010. The Gift of Failure and How to Set Big Goals

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck. And this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast, where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom one business at a time. Well, hello, hello my friends, and welcome to the podcast. Hope you're having a fabulous start to your week. I have a gift for you. It's the holiday season. And speaking of the holiday season, my kids will be home in just a few hours. They are in their final day of school for the year, and then they will be home under my roof for the next two and a half weeks. So I'm like, I gotta get this podcast recorded because there's not going to be any quiet moments I would predict for a while. So I wanted to give you a gift today. It is the holiday season, the season of giving. And so I am going to give you the gift of failure. Aren't you excited? This is a concept that I invite you. I'm giving this gift to you and I invite you to open it up, to play with it, toy around with it for 2022. And so the reason I want to give you this gift of failure is to help you to achieve your biggest goals faster. And the way to do that is by embracing failure. And I know this is a concept that will break your brain a little bit because it has broken my brain for years and it's been something that I've wrestled with and I feel like I finally understand why failure is a gift. And so I wanted to explain it to you in a way that you know that it's coming from a failure intolerant perfectionist, a student person, that's me. And I wanted to have this discussion because it's been something that has been really challenging for me to embrace. But as I have embraced it, I have seen my success and my ability to reach my goals become so much easier, come so much easier. I have so much more joy and feel so much more self support, and it's all stemming from stopping avoiding failure. I wanted to have this discussion today. I would love for you to send me a message. You know, how you receive this, how you're thinking about it, if this is helpful to you. Because I wish that I had this podcast to listen to that was recorded by someone like me a few years ago because I think it would have really been helpful. So I hope it's helpful for you too. And so I want to just honor you for showing up to listen to this episode. I know sometimes when I see titles that sound like topics that will be difficult for me to handle, I scroll on by and I don't listen to them. But I want to honor you for being here and for learning and thinking about failure in a new way. And so the concepts I want to share will be generative and positive. We're not just going to talk all about failing and how awful we all are. So you can just put that out of your mind. And I'm going to just offer this to you in a way that's loving and compassionate for wherever you are on your journey with having a relationship with failure. We are socialized in our culture and especially, I think for us as women, especially in school and business, that failure is bad and that it should be avoided at all costs. Like, we don't want to get an F on the test. We don't even want to get a C or a D. I mean, even partial failure is unacceptable, right? And I know I was raised that way. I have raised my children that way. Like, we reward them for good grades and so, you know, rethinking those kind of decisions. But and in business too, like, if you ever have had a, which most of us have had a job working for someone else, you didn't want to really stick your neck out, right? Too much. Because if you failed, you're going to get fired and you're going to like, lose your career, you're going to lose your benefits or whatever. You know, lose your, your place in that status in that company. You know, bad things happen if you stick your neck out and fail. And so that's definitely how we're socialized. And I think even, especially for us as women, that we are even more failure tolerant because we have just biologically, we have a greater dependence on being part of a group, being part of the tribe, so to speak. And so when we risk being expelled from the group, that makes a. That really can. Can spark within us a lot of trauma type response, right? Like, we just, we don't want to come close to failing because of all the awful things that it could mean for us. And so I think we as women are more vulnerable to feelings of failure. And overcoming that is quite a challenge. And I know it's been a challenge for me. So I want you to just as I talk today, just have compassion for yourself for however you feel as part of this discussion because it's kind of a heavy topic. I'm going to make it as fun as I can. But, but I want to just Give you an understanding of failure in a whole new way. And also just encourage you to have compassion as you go through this journey, as you take this gift of failure that I'm giving you and play around with it for the coming year. So just have compassion and please reach out to me, let me know what comes up. And obviously, I'm always available for coaching on this subject, but today I want to offer you a whole new way to view failure that will help you to reach your goals faster. That's why I think this discussion is important. This is not just an exercise for us in torturing ourselves and trying to think new things. This is an exercise in really helping you to overcome something that I see holds all of us back. And so I started this journey of setting goals. And if you've listened to the episode prior to this one, I talk a little bit about that. But I've really avoided setting goals for many, many years. And it all stems from this fear of failing and fear of setting goals and, you know, talking about them and then being humiliated and making a fool of myself and all of that. And so that's where I come from. And so this idea of setting an impossible goal or setting a big goal was always very uncomfortable for me. I mean, a lot of the mentors that I follow talk about setting impossible goals, and I just couldn't understand why. So, because I was like, well, why would you set an impossible goal that you're never going to achieve and just continue to feel failure and failure and failure? Like, I don't understand that. And that was really hard for me for a long time. And so I feel like I've finally made sense of it. And I want to share that with you because maybe you struggle with this too. So. So the reason why we set impossible goals, or, I don't know, I don't even like the term impossible. The reason why we set goals that are more impossible than they are possible is because it stretches us and challenges us. It calls us higher and it pulls us out of our comfort zone. It invites us to be unreasonable or even delusional. And we might say, well, why would we want to do that? Because that discomfort creates growth, right? We know that diamonds are created through natural means, through creating pressure, and so beautiful things can come out of increased discomfort. And so that's why we set big goals, right? However, we also grow and succeed faster by creating an environment where we can fail and where we can reach higher and fall short and still love ourselves and still believe in our dream. That all comes from thinking differently about failure. So for most of us, when we don't achieve our goals, it can be devastating, right? We, and that for me at least is, and I see this a lot in my clients, is that we are depending on the results that we're getting or not getting, meaning hitting our goal to validate our belief, right? So, for example, my goal for 2021 that's going to be over here in a couple of weeks was to create over 205k in my business as my gross revenue. And I did not make that goal, I did not achieve it. And there was a time where I would look at that and I would. That would devastate my belief in myself, in my belief in my business, in my belief in my mission that I'm on through my business. And it's because I was allowing that result of less than 200k to validate or not validate my belief in myself, right? So in order to create big goals and not achieve them and still get all the growth and the learning from them, the first thing we have to do is have and create unshakable belief that we are on the right path, that nothing has gone wrong, that we are going to achieve that goal at some point if we never give up and if we continue to try and fail at all the different options and scenarios, that maybe it's just data, right? It's just learning what doesn't work. That's all failure is, is learning what doesn't work and then iterating, evaluating, iterating and moving on from there. So when we remove our feelings of what we make failure mean about us and our business and our goals, if we remove what we make it mean and just look at it as data, then of course we want to fail because we want all the data we can get. That's my first invitation to you, is just stop making it mean something about you when you think you have failed and failure will happen. I remember my brother who has been a motocross racer his entire life, and I remember something he said to me, I think it was back when we were teenagers, he's like, if you're not crashing, you're not winning. And so he never thought about crashing as a bad thing. I mean, obviously if he got hurt or something, that wasn't good, but he always was pushing it to the limit, to the limit of crashing to find out what his limits were. And so that's the same thing in our businesses is let's push it to the limit as far as our growth and what we think we can accomplish and see if we're right right or if we're wrong. And even if we don't make it, that doesn't mean we're on the wrong track. That just means that we failed and we got some data about why, what didn't work and how we want to change things and try again. So letting our belief in our business and our success be dependent on whether we hit a goal or not is a recipe for an emotional roller coaster and a very volatile business. So if you see in your business that you are up one month and down the next, up one month and down the next in revenue and it's not due to the cyclical nature of your type of business, then this might be part of why that's happening. Right? Because you are letting your belief deter be determined by how much money you make. And so I want to encourage you to think about how can you create unshakable belief that does not matter what the revenue is that's coming in. And for me it's been trial by fire. I've learned this lesson the hard way in 2021 because I've had months of just eye popping success and lots of money coming in, lots of clients coming in. And I have had months where nothing's coming in and very little money. And so there was a time where that really rocked me, right? That was like, oh, I'm doing everything wrong. I must, you know, I made it mean a lot of awful things. And so then that, then all my focus on the lack of revenue just created more lack in my business. And so then I had lower and lower months. And so what, what I encourage you to do and what I've learned to do is that I have to have the belief in myself and in my business, no matter what's happening, even when I fail, even when I fail at hitting the goal, even when there's a lot of money coming in, and even when there's a little money coming in, I have to maintain the belief, the belief has to remain consistent throughout all of that. So I can look at my bank account now and just feel totally neutral about it. Like it's not, you know, it's not giving me a feeling of good or bad either way. It just is, it's a neutral fact. There's numbers that appear in pixels on my screen when I look at my bank account and I don't make them mean anything, right? I believe in what I'm doing and in my business, no matter what's going on in the bank account. So that Is first. One of the first things that we really need to work on is separating our belief from being dependent on our achievement or our results or hitting a goal. And so doing that allows you to hit big goals or not hit big goals, but experience massive growth and learning as a result. Because we don't start spiraling out in what we make it mean and we don't lose belief. Right? The belief is consistent. The results might not be consistent, but the belief and the learning is always consistent. So that's how we can have a big audacious goal and make not hitting it the goal. Right? The growth. Because the growth for us is in becoming who we need to become. Like stretching ourselves to become that next higher version of ourselves to get to that next level and believing that if we never give up and we keep reaching and learning and failing and learning and iterating, we will achieve the goal. But the growth that you experience along the way will mean so much more than actually achieving the goal. And I have experienced this. It's amazing. It's amazing to be able to set a goal and not hit it and still feel so proud of yourself because of all the growth that you have experienced along the way and all the amazing learning and things that you have tried and along the way and learned about. So to experience this yourself, all it takes is changing the way that you think about failure, how you internalize it. And so one way that you can think of, another way I should say that you can think about failure is to imagine as if you thought about it like a scientist. And one of my coaches, Simone Soldier, talks about this. This I got this idea from her and it just really has resonated with me and is the way has become my standard for myself. And how I think about failure is thinking about it like a scientist and a failed experiment, right? So a scientist goes into a lab and they have a hypothesis about what's going to happen in this experiment that they're about to do, and they form their hypothesis and then they conduct the experiment and then either it turns out the way they thought it would or it doesn't, or maybe it partially does, right? But they don't look at that experiment and if it doesn't match up with what their hypothesis was, they don't go, oh my gosh, like, I am not. I was definitely not cut out to be a scientist. This is awful. I'm quitting. I'm never doing any more experiments. I'm just going to go back to Starbucks or whatever and I am not going to be A scientist anymore. They would never do that. They're like, okay, what did we learn from this failed experiment? My hypothesis was not proven to be correct. So what do I learn from that? Okay, I learned X, Y and Z. Now we're going to do this experiment again and we're going to change these two variables or this one variable and see how that works. They don't make it mean anything about them. They look at it as data. It's simply data. They evaluate it, they change the experiment and then they attempt it again. So why can't we take the same approach? And this has become my standard. Not that I'm always perfect about it, because you always have that inner critic, you know, in the back of your mind, like yelling at you like, yep, see, this is proof you're not supposed to be doing this. We always have that going on and that's fine. But what is becoming more of my practice is, oh, look, this didn't work. Why didn't it work? Let's make a change and try it again rather than making it mean awful things. Right. And taking it personally. So in this process of changing your thinking, this is why it's so powerful to have a coach that's in your corner helping you to manage your thinking around failure and what you make it mean. That has made all the difference for me personally is having a coach that has helped me and continues to help me to really embrace this idea of failure and really stretch and grow myself in the process. And so I want to just give you a few steps on how you can set a big goal and use that to become more failure tolerant. Right? We're not making failure go away. What we want is just to be able to tolerate it and use it as fuel and use it as data and use it as something that calls us higher. Right. And teaches us things and we can learn from. So step one is to make sure you are setting yourself up for failure. That sounds so fun. Right? I know you are all bought in. I want you to pick a big goal and notice how it feels in your body. So for me and if you're coming to my event, my live three day workshop and coaching event, Envision 2022. We're going to. I'm going to be right along with you planning out my year and setting my impossible goal. My big goal for the year, which is going to be my big goal for 2022, is to create 300k in my business and gross revenue. So when I pick that. So step one here is to pick your big goal and then notice how it feels in your body. For me, it's like I get butterflies. Like, I can feel the excitement, but then it's also a little bit of a, you know, nausea. Like, oh, my gosh, that's so big. And now I just said it in public. And who am I, you know, who do I think I am, Right? So. So just take it. Just notice that. And then step two, I want you to write down everything that comes up for you. Everything. All the thoughts that your brain is giving you, telling you how impossible this goal is, right? Some popular ones that, that I hear a lot from my own brain and from my clients is that you've never done that before. You haven't achieved. You didn't achieve your goal for 2021. Like, who the hell do you think you are that you're going to create 300k in 2022? You know, and it goes on and on, right? So write down everything that comes up for you and that your brain is giving you that make it impossible to achieve, that this goal is impossible to achieve. And then step three, I want you to write down all the ways that it could be possible, right? So crunch the numbers. How could it be possible? For me, it's like, okay, you know, if I get. If I can serve, you know, this many people over the course of the year, and I'm gonna, you know, do this retreat and, you know, like, how are all the ways it could be possible and make it fun to play around in that sandbox of possibility? What are all the ways that it could happen? And then step four, I want you to decide what you want to make failure mean. Create your standard that you will follow no matter what others think. Because a lot of times we fail and it's public, other people see, right? And then we're, like, cringing because we're, like, just waiting for. For them, you know, to point out how much of a failure that we are. And so for a lot of us, for me included, that was one reason why I didn't set goals, right? Because I didn't want that humiliation. But remember, humiliation, disappointment, it's all just feelings, right? We are not. They're not going to kill us. We're not going to die. We won't be expelled from the community. Like, it just didn't work out like we thought it would, and that's it. And it's okay to have those feelings and to be disappointed. But then you go back to your standard that you'll be setting in step four, that the standard that you will follow. And for me it's yes. My standard is to allow the disappointment and the humiliation and you know, I still talk about my goals even though I know that I probably not going to achieve them. It's okay, right? So my standard is to be okay with the feelings, to just allow those feelings, but then also put on my scientist hat and look at the failure as learning as data, as asking why and approaching it with curiosity rather than condemnation. So you can set the standard that you want for yourself and your business, but how do you want to handle failure? And this is awesome for setting for yourself, but then also if you have team members, it's also a great standard to share with your family to allow your children to try things and fail at them. It's very useful to create the standard. Anyway, step five is to put yourself in the future of having achieved the goal. So for me, I'm thinking about Melissa on December 31st, on New Year's Eve of 2022 when I open up my QuickBooks app and I see that my revenue for the year is over 300k. What? And these are the questions I want you to journal on. What do you think and feel about having achieved that goal? From that place, from that, from having achieved the goal? What are you thinking and feeling? What wisdom does she have, does that future self have to share with you? What, what does she say that, that you need to know now as you're embarking on this goal? And who does she say you need to become to get to where she is and just allow all of that inner wisdom to come through on the page and, and just hold this near and dear to you as you go throughout the year, as you are attempting, making many attempts at achieving your goal and failing and learning and growing. And just imagine that that future self is there with you all along the way and speaking this wisdom to you. Okay? And then step six, I want you to think about incremental milestone goal goals that you can set for, for yourself along the way that will help be your guide as to how you're doing with your big goal. And so those are measurable and it's also data, right? And so these are pieces of data that you can take a look at periodically throughout the year and evaluate them. Evaluate where you're at, why you're at that point where you've seen your growth, what's going right, what are you celebrating, and then evaluate what's not working, where you've gone wrong, and then iterate regularly. I have a process for all of this that I will be teaching at Envision 2022, our three day workshop and coaching event, January 4th through 6th and I invite you to join me for that event. I want to. It's live on Zoom. I will be teaching these concepts around goal setting and planning and you will be working and creating your 2022 plan and we'll be coaching on it so that we help you to clear out all the obstacles standing in the way between you and that big goal. I want to show you and coach you on this whole new way of thinking about goals and about failure so that you are creating a very joyful, energizing, fun, supportive environment for you to attempt and grow and fail all year long. Okay? Doesn't that sound so fun? It's going to be really fun. Believe me. We this is one of my favorite things to do is to help folks plan. Help my clients, and you are all my clients, is to help you plan and create a plan. Create a plan for execution and go out there and follow the plan and achieve your biggest goals and achieve amazing things. And so I hope you will join me. You can visit the show notes for a link or you can Visit my website, melissamkellog.com and sign up there. But I invite you to join me there. It's going to be amazing. I invite you to accept this gift of failure and play with it, toy with it all year long and see how you can make failure work for you in your business, in your life. Okay, until next time my friends. Take care. See you soon. Bye. If you like this podcast and want to take this work deeper, I invite you to coach with me one on one. It all starts with a conversation. Let's get on a call together and I'd love to learn more about you and your business. And together we can identify what is standing in the way of creating the business and life you envision. And then we'll create a plan to get you there. So visit my website@melissamkellog.com and find a spot on my calendar. I look for. Forward to seeing you.