is to be expected, one good tactic would be
to start writing in the grass. To take something that
(30:40):
you know you want to do but you're worried you
might quote unquote fail at, and to put some compassion
around it, to put some kind of gentleness around it,
to do it in a safe way or a safe place,
so that if you fall in when you fall, because
you probably will fall, that you fall onto something a
(31:01):
little bit more forgiving than the cement. So maybe there's
a secret that you need to share. You know, you
need to share it. This is just something that you
can't stop thinking about. It's like something you've got to do.
And maybe instead of sharing the secret on Instagram, maybe
you call a therapist and share it with a therapist instead.
Or maybe you call up your best friend and share
it with your best friend instead. Maybe you start in
(31:23):
a way that's a little more gentle so that the
failure doesn't feel so painful, so that you can get
back up and keep trying again and again and again
and again until you get it right. Maybe you have
a creative project do you want to work on. Maybe
you have a book idea, and instead of making an
announcement to the world that you're writing a book, maybe
(31:46):
you just find one person that you love and trust
that you could say, you know, I've always wanted to
write this book, and here's what it's about. What do
you think? And maybe that would be a really safe
and secure way to give that by make a first
spin and just see how things go, and maybe you
tip over, maybe you fall, but you've given yourself a
(32:08):
little bit of a soft place to land, so that
that fall doesn't completely derail you, but inevitably, even if
we start out with a soft place to land, the
fact of the matter is, we're all gonna have to
ride our bike on the cement at one point. And
it's just an iconic part of childhood. It's a core memory.
It's something that we're all going to experience, to fall
in the cement, to scrape up your knee, to maybe
(32:28):
break a bone, to go to the hospital to get
a cast, to you know, none of those experiences are
comfortable or necessarily fun, and none of us sit around
going like, oh, I can't wait until I experience my
first really big heartbreak. And yet when you talk to
older folks, folks who are in the second half of
their life, who are zooming out from their life, the
(32:49):
moments that we will point to, and I'm like, barely,
barely barely in the second half of life. But I'm
forty two. So I'm on the back half of my life,
on the back nine, as they say, even though I'm
not a golfer, but there's a golf analogy for you.
I'm on the back nine of my life, on the
second half of my life. And when I look back
at the first forty years of my life, and I
think about what really matters. I think about the parts
(33:11):
of my life that I really care about and moments
that I just think are so pivotal to who I've
become as a person into what I was meant to do.
Here I point to the moments where I failed and
where there was a lot of pain involved and a
lot of loss and a lot of suffering. But that
has contributed so much to the person who I am today,
(33:32):
to my sturdiness, my stability, my compassion, my understanding, my
self understanding, my acceptance, my healing. Like the pain, as
Rumy says, is the medicine. The answer you're looking for
is inside of the cave that you don't want to
go into. It's inside of the thing that you're most
(33:54):
afraid of. And so maybe most of us are tiptoeing
around our lives trying to avoid this feeling failure, going well, nope,
I'm never riding a bike again because my brother was
faster than me. And what if the answer is actually
get back on the frickin' bike and just given another try.
And I was listening, I was overhearing my husband coaching
(34:16):
Nella on how to do this, you know how to
make the bike go. And one of the things that
he told her that I thought was such an amazing
piece of advice that can carry over to every single
one of us, and especially for those of us who
have this perfectionism tendency and who want to give up
when things are not going our way, when things don't
(34:37):
seem like they're going very well for us. One of
the things that he said to her that I loved
is when you feel yourself get wobbly, pedal faster. And
I was telling him about this later. I was like,
that's such a brilliant piece of advice and what an
amazing analogy for life. It's like, you feel yourself start
to get wobbly wobbly, and the answer we sometimes think
(34:59):
is to stop doing what we're doing. It's like I'm
trying to write a book, I'm trying to start this relationship.
I feel really crazy. I don't know what's going on.
I'm losing hope. I'm not sure I can make this
happen for myself. And instead of going like, Okay, well
I'm done, I'm just not gonna try anymore, maybe the
answer is actually go faster, pedal faster, Lean into the discomfort,
(35:21):
lean into the pain, lean into the feelings of not enoughness,
like go fully there and allow yourself to feel that
and rewrite the narrative. Rewrite the narrative, pedal faster and
move through those feelings of discomfort until you feel yourself
find your stride. I loved that analogy so much because
(35:45):
I have a tendency to sit myself out when I
feel like I'm not getting the result I want. It's
like I almost pout. I think is a little bit
of what it is. My therapist told me something that
I loved. My therapist is ultra a practice, which is
great for me because I'm not ultra practical. I'm very
like esoteric and spiritual and airy. This is part of
(36:06):
like I think the transition that I'm going through in
my life is like becoming a little more grounded. But
so my therapist is super super grounded. He's very, very practical.
And one of the things he told me when I
was kind of complaining to him about how the last
couple of years have gone, I was saying, I'm having
a hard time trusting myself and trusting my intuition because
I've always been so good at knowing what the next
step is to take. And every time that I've been
(36:27):
challenged to take a step, I've always taken the step,
and things have always worked out for me, and the
ground has always risen to meet me, and I've always
felt really secure and protected, and you know, everything has
just kind of unfolded and gone my way in life.
And he was like, I just want you to know
that that is not normal. In other words, what you're
describing is a sense of luck slash in maybe entitlement
(36:51):
or privilege that not every single person experiences. And there
were so many awarenesses that came out of that single
piece of advice, but one of them was like, maybe
part of what's happening for me right now is my
vision is broadening, and I'm realizing that not everybody shares
the same privileges that I share in life, and maybe
(37:12):
my compassion is deepening inside of that. And there's so
much meaning and so much purpose and so much happening
inside of this story for me, that that's where all
the goodness is. This really was never about getting it perfect,
about things going our way, about you know, making the
money we thought we were going to make isn't this
isn't about the financial crisis. I mean it is and
it isn't. But the analogy being that maybe the answer
(37:36):
is not to set yourself out like, hmm, it didn't
go my way. I didn't get what I wanted, So
I'm just going to sit down and pout that my
intuition was wrong. No, maybe maybe it's about peddling faster.
Maybe it's about continuing to show up and continuing to
live in my life with my whole heart even though
things didn't go my way. Because guess what wake up call?
(37:59):
Things off times don't go our way in life. We
cannot move through this life expecting that everything is going
to always go our way. Failure is an absolutely essential
part of life. It is baked into the recipe of
what it means to be a human being, and in
some ways we need to rebrand failure to not be
this horrible thing that all of us are trying to avoid,
but to be something that we learn how to take
(38:21):
in and metabolize and move with and receive for all
the gifts that it has to offer us. So I
don't know for you what's coming up, Like maybe there's
a failure in a certain part of your life. Maybe
you've sat yourself on the bench of a part of
your life because you've had some kind of failure. Maybe
(38:42):
you've had a relationship failure, maybe you've had a hundred
relationship failures, and so you've kind of sat yourself on
the bench of romantic love or relationships or even friendships
because you're just like, yeah, I've been burned one too
many times, I've been betrayed, things haven't gone my way.
You know, I've failed at this and that. So I'm
just going to kind of sit myself on the bench
of this part of my life. Or maybe for you
(39:05):
like me, it's more related to career and finances and
you know, feeling empowered in that part of your life.
Maybe you've had a failure or two like I have
in the last couple of years, and so you're just like, yeah,
I'm just gonna sit myself on the bench of this
part of my life and just kind of like throw
my hands up. I guess there's nothing I can do.
I guess I tried everything and it didn't work. Instead
(39:27):
of going like, well, failure is just a part of
how we learn. This is just falling over as a
part of learning how to ride a bike. I got
to get myself back up and you know, get myself
back in the saddle, so to speak, or maybe it's
more creative for you. I think this is another area
where a lot of people experience a quote unquote failure,
which sometimes isn't even really a failure. It's just a
(39:49):
feeling of failure where you start to work on something
and it doesn't turn out on the page the way
that you wanted it to or the way that you
pictured in your head, and so you write, you know,
sentence or two and you're just like, oh, oh, this
is hard. Okay, moving on to something that I feel
good about myself when I do like I'm going to
(40:09):
go help people, or I'm going to go clean my house,
or I'm going to go, you know, take care of
my kids, because when I do those things, I feel
good about myself. Or I'm going to go back to
work and you know, get attention there. I'm going to
go to church and volunteer because when I do that,
you know, everyone goes like, we love you. You're amazing,
You're the best. And here's another element of failure that
(40:29):
I think we need to be in tune with is
watch out for the ways that you avoid failure and
move toward accolades. You move toward outside validation and away
from the feeling like you have let someone down or
you let yourself down. I think this is a big
(40:50):
mistake that so many of us make, and I have
made this one hundred times in my life, is continuing
to do something because you get attention and validation for it,
and choosing no to do something because you don't get
those things. It's like that is your drug and you
need it to keep going. And so you don't do
your creative work, or you don't do your self care,
(41:11):
or you don't do whatever, because no one goes like
good for you, good for you booking yourself a massage,
like you know, I don't know. Even that kind of
sounds like someone might be patronizing you a little bit,
but it's like, yeah, I'm so proud of you for
taking care of yourself. I'm so amazed that you put
yourself first. Yes, Like more of that, good on you,
(41:33):
high five, Like let's get you an award, you know,
like no one does that. So it can be difficult
to move away from validation and toward failure. But I
think sometimes that is exactly what we need to move
away from validation and toward failure, toward the thing that
most scares you, toward the thing you're most afraid to
(41:55):
fail at and to fall at. Because on the other
side of that ex experience of tipping over is the
experience of utter freedom and the wind in your face
and the wind in your hair, and that first feeling
a freedom when the person who had their hand on
your seat let's go and you're just off. I hope
some part of this resonates with you. I hope you
(42:16):
find it helpful. I hope that you can urge yourself
and encourage yourself to move toward your failure instead of
away from it, to rewrite the narrative that's playing in
your head to accept and receive that failure is a
baked in part of life. It's an absolutely expected part
of what we are put here to do, what we
are meant to experience on planet Earth. And I hope
(42:37):
that moving toward failure, moving through quote unquote failure, helps
you experience the freedom, the joy, the utter bliss that
comes from facing down your demons and showing yourself what
you're made of. Until next week, I'll see you back
here on the Write Your Story podcast
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
Host
Amy Brown
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