Episode 6: So You Feel Like You're Failing...

My coaching ears perk up every time I hear the word “failed”. Failure is often a self-judgment stemming from the belief that there is a perfect way to succeed. The trouble is, it’s impossible to be 100% successful with any long-term goal. We have to get comfortable with being unsuccessful. Reframing how we think about failure propels us towards more sustainable progress. This episode gives you 5 strategies to do just that!

Episode Transcript:

INTRO MUSIC: Welcome to The Compassionate Wellness Podcast. I'm Alex Treanor. I'm a Nationally Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and I am so excited you're here. The wellness industry is full of do's and do not's, should's and should not's. But I like to take a different approach. I'll be sharing all things health and wellness from a joyful, real-life compassionate perspective. If you're ready to drop the cookie-cutter approach and create a life you truly love, while eating a cookie or two along the way, let's dive in.

Hey, friends! Welcome to episode six. I don't know why that feels so fun to say...episode six, we're just cruising right along! Today we are talking about the elephant in the room when it comes to goal setting. We're talking about failure.

This topic today is actually inspired by a couple of my coaching sessions that I've had recently, where I've heard clients expressing that they feel like a failure. While there's nothing wrong with not achieving a goal, there's a difference between not achieving your goal and feeling like a failure and that's what I just want to address a little bit today. If it crosses that line, where now you're feeling like a failure, that can be, one, very hurtful for yourself to feel that way, and two, it's not very helpful for continuing on working with your goals. It's important to reframe that a bit and to think about it differently and to find ways to navigate through the hard times that are inevitable with behavior change, to find a way that you can process, and learn, and grow, and work through when we aren't successful. So that's what we're going to dive into a little bit today.

The honest truth when it comes to behavior change and to goal setting is that you're not going to succeed in every goal. Even with the best planning, and the best of intentions, it's just not going to work out sometimes. As a coach, I hear the word failed a lot, a lot a lot. And it doesn't strike me as a bad thing, except when I hear it with a certain tone.

I'm gonna give you a few examples of clients recently that have used the word 'failed' in a coaching session. The first one was earlier this week. I have a client who wanted to add in some walks to their work day, but they told me that they failed to do so because of a very stressful week and an unexpected family situation. Then I had another client who wanted to cut out all processed sugars and exercise daily, but told me that they failed because they had processed sugars and then could no longer achieve that goal. It was considered a failure and not worth trying anymore. And lastly, I had a client who was told by their doctor that they should exercise for 60 minutes every single day, and told me that they have failed to do that because they could not find an extra 60 extra minutes for exercise.

When I heard each of these situations, they all sound very normal to me. Family situations happen, that's life. Stress levels become overwhelming sometimes. Desiring sugar is physiologically expected. I don't think I know anyone who has never desired sugar. And I definitely don't know anyone who has a free 60 minutes in their day, every single day, just waiting for that time to be filled with an extra workout.

I bring up each of these examples, because there's nothing wrong with saying that you didn't achieve a goal. However, my coaching ears do perk up when I hear someone say that they have failed, or even more particular that they feel like a failure, because they did not achieve a goal. I think that's where it becomes more troublesome or more problematic is because oftentimes when we say failed, it can be a judgment. It becomes something that we identify with.

If we didn't achieve the goal, then we failed at it. And if we failed at something, then we must be a failure.

When we think of ourselves as a failure, that becomes hurtful, and that becomes harmful. It gets in the way of us being able to continue making change in our life. This concept of failure is often closely tied with this idea of perfectionism, right? That it has to be perfect or not. And if not, then it's a failure.

Goals are often very outcome driven, meaning we know, based on the outcome, if it was a success, or if it was not. You either do it perfectly, on the dot exactly as you imagined or you don't, and if you don't, that's a failure. Revisiting those goals that my clients mentioned, each of them were very clear on the outcome. They were very specific. They knew what they were hoping to achieve. However, it may not have been the most realistic with the circumstances that were presented throughout their week. When those circumstances were presented to them, because they had this specific outcome in mind, it was harder to pivot or to make a choice that still got them some progress, because they'd already considered a failure.

When we're aiming for perfect, it can get in the way of progress. Because what happens is we start, it's not perfect, so we stop. Then we restart, right? We go back to step one, instead of progressing on to step two. We're constantly restarting.

Instead, when we aren't aiming for perfect, that's when we can focus on growth. Growth really comes from having tried something, failed, and navigated through it to continue going to that next level, or the next step that you want to work on.

Perfect is not sustainable, because we get stuck. Progress is sustainable, because we can push forward through the challenging time. So much of change is really about how we think about things, and what things mean to us. I think there's this subtle difference, right? Failing is not bad if we don't think of it as being bad. If we're starting to feel that it is bad, that we are failing, and it's harmful, and it sucks, that's when it may be helpful to do some reframing.

So I want to give you five different things to consider, encouragements, suggestions maybe, about how you can reframe these challenges if you're starting to feel like you're failing.

Before we jump in with these five things, I do want to say that your brain likes the easiness of sorting things as success or fail. It's very easy to make that decision. It's going to take some conscious effort to reframe it and to find that middle ground. It's going to take time, it will take patience, it'll take self compassion. This does take a conscious effort. It doesn't just happen overnight, same as with most things we talked about here, right?

Okay, so the first thing that I would encourage you to consider is that when you're feeling unsuccessful, ask yourself what you can learn from the experience. Feeling failure gives us an opportunity to grow and an opportunity to refine our approach. We aren't born with perfect skills in every area of life, right? We have to learn how to walk, we have to learn how to talk, we have to learn how to hold a fork, how to eat, how to meal prep, how to exercise. All of these things are learned behaviors. If you're having a hard time with it, think about what you can learn from it. What what is making it challenging? Sometimes I hear people say when they're feeling like a failure and in that negative headspace, they'll say "why can I just do this?! It is very frustrating. Why can I do it?" And I think that question is valid when we phrase it differently. Because with a curiosity mindset, that could be very helpful, right? You can learn from that experience by staying curious and saying, "why can't I do this? What is getting in the way? What is making it hard? How do I overcome that? How have I overcome similar challenges in the past?" Really breaking it down and making that a proactive approach rather than just a self criticism.

Another way to reframe feeling like a failure would be that it gives you an opportunity to cultivate resilience. Resilience is our ability to recover from a hard thing. If you didn't get it perfect the first time, this is an opportunity to improve. It's an opportunity to get better at tackling hard things. It's a way to improve your ability, to bounce back, to overcome challenges, to make yourself stronger. This is exactly how we become stronger, by not being able to do things right. You aren't born being able to deadlift 300 pounds. You do it by trying, not succeeding, keep trying, keep pushing forward, and eventually, you get there.

Another way you might reframe failure is to look at how you're defining success. In the client goals I mentioned earlier, those were outcome-based, so the measurement of success was based on the outcome. One thing you could try doing instead is setting a process-based goal. I'll give you an example. One of those clients, the one who wanted to cut out all processed sugars, and exercise daily. We have really explored this goal and I know it does sound pretty extreme. I think this client will tell you it is extreme. But it does align with her values and some specific health concerns, so it is very important to her. and it's a valid goal for her to set. So what we did, instead of saying it's an outcome-based goal, instead of saying, you're either going to eat sugar, or you're not, we changed it so that the goal is towards rating her effort each day. She's gives herself on a 1 to 10 scale, she rates her intentionality, her mindfulness around foods, and how she put in the effort towards not having sugar that day. That shift has made it so that even if she has sugar, but she gives herself an 8 out of 10 on that effort, it can still be a success. It's based off the process rather than whether or not she actually has sugar. Setting a process based goal loosens the rigidity a bit, and it also gives you more control, right? We don't have full control over the outcome with every goal that we set. But we have more control over how we enact the process.

The fourth suggestion that I have for you would be to view your goals as experiments. With an experiment, you literally can't fail, you're just trying something and seeing what happens. Viewing it as an experiment, instead of a goal, takes some of the pressure off. It actually reminded me of in school when we learn about the scientific method for doing experiments (...which I did have to look up. I'm sorry, to my sixth grade science teacher. Mrs. Bednar, I apologize. I did not remember all the steps).

But here's what it said, when I looked it up. The steps of the scientific method are to come up with a question. Do some research and set a hypothesis. Then you take action, you test that hypothesis. Look at your data afterwards and make conclusions, which then gives you more questions and the process repeats.

This sounds so similar to the steps for problem solving skills, which are so important to behavior change. It's that same process, right? You set a goal. You do some research on how you want to do it. You come up with an idea. You try it out. You look at the data, how is it working, what's going well, what's not. Make some conclusions. Adjust as needed, and continue pressing forward. Viewing your goals as more experiments can help to change how we think about goals, and take some of the pressure to either succeed or fail out of the equation.

The last suggestion I would give you for reframing of failure is to don't be afraid to adjust your expectations. Life disruptions always happen. Like, they always happens. So let's plan for them. When you're setting a goal, really think about it and visualize it. Make sure that you are asking yourself if it's realistic for your real life scenario, not for your idealized life scenario. You know the perceived barriers. You know what challenges will likely come up and what is possible to happen, because it happens all the time to you. So take that into consideration and adjust your expectations because something is always going to be better than nothing.

The last thing I want to say about this topic is for in those moments when you are feeling like it's a failure, or you're personally feeling like a failure. When you're working on goals, and you start to have those thoughts, that's an opportunity to pause. Let that be a cue to you to say like, "Okay, hang on, let me reel this back in. And let me take a look here". This is your opportunity to make a choice about how you want to approach this.

In those moments, I would just really encourage you to find a compromise. If you have an outcome-based goal, something that you are wanting to do, something that's important to you, and it's not going well. What's your next best option?

I think of darts here, and who knew I would be doing so many sports analogies on this podcast. But when you're playing darts, you're aiming for the bull's eye every time. I don't think I've ever gotten a bullseye if I'm being honest. But you get points for getting on the board. So when you're feeling like, "Dang, this is just not going how I planned. Is it even worth it?" Remember that you get points for getting on the board. Every effort that you do counts. Every choice that you can make, that is a little bit of improvement is helpful. You don't have to get it 100% of the time. You just have to keep trying.

One of my favorite phrases, and I saw this on a self compassion Facebook post so I don't even know who to attribute it to, but it said "change is hard, because it's hard, not because you're bad at it". I would encourage you to keep that in mind. If you're feeling like it's a hard day. It is, it's hard. That's true. And you can do hard things. And you're not failing because you're having a hard time with it. It's just an opportunity to reframe it, to learn from it, and to grow. Sometimes that includes taking a pause. If you need to take a break, and you need to reevaluate and pause, that's not a problem. Do what you need to do; just don't give up on yourself. Don't let that feeling of failure or feeling like you've failed stop you from making progress. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope this helps you to find a little bit more peace in your change journey. And I look forward to talking with you next week.

OUTRO MUSIC: Thanks for joining me on this episode of the compassionate wellness podcast. If this message resonated with you, please share it with someone you care about. I'd love to connect with you as well follow me on Instagram @alextreanor.coaching, or visit my website alextreanorcoaching.com. And as a reminder, Treanor spelled kind of goofy, it's T-R-E-A-N-O-R. For any references mentioned in this episode, be sure to check out the show notes. I hope you have a wonderful day and don't forget to make time for something you enjoy.