Chloe SpillaneYour personal career strategist - start here ↓

Student Motivation #unistudent #careergrowth #selfgrowth #keepgoing #lifeadvice #universitylife

21 Mar 2026 · 2 min

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1:57

In this solo motivational monologue, Chloe Spillane recounts the first major failure of her life—failing a core acting‑school subject and consequently an entire semester. While receiving the notification during a dentist appointment, she describes the shock, humiliation, and bruised ego that followed, especially given the small, tight‑knit cohort where everyone knew she had failed. Despite feeling vulnerable and fearing judgment, Chloe refuses to let the setback define her. She chooses to return to school with a new cohort, confronting embarrassment head‑on, and ultimately forms close friendships with those classmates. Throughout the story, she emphasizes the importance of using failure as proof that one can recover, warning that surrendering to setbacks sends a self‑defeating message. She encourages listeners to recognize their inner strength, confront challenges, and persist, framing personal resilience as a skill anyone can develop.

Chapters

Storytime about the time I failed for the very first time in my life and how I came back from it. Okay, so I was sitting in the dentist chair and I was getting a filling, and I get a notification from the acting school that I was studying at at the time that I had failed a subject. And I didn't just fail a subject, I failed the core subject, meaning that I failed the entire semester. Now, at the time, I'd felt pretty hard done by. I thought they all just hated me and that they had something against me. Me. But I was trying to be someone that I wasn't. I was trying to be some big, bold, vivacious, outspoken person, which I can definitely be at times, but I'm also like really soft and super sensitive and cry all the time and feel these emotions. But I wouldn't let anyone see that. Giving up is not something that's in my vocabulary, so there was no way in hell that I was not going to do that degree, even though my ego was very bruised, and I was humiliated, embarrassed, mortified. I had to show up again with a whole new cohort of people. Keep in mind, those people became some of my closest friends, and everyone knew that I was the chick that failed because acting school has quite small groups of people. So it's not like you've got hundreds of people in a university year, it's like a group of 30 people. So everyone knew that I was the one that failed. But because I wasn't just going to give up and let my ego overcome me and not get me to where I want to be, I had to show up for myself and I had to get through the embarrassment of it. You need to give yourself evidence that if you fail, you can come back. Because if you go through a failure and you choose not to overcome it, then what are you telling yourself? You're telling yourself that when it gets too hard, then you're just going to throw in the towel. You're telling yourself that you're not strong enough to overcome a failure, whereas I can probably tell you if I spoke to you that you definitely do have that strength. You're just choosing not to get close to it.