Week 2

some observations…

I feel like everything I’ve studied about habit formation, getting over fears, and achieving success are all merging toward this nervous breakdown exciting project (I am borrowing this joke-truth from Dr. Brene Brown’s famous Ted Talk, because it so applies).

We always hear successful people in their fields tout the benefits of failing, their failures having been the best teachers that led them to where they are today. We see the inspirational quotes, listen to the inspirational podcasts, read the inspirational stories, and maybe through all of this we have managed to convince ourselves of the benefits of failing. If failure is so important, why aren’t we all unbreakably focused on trying things that might fail, like, all the time? There are so many reasons, but today I will argue one I’ve been thinking about a lot.

We tell ourselves that one day we might get to where we want to go and be one of those success stories. But today? Today, risking failure is just too hard.

It’s too scary.

Remember the last time that failure thing happened? It felt so, so awful.

We don’t have the energy for that today.

Our family doesn’t have the energy right now to deal with us after that.

Risking failure is so hard on its own, and it’s made extra difficult because of all the temptation to stick to things that people tell us we’re good at doing. Regardless of burnout or feeling stuck in a rut, or harboring a secret dream, the social pressure from our people tells us to keep doing what is safe. Maybe our loved ones are even telling us that we’re needed in continuing to do the thing that is safe. So “safe” and what we’re “good at” is the default mode, and the hard gets pushed aside, forgotten about, or kicked down the road. We can do the big, hairy scary thing that risks failure tomorrow, we tell ourselves. We’re needed today, so we’ll leave the dreaming to the kids— we are responsible adults with obligations to fulfill.

So tomorrow becomes the next day, and the next day becomes next week, next month, next year, and now we’re in a formidable death-grip of a habit of doing what’s safe and avoiding the uncomfortable, of avoiding failure. And we look up at the clock and the calendar and the time that has passed, and look down on what we’ve made of our dreams and our progress, and we really feel like a failure because we never truly reached for the thing that we wanted to do in the first place.

When we do, finally, collect our courage to step out of our pattern of safe inaction—for a moment—and try something… Well? It usually fails, as could have been predicted because we are trying something new and haven’t yet given ourselves enough opportunities to fail and learn and grow into our success. Then often well-intentioned support system will say something like “I’m sorry,” or “maybe it will work out differently next time.” Maybe they’ll even toss out a quote or two on the importance of failing. It’s nice, but we feel their disappointment for us and discomfort from our failing, and it sucks to feel like we’ve disappointed the people we love. So we tried, we tell ourselves, and yes, we’ll try again in the future but right now is the time for licking our wounds and finding comfort in the familiar, so we go back to the safe path and we don’t try again for awhile. And more days and weeks and months and maybe years pass, and the next time we try for something, we feel the weight of our last failure and our few cumulative failures and we walk toward the next opportunity already weighted down to the ground with a heavy heart and the expectation of disappointment. And we fail again, and it feels like we can never get a win.

Ugh. It’s so painful. I’ve been using “we” with the suspicion (or maybe just hope) that I haven’t been alone in this vicious cycle.

My representation of an anti-failure mindset (with help from Canva)

Our pattern of inaction is not our fault. It is not our fault! That suspicion you’ve had that everything is working against you may not be all paranoia. Our routine and social systems may not actively be working against us, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t structured in ways that have been working against us. It is totally not our fault that we’ve struggled so much for so long!

But just because it’s not our fault doesn’t mean it’s not our responsibility to work toward something better for ourselves. I’m believe that together we can stop the madness and start a new cycle.

This whole project started by decoding a few clues the universe sent me:

More opportunities for failure —> more learning AND more opportunities for potential success

How to find more opportunities for failure? Seek them out.

How to seek them out? Reframe failure by making it the goal in and of itself + Establish a failure-seeking habit

How to make failure the goal and establish a failure-seeking habit? Set up systems to reinforce it. (This blog).

I’m hoping that through this experiment, the new cycle I’m building for myself will look a lot less like the picture above, and a lot more like the picture below:

My representation of a failure-positive mindset cycle (with help from Canva)

looking ahead

I want to work on examining my fear of failure (stay tuned for my past failure wounds), while also building up a habit of reframing it. It seems that two common methods to helping people overcome fears and phobias are exposure and flooding.

Exposure = exposing yourself to your fear in stages, with each stage gradually increasing in intensity

Flooding = throwing yourself into the deep end of your fear until your brain can start to calm down and realize your fear is not an actual threat

I think that it will be key for me to put myself through both methods. With systematic desensitization, I will be exposing myself to many small opportunities for failures across a wide variety of areas, all with small stakes (there’s nothing to gain except a personal sense of satisfaction, and there’s nothing to lose except my dignity. Just kidding. Kind of.) With flooding, I will be exposing myself to as many opportunities for failing as absolute possible in one specific area (say, writing/ pitching) in a very short span of time.

I am going to start this month (January 2024) with systematic desensitization. I am in a phase of exploring the roots of my failure fears and resistance, intellectualizing failure a bit from reading research and stories, and actively planting failure seeds as I go about my hunt for more failing opportunities. If I can get one failure per week this month I will be pretty happy. Next month, I will probably aim for two failures per week with a bit more strategizing on approach.

failure of the week

I participate in a monthly screenwriting group, and this week the topic was writing a logline (a high-interest, one-sentence encapsulation of your screenplay for the purposes of pitching). The coach asked for volunteers to workshop their loglines, and before I could second guess myself I threw one of mine into the ring. As she read and gave feedback to writer after writer before me, all I could think about was how good their lines were. If I had read even one of theirs, I would not have had the guts to show mine. I started shaking about four writers ahead of me. She kept making little tweaks here and there to their lines, while saying they all worked very well as they brought them. I knew mine was not in that kind of shape.

I desperately wanted to jump off the call and pretend I had internet issues. I felt sick. My mantra became the only goal is to be uncomfortable, and you have already succeeded. I had succeeded in being uncomfortable—wildly succeeded, as a matter of fact.

Then she got to mine. I shook as she read it. I turned red as she did the “hmmm” pause. But because I had my mantra, I could be present enough to answer the questions she asked of me. Because I could answer her questions, she got to understand the heart of what I was trying to say with my script, which meant that she could then work with me on how to convey that heart in the kernel form of a logline.

And then it was over, and while I had expected to cry, I wanted to jump and dance and yell “hallelujah!” I felt proud of myself, not because my logline was deemed successful, but because I had gotten such helpful and supportive feedback so I could fail better next time. I wanted to laugh because I had spent ten years noodling around the idea and fiddling with its logline, and all I had to do to drastically improve was to let myself be really uncomfortable for a few minutes and ask for help. And then I did want to cry, because I felt a little bit braver, and ready to take on my next small but mighty fail.

As always, thank you for your kindness and support, and I’ll be with you again next week.

Happy Failing!

Rachel