EP24 Mindset Monday - How to Fail

This is the Empowered athlete podcast episode 24 this is the empowered athlete podcast mindset Monday 10 minutes with Kari Schneider to learn new mindset tactics and tricks to optimize your performance in sport, business and life.

If you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out the Empowered Top Performers Group Coaching Call. It's my monthly coaching program where we take health and mindset topics and break them down to action steps that can then be applied to your sport, career or life. You want to try this coaching call out? It's the second Tuesday of each month at 8pm Eastern. Pop me an email and I'll get you on there. Give it a try. Ksempowerconditioning.com awesome. So for failure, the reason I chose this topic is because at this time of the year, early into a new year, when you get this far in, this is when people have usually set out to do something really specific and then they likely haven't completed it, especially if it was something really daunting, really challenging. And so this is what happens. Failure is what happens. But today we're going to talk about it on hopefully in a different way than you've heard before. Or maybe it's going to be a reminder so that it doesn't become so daunting. And I'm going to give you three steps as to how to fail. So if we define failure and you look it up on Google, or maybe you've got a Webster's dictionary, if you're really old school and you look up failure, it's going to say lack of success. But there's another more in depth definition that is that we didn't do our own expected action or something else didn't do our expected action. So I'm going to repeat that we didn't do our own expected action or something else didn't do our expected action. So if you think about that definition of failure, so we've got our lack of success, then not completing our expected action or something else, not completing our expected action. We look at those definitions, then you kind of at first, when you look at the expected actions, we just want to change our expectations, make our expectations lower. If we make our expectations lower, then we're not going to fail. We get really small. So if we do that, what happens is that we end up living on this lower level with really low expectations. But then everything's going to be okay. And our life isn't necessarily becoming this exceptional version of what we really wanted. It's becoming this small version, smaller than what we used to Imagine so that we don't fail. So it's this lack of success or not meeting the expectations. So what do we do about that? Sometimes if you look at failure you've had in the past and maybe you've been burned by failure, you look at why, why did you fail? Maybe you didn't do certain things, but really what we want to look at is how that made us feel. And if we felt like a bag of crap because we didn't reach our goals, then we are often trying to avoid failure going forward. But here's the thing. Having worked in sport and high performance sport and with clients for so many, many years, here's the thing that I know is an unequivocal truth and that is that you cannot have performance without failure. You must, must, must have failure in order to get to that ultimate level of performance. So failure is one of these ingredients that has to be there. It's like if you're baking that cake and you didn't put the flour in, it's not going to become the cake that you expected it to be. So you need to have that failure in order to get to performance. So we're going to look at it a little bit differently and take some steps in order to really take a look at redefining this for you. So number one, most people are going to say if they go into, if they're, if they're going to do something really, really scary and you say, well, why aren't you doing it? Why aren't you taking action toward it? And what may come out is that they're afraid to fail. But then if you ask the next question, why are you afraid to fail? Because I don't like how that feels. Well, what does failure mean to you? Maybe to you it means something that you just couldn't accept or you didn't like. But ultimately it's going to be that feeling that you have. The way you think about a certain thing causes the feeling that you have. I'm going to think back a little ways ago and I turned when I turned 40, I didn't have a midlife crisis or this awful feeling. But I did take a look at my life and there were a whole bunch of areas of my life that weren't the way I expected to. If I thought back at 20 years old what I thought my 40 year old life would look like, I thought. Then I took a look at it and I thought, oh, I was disappointed in where I was with my relationship. I envisioned my family scenario to look different. I envisioned my career to look different. I envisioned my earnings to look different. So I looked at all of that and all of that seemed like a failure. And I had to reframe and take a look at everything else and how I was looking at it in order to understand that that failure in certain areas got me to areas that were much greater than what I had anticipated. So there was so many things that I could never predicted at 20 that had happened at 40. Maybe living in another country, maybe finding the love of my life, maybe having an amazing blended family, performing in or achieving certain races or times that I never thought I could have. So there was all kinds of things that didn't equal failure, even though my definition of what it was didn't meet my previous definition. So step one is going to be why are you afraid of failure? And keep asking why until you dig down. Why are you afraid of failure? I'm afraid of failure because of what other people will think. I'm afraid of failure because it didn't meet my expectations. I'm afraid of failure because something else didn't meet my expectations. And that makes me feel like I am not good enough. That makes me feel like I am not worthy. So it comes down to how it makes you feel. That's the thing that you're avoiding with failure. You're not avoiding missing out on the thing as much as you're avoiding the feeling you don't like. So that's number one, why are you afraid of failure? Keep digging down until you find the feeling that you're afraid of because it's the feeling you're afraid of more than anything else. Number two, this is the next step. Change. Completely change what failure means to you. If failure means to you looking bad in front of people you respect or failure means to you that you didn't get what you wanted, or failure means to you that you're no good and that you are not worthy, then you need to change and reframe that perspective of what it means to you. So that's step two. Turn it into meaning that it means you're closer to where you wanted to go. Turn it into meaning that you learned more about what it takes. If a team failed at achieving a championship and they worked really hard for that, then there's all kinds of things that came out of it. They learned that they needed to know more about those tactics from that other team. They needed to be fitter in this certain area. They needed to learn more skills, skills around their offense, whatever it is. There's all kinds of things that that failure is going to mean to them, but it could mean a whole bunch of good things instead of a whole bunch of bad things. So change what failure means to you. That's the most important step, I think, overall, changing what it means to you. And number three, you need to focus your thoughts because if you are stuck into feeling bad about what failed and then you need to ask yourself better questions to focus your thoughts and then change the feeling around it. So number three has to do with a better question. And that is what is successful about this failure? And you might be feeling so bad that you can't even find something that's successful. And let's push that boundary just a little bit and go, what is successful about this? If you can't find anything, I don't know, keeps coming up, I don't know. Well, what if I had to find something successful? You really need to look and dig, find something successful about this failure. And then you need to look at the nuggets, the things you learned, what came out of it, those key insights that you now know that you didn't know before about what it was going to take to get to that goal that you really want. So if you're at this point point of the year, you're early on in the year and you failed at the weight loss, or you failed at getting to something in this first month of the first quarter that you really wanted with your career, or you're not quite as far along on your training or your strength or your fitness or whatever you wanted, or you set out a 30 day goal in January and it didn't work then take a look right now as what is successful about the failure that I had. What if I had to find something, change what failure means to you. So I'm going to take a look at this from a few quotes that have to do with failure. And one is something that I've heard a number of times is from Will Smith and I think he's amazing. So this quote is that he has said it's fail early, fail forward and fail often. Maybe the order should change. So fail early, fail often, fail forward, meaning that you're failing early, meaning you're putting the effort in, you're trying so much that you have failed right when you started your endeavor to what it is. You're trying so hard that maybe you fail a little bit, but that's how big you're playing your game. You fail often, you've done all kinds of attempts, you're working really hard at getting towards where you want to go and you fail forward, meaning you're learning, you're finding the success in every single failure you are learning. All that failure means is that you are learning what it takes to. To get to where you want to go. That's all it means. And another one. And I don't know who made this quote. I've heard it so many times. But if you're playing really big in life or really big at what you want, then that means that if you want success, you double your rate of failure. So if you want to really change, like I said in step two, really change what failure means, then you change the game. That means for February, whatever your goals are, whatever you want. How many times can I fail in February? And if I don't fail three times or five times or whatever it is, if I don't fail that many times, then I'm not playing big enough. I'm not trying hard enough, I'm not going all in. So that's the kind of change in the concept, if you want success, double your rate of failure. And this last quote is. I love it. I think it's a really amazing failure quote. So this one is, only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. And this is by Robert F. Kennedy. Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. So that's my challenge to you is dare to fail. If you take a look at what's coming up in this first quarter, quarter of 2019, dare to fail. Make a challenge to yourself. Fail five times in this month, and all these things in your life that you're playing really big. So there's my challenge. Dare to fail so that you can achieve greatly. Have a fantastic week, guys. Happy Monday, and I will talk to you soon.