PopUP! Series 🔥 Part 1/2: Rethinking Failure: You're A Scientist

Welcome to another series! We are reframing our relationship with failure by adopting a perspective of experimentation and evaluating. 

Ready to get coached? Apply to work with me here.

Apply to work with me here, and let's start designing a business that works FOR YOU.

Link to Music Credits
Track: Positive Motivation
Author: AShamaluevMusic (ASM)
Publisher: CD Baby (IPI 700570289)

Connect With Ilonka On Social Media
Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

Transcript

Ilonka Ras (00:01.582)
Welcome to the Effortless CEO Podcast, the only show that teaches South African business owners how to improve their operations and design a business that can run without them.

If you're interested in leading your team more effectively, creating more operational efficiency, delivering with excellence while getting some of your life back, then you're in the right place. Here's your host, strategic intervention coach and operations specialist, Ilonka Ras. How often do you say, I failed, this was a failure?

You went after a goal and things didn't work out and now you feel like you don't know what you're doing. You fear what people will think or say because you failed and you feel like a failure. I was coaching a client this week on the topic of failing and she mentioned that she was tired of trying. Tired of trying things and it not working out. Now this is a normal response. It is very uncomfortable to put in a ton of effort.

only to get to the other end of it empty handed, to feel like you wasted time, wasted energy, money, to want something so desperately to put in the work and then not achieve it. And when this is happening publicly, as it does for many business owners, it can feel so much worse because we don't want people to see us struggling. We want to look and feel like we've got it together.

Now we always have the option to blame ourselves and to believe that we have failed. And it's also not useful. It makes us feel miserable. And when we feel miserable, we show up like that in everything that we do. And how we show up creates a ripple effect of more outcomes that we don't want. Now the alternative option that is available is that we get to choose

Ilonka Ras (02:06.904)
How we label the thing that happened. We get to choose what we make it mean. We get to define it differently. If you Google what success means, you will learn that it is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. Failure on the other hand is the exact opposite. Its definition is literally the lack of success. In other words, not accomplishing the aim or purpose that you set out to achieve. Now this is

very black or white or all or nothing thinking as we talk about it in the coaching industry. There is really no room for anything else other than you either made it or you didn't. It actually makes me think about the Netflix documentary Free Solo and Alex Hanold climbing Yosemite's 3,200 foot alt Capitan with no rope. He actually says in the episode or in the documentary, he says,

You can't make a mistake. If you're seeking perfection, free soloing is as close as you can get. And even though our goals are never life or death situations as it is for Alex, we treat it like it is. There is a lot of pressure and anxiety and stress. I'm inviting you to a different way of looking at the goals that you set, the failures that happen along the way from a new perspective. One with

Lace pressure and anxiety and also lace self-laming and loathing and just feeling miserable because you didn't achieve the thing that you set out to achieve. The way that invites curiosity and fun into the process. So you're actually enjoying your way to the goal, even if it doesn't go according to plan. Now, when you think about failure, what really happened was that you had an outcome that you were aiming for.

a result that you expected to achieve, but the reality, the result that was achieved was different than what you expected. Failure is really just the gap between what you expected would happen and what you actually got. That's it. Failure isn't a problem. How we treat ourselves when we quote unquote fail is we tell ourselves that we're not good enough. We don't know what we're doing.

Ilonka Ras (04:31.544)
People think we are idiots. And then comes the shame, the guilt, the frustration, the anger. And these are big emotions, emotions we don't want to feel. No one gets up in the morning thinking it's going to be so lovely to be disappointed today. So we try to protect ourselves. We stop showing up. We stop trying. We fail ahead of time by not even putting ourselves back in the arena again. But what if...

We changed how we thought about failure completely. What if failure wasn't even a word you used in your vocabulary anymore? What if it didn't exist? What if it isn't a failure, but rather an experiment? What's been so helpful for me and for my clients is shifting our perspective about the action that we take inside of our businesses, how we go after our goals.

and thinking of it as a series of experiments, things that we are trying, thinking about yourself as a scientist. Now, a scientist doesn't expect every experiment to work. They start with a hypothesis, an idea they think will work, and then they go and taste it. They gather data, they learn, they tweak, they try again. They're not telling themselves that they're failing. They are learning.

Now, when you set a goal or you have a desire, that's like the last piece of the puzzle. There is so much satisfaction in putting that last piece in place, but they were 999 other pieces, the things you did leading up to that final moment. That's the 99 % of the time where we are in the messy middle, doing the work, trying things, showing up.

Now, if you make everything about that last piece, hitting the goal or not hitting the goal, you are missing a lot of opportunity, a lot of growth, a lot of expansion, a lot of life in the in-between. Now I have noticed that we have a lot of entitlement around the things that we want. If I put in this effort, it better create this result. But the truth is we often underestimate how much is needed.

Ilonka Ras (06:55.522)
We can do everything right and it might still not work. And it's because we aren't entitled to getting the thing that we want. With most goals, especially ones we haven't done before, it's probably going to cost you more, be messier, be harder, require more effort, time and resilience than you think. Does that mean we don't go after the goals? No, but we do get to release some of the pressure we create on our way to it.

We get to have more fun with it. And this is the magic shift. I get to. So instead of telling yourself that you have to hit this goal, this has to work out. Shift it to, I get to, I want to. And just notice how that feels. Whenever my clients are setting goals, I love to ask them the question, why would you want to do this even if you don't hit the goal? Why is going after this goal worth it?

even if you don't succeed. This is going to help you shift your relationship with your goals and have more fun and curiosity and joy as you work towards what you want. So here's your script for the next time something doesn't go the way you plan. This wasn't a failure. This simply wasn't what I expected, but it's showing me something that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. Failure isn't the opposite of success.

It's part of the success. And if you're willing to stop judging yourself and start noticing what's actually happening, you'll start to see that even your mistakes, your failures are shaping you into the person who can handle more, who has the capacity for more. Like Anne Larray says in her book, Tiny Experiments, if you see life as a series of experiments where the only purpose is to explore, learn and grow, failure stops being something to fear.

and instead becomes a necessary part of discovery. In the next episode of this series, I'm going to share my simple three-step process for turning any failure into a goldmine of growth, expansion, and even unexpected success. I'll see you there.