Is failure ok?
Julia Landauer, one of the most successful professional racer woman, recorded a podcast about rejection lately .
In sports, you need sponsors, it just costs too much money to continue without them. The struggle is hard as many drivers need to train their skills to the very best and be salesmen at the same time.
To get resources to continue her passion, Julia was sending out about 20-40 carefully selected emails with sponsorship opportunities, getting quite impressive 3-5 responses, out of them 80-90% were a straight "NO". 10-20% were inviting, and out of them only a small fraction actually converted. Each shot was 1/1000 ods shot.
How did she continue and persisted against such low chances of success?
Here most favorite quote (and mine top-10 too!) was Winston's Churchill one:
Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm
For Sir Winston, failure was part of success. For Julia, it became one too.
I know... easy to say. Let's move on then!
You learn to accept failure (if you manage to push through it many times)
Just as Julia did, and all salesmen learn, you just need to stick through routine and receive enough "NO's" to stop bothering about them, and actually start appreciating them (as "NO" is better than no answer at all)
All of us went through period of learning how to walk, how to swim, how to ride a bicycle. It is a stream of failures at the very beginning, that then occur less and less frequently.
So, in theory, our bodies have internal mechanisms for dealing with failure embedded since our birth.
Where are they now when we are adults? When did they stop working?
But we get stuck in failure most of the time
You and I know the hard reality, which is, for most of the time, failure discourages us.
Also, most of the time success doesn't taste as sweet as we hoped it would!
It just seems like our nervous reaction to failure and success is biased in the wrong direction!
"I accept that nothing I will do today will bring any significant effect on my life"
Consider telling yourself the above mantra today.
It is not about self-shaming or self-harming. Just drop your expectations, they kill your ability to experience your full potential.
Wanted to study for an exam? Wanted to do a solid gym training? Wanted to achieve something at work today?
Still do it! But expect it to have no effect. It is what it is, tomorrow will be the same as today.
What if you planned to study for an exam, but can't start? Procrastination? Accept it. It wouldn't matter today anyway.
See what these thoughts do to your brain, to your line of thoughts.
If nothing you do would matter today, what is that thing you actually WANT to do now?
"I expect to fail with the worst-case scenario"
Another one, also a very powerful quote.
Especially useful for public speaking anxiety and other internal worries. Just imagine worst-case scenario (you stand there silent, the crowd awaits, and you can't say a word), accept it, and imagine that your life moves on after it as it normally would. Nothing really happened.
Maybe you are going to give the worst performance of your life. Reach the lowest point of stress-induced umms and errs. Accept it, imagine there is normal life after it. Nothing changed.
Our imagination of the negative consequences of failure is tying our hands so many times.
We are doing this to ourselves!
This is no time to get motivated! This is time to chill out a bit!
Fear of failure causes failure.
If you can't fight it. Accept it. Let go.
"Promise me you will fly low and slowly!" Says worried mom to her son, the aircraft pilot in an old joke I cannot recall in full.
Me & you, we are not famous superheroes and superstars. Just normal ordinary people. Each one of us lifts the weight of our past on our shoulders. We can't just snap our fingers and change into different personas.
(although looking at the popularity of motivational speakers, many people would, almost like we would prefer to become bipolar, ha! I wonder how this connects to the growing number of mental illnesses in society... hmm..)
So, if we cannot change just like that. Is there a way to accept "it is what it is"? Start from there?
Not doing this means growing frustration between expectations and reality - who wants that in their life??