Speaker 1: 0:12

Welcome back to the Practical Spirituality Podcast. We are so excited to have you on this journey with us, where we explore all elements of mind, body, emotions and soul through the lens of everyday life.

Speaker 2: 0:28

Hello Kim, Hello Gareth, so what topic are we discussing this evening?

Speaker 1: 0:32

You know, I think we have a really good topic tonight. I want to talk about failure, and why is failure so important? Don't you think that's a good topic?

Speaker 2: 0:42

I can't say. I'm familiar with the sensation.

Speaker 1: 0:47

Okay, well, lucky for you, I am for the people listening.

Speaker 2: 0:52

I'm being incredibly sarcastic right now, just so we're all the same.

Speaker 1: 0:56

Yeah so we're all on the same page. I think everybody listening would be very familiar with this topic and the reason I think it's so important is because, next to control, it is one of the biggest issues people have, wouldn't you say?

Speaker 2: 1:14

I do think it's something everyone experiences universally, but yet no one knows how to deal with it or how to process it, shake it off, understand what it actually means, because the definition of failure literally translates to lack of success, which is quite telling.

Speaker 1: 1:30

So for me, the definition of failure is first attempt at learning or in learning, and so I think you cannot be on this planet without experiencing failure, and it's so prevalent. So why is it people run from it like it is kryptonite?

Speaker 2: 1:52

Well, I think anyone listening to our podcast is probably going to be able to guess where we're going to go with this in some respects, when it comes to the emotions that it brings up on us. I think part of the reason is that from such a young age we are basically trained that when people, when we do things correctly in other people's eyes is that then it releases a sense of positive emotions, a sense of achievement, a sense of being seen, and then we continue to crave that. But then, yet when we do not do things correctly, we see ourselves failing in some way. Then we experience all the negative emotions or feel unseen, unappreciated. Naturally, you can understand which we're going to prioritize, what we're going to chase, and especially in everyday society, the world continues to praise successful people as individuals that we should look up to.

Speaker 1: 2:46

I realize that and what I think the value that we're talking about, when we really want to come in here and look at failure, is that yet all successful people that we look up to have failed countless times and that every single person on the planet experiences failures throughout our life. So while the attention has been put on success and we've kind of dismissed failure or you'll do better next time or you get it right. I hate that saying you'll get it right next time, because it's not about getting it right, and one of the things that I like to share with my clients is when a baby is learning how to walk and it falls down, you don't go over and put your foot on that baby's back and say, oops, too bad, you failed, you can't walk. We don't do that. We encourage them to keep going, but somewhere along the line that gets lost.

Speaker 2: 3:46

Yep, like most things, I think in beginning to dissect our relationship with failure and even success is a very interesting one, because it naturally comes from the societal expectations and even our education, at times even competition within family members, siblings.

Speaker 2: 4:00

You can track it back to so many different areas and that's why you see it present in everybody's life, regardless of who you talk to.

Speaker 2: 4:09

But when I know, when I started doing that work for myself and dissecting where do I get my definitions or understandings or even what triggers my emotions when it comes to success and failure, it was interesting of that when I use certain examples of my previous definitions of what failure was, and I feel that this I started to question myself in whose eyes my viewing that through actually from a young age, because when, as you're saying in the baby toddler analogy, at that age, you're not focused on that, your, your mind doesn't think oh, I failed because I fell over.

Speaker 2: 4:44

The child is learning, gets back up, doesn't overthink, it, doesn't give up instantly. So therefore it's a learned behavior that we experience from a young age and then it compounds over a period of time and it's never corrected until much later in life. So therefore it's really an interesting exercise when you start to question okay, when I'm saying I'm a failure, I failed at that, or those emotions are present to begin questioning where is that actually coming from? Whose voice are we hearing? Who are we envisioning? And sometimes it's not very clear when we ask those questions we both know, because it can come from so many different people. But to start exploring that I think it's always going to be a fascinating starting point to understand where do we begin our foundations of this relationship of failure and success.

Speaker 1: 5:32

I agree, and I think one of the first places that we need to start is when you really look at what does failure give us? Like, what does it really give us, instead of thinking because what I hear a lot of the time is, I failed, therefore I'm no good, that proves I'm not good enough is what I often hear my clients saying, and they take it as that proof. And that proof starts to stack and very few people actually look at what is it that failure can actually give them. Now, I know we talk about you know, sacred contracts and we talk about how we have to go through so many things in order to grow and to learn and until the time is right, we're not going to understand that. But I think if we can start to introduce the idea that failure actually is a great learning tool and that's why I like that analogy first attempt in learning, because if you look at the people who are really, really successful, they have failed many times. Very rarely are they talking about their failures, because what they do is they go. Okay, what went wrong? What did I learn from that? You know, how is that going to help me get forward the next time and what growth is in it for me. Yet as we go through life, that part tends to get left out as we are growing up and the people we look up to to teach us don't actually show that you know.

Speaker 1: 7:05

Like you come home from school and you have a failure on a test, why didn't you study harder? It's not like, oh, did you do your best? Because that is one of the key things I did with my kids. I can remember when my youngest, who had severe learning difficulties, came home with his first F and he was all upset and he had to get me to sign the paper, and so we sat down at the kitchen table and I said, honey, did you try your best at this test? And he said I really did and I studied.

Speaker 1: 7:36

So I took my pen because the F was in red, and I took a pen and I put a line through it, made it an A, then put a plus on it and I went see, it's an A plus. And then I signed it Because it's the effort that you put in and, okay, it didn't pay off this time. And what do you think we need to focus on next time? That is what I would have liked to have had, and whether I would have been able to hear it or not is irrelevant at this point, but I think if nobody focuses on the fact that we can learn, there's actually value from what we've learned in the failure, if we look at it in a different way, rather than saying oh look, more proof that I'm wrong or that I'm not good enough.

Speaker 2: 8:17

And I think this is what's interesting about failure. Oh, look more proof that I'm wrong or that I'm not good enough. And I think this is what's interesting about failure, though, in what you're saying, because I think it does depend, of course, in the individual, their experience. At what age you're actually communicating them about this? When they're in development phases of their lives? But so, especially when working with clients, at times it's amusing how their logic can't be correct in the sense of they know they're not a failure. They know they can get up and go again then, but then it's the emotion that is, as if that's what keeps them stuck. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 2: 8:47

Because you and I've worked with people who are incredibly intelligent, who have read all the different books on failure, amongst many other books, but yet it's the emotion surrounding what failure represents to them is what often keeps them stuck, no matter how much they say. It's kind of saying someone who doesn't feel like they're capable of love and their family or partner or kids say, but you are loved and they're like I know, but they still don't feel it, and I think there can be that disconnect when it comes to something like failure at times is that they kind of know all the parts logically. But when it comes to shifting the emotion, I think a lot of people struggle with that or how to even begin approaching that.

Speaker 1: 9:27

I agree with that and a lot of times, as you've said in the past, when we're stuck there, we're stuck there for a reason because those emotions need to come up.

Speaker 1: 9:37

We need to examine them. But what I find is, more often than not, we're not examining the emotions, because we are suppressing those emotions and we start telling the story or the lie. You know, I talk to clients all the time about. There are core beliefs that almost every single person on the planet gets stuck into, and perhaps that's a podcast we can do on its own. Some of the core beliefs and my definition of a core belief is the fact that it's a lie that we believe to be true and that we spend our whole life trying to resolve Maybe not our whole life, but a good portion of our life. And that becomes a very valid thing because, like you said about the emotion, well, if we're going to avoid the emotion and we're not going to be willing or able or curious about what those emotions mean to us, we're going to continue to try and resolve the lie, and that whole point of failure is really a lie. It's all about, like you said, in whose eyes.

Speaker 2: 10:41

Yeah, but this is where it's interesting, because we're trying to avoid failure because of the roots in which we experience failure from. It's because someone we trusted, someone we love, they're disappointed in us. We didn't know how to emotionally regulate. But then on the other side, when you try to do the opposite, going through life, you're trying to avoid failure, but I want to be successful.

Speaker 2: 11:00

But then even when we achieve that quote unquote success, it's never enough because there's always more we can be doing. So it's as if, no matter whether we look at failure or success, it's as if we're feeling and experiencing both truly, because we're not doing either for ourselves. Actually, we're doing it for other people, for other people's approval, for other people to admire us, to put us on a pedestal, but in my experience it always comes to it never being enough and it's because what we're chasing is there's actually never an end point in that Well, sometimes we don't even know what we're chasing in the success, and then after a while because failure is what we identify with so much then we don't even know what success would feel like, and so then that becomes a risky thing for us as well.

Speaker 1: 11:49

So the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. I'm really comfortable in this whole failure story, and it's not like anybody consciously says, oh, I'm comfortable in the failure story, I'm going to stay here. It's just they don't actually understand that trying to resolve this belief that we picked up in early childhood is never going to give us what we think we're looking for.

Speaker 2: 12:13

Yeah, we don't necessarily know what success is longer term throughout our entire lives, what that end point is. But what we do know is what we don't necessarily know what success is longer term throughout our entire lives, what that end point is. But what we do know is what we don't want to feel and we don't want to re-experience so any. So we try to do the opposite of that, but you can see why people do get so lost in it then. But then when we do experience failure and we don't know how to emotionally regulate, we don't know how to evolve our patterns to do things differently, we can get stuck in that cycle, as we were even talking about earlier and in the previous episode as well, of experiencing this time and time again and goes back to, I must be, the problem I am a failure, as you were saying, that the clients come to, and even with logic, then the emotions as well can be so heavy. So this is why you have to do the 360 across mind, body, emotions, as well as past, present, future to get an understanding of those definitions, of what it means for you. So we can dive into some of the basic understandings of what people say.

Speaker 2: 13:07

The value of failure is because some of them are. So I want to say cliche at this stage, like everything's a learning opportunity. It helps build resilience, it's all there for personal growth. I personally am tired of hearing that because it's just very, it's very overused, and I know that people out there are just craving a better understanding of what failure represents to them and how can they actually learn from it and not just know logically. Yeah, I know I should be okay with failure. I know all successful people failed in the past, but what does that actually mean for me? So that's why we're having this conversation.

Speaker 1: 13:40

It is why we're having that conversation, and I think one of the big parts about this and I use a graphic to explain this to some of my clients, and what it looks like is it's a little mud man Of course, I use a different language when I'm talking about it with my clients and it's got layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of mud on top of it and we look at that and that what I said before we're running around in a circle trying to resolve this belief system that we have. That is not actually true. Well, you know, that's an endless cycle that we go down, true. Well, you know, that's an endless cycle that we go down. And so if we could just understand that there is reasoning that we have to experience failure in order to grow and, yes, sure, there's opportunities like that cliche saying is, no one says how about we just stop and just really experience the feeling first, because everybody's rushing to get beyond the feeling instead of going. Let's just sit with what that actually means.

Speaker 1: 14:49

So here's another example I was speaking to someone the other day that made a mistake and up pops all this shame and guilt because they made a mistake and they had told a white lie, and so then they felt bad about telling the white lie.

Speaker 1: 15:05

So then they told the person the truth, which then made them feel even more shame and bad, because now they're worried about what that other person's going to think, and that person's going to think they're weird, and so it's this endless cycle. That person did both sides of the theory, but still came out feeling like a failure. And instead of being able to turn around and go let me experience this feeling of feeling not good enough, feeling shame, feeling the hurt. They're trying to logically take themselves out of that equation. And why can't I get it right? Instead of going, perhaps if I sit with this, I'm going to see that it's based on I care more about what someone outside of me thinks about me than I care about me, and it can sometimes be that simple. It's not often that simple. I just picked that because it was a simple explanation, and that is one of the things I think, rather than saying it's a learning opportunity. It's an opportunity to meet ourselves.

Speaker 2: 16:16

And because, even as you're saying there, even in my own personal life, it reminds me of back to time, feeling deep failure and as a simple example of when I done my driving test for the first time and I failed first time, and I remember coming home and my mother was probably similar to how you approached your children in the sense of, well, did you do your best? Because even my grandmother, who was devoted Irish Catholic, used to say do your best and God and Our Lady will do the rest in the sense of as long as you do your best, I'm content.

Speaker 2: 16:44

So that was pretty much the theme even in my house growing up. So when I went out, failed my driving test, came home my mother was not angry, not frustrated, very supportive we'll go again, you know it'll be what it'll be. But so she came over and hugged me unexpectedly and I just burst into tears and this overwhelming feeling of failure came over me. But then I realized later on that I'm the one that set that standard. Why? Because my brothers had passed first time and I was the first one to fail first time.

Speaker 2: 17:16

So a very simple example of a standard I had set myself. No one else was involved, you could say in that circumstance of having high expectations of me, putting pressure on me or even teasing me. But it's amusing how in day-to-day life, how we can set these different, as we talk about expectations, standards for ourselves, even at a subconscious level, without realizing it. And then, when you go and study it, as you said, it begins to show the strengths and weaknesses of the relationship we have with self in the areas that we still need to question and explore and get more curious about.

Speaker 1: 17:47

And I think what's funny about that is you know those of us that have run the little perfectionist lie. You know it is. It's like here. Let me sign up for a lifetime of failure, because there is no such thing as perfection. So I must really love this sensation.

Speaker 2: 18:07

I think what perfection is for me is what acceptance is for you Right.

Speaker 1: 18:12

But it's true, though, isn't it? Because we know it is not real. It is not possible to be a human being and be perfect at anything. Yet, whatever reason that we buy that, that we're going to do it and we set that standard. As you just said, we are inviting that failure feeling. We're literally saying, oh, I love failure, bring it on, because I'm going to keep trying to hit them.

Speaker 2: 18:38

Yeah, let me feel those emotions.

Speaker 1: 18:40

Well, I don't know if we love feeling those emotions.

Speaker 2: 18:42

The perfection doesn't exist. Good to know.

Speaker 1: 18:45

Anyway, let me just dismiss that as fast as I can yeah. But it's the truth, isn't?

Speaker 2: 18:53

it. We've all been there.

Speaker 1: 18:53

And we don't realize it. Perfectionists, people who run perfectionism because God knows I haven't run that ever in my life we don't realize at the time that that's what we're doing to ourselves, and I remember the first counselor I had that said you know, your expectations of yourself, of life and other people are so high that no one would ever reach them, and I remember looking at her going they're not that high.

Speaker 2: 19:24

What are you going on about? They're not that high.

Speaker 1: 19:27

You're like, I'm used to it, at this stage it's fine, yeah. And so we're laughing about this now, and we can laugh about it because we have learned how to sit with ourselves. We've had that ability to sit and experience it and realize. And I think for me I can't speak for you, but for me one of the greatest reliefs in life is when I could start to let go of some of those high level standards. And even as I say that statement, do I suffer from perfectionism still? I don't know. Just before we started this podcast, we talked about a reel I was doing and we talked about the four hours that I spent doing, take after take after take, because I don't run that anymore, right?

Speaker 2: 20:10

Just hyper aware that we run it now.

Speaker 1: 20:12

Yes, we're very aware.

Speaker 2: 20:15

Let's take a step back from this week's episode and share with everyone what we've been up to behind the scenes.

Speaker 1: 20:20

We're really excited to be able to finally offer the Gareth Michael community to each of you. The community offers a range of benefits, including access to our live events, weekly podcast episodes, articles, self-checking questions, as well as a community of individuals you can connect with and interact with along the way. It's designed to offer you support, guidance and a safe space on a day-to-day basis. We'd love to have you join our global community of like-minded individuals. That website address, again, is wwwgarethmichaelcom. Now let's get back to that episode, shall we? And what's? I think one of the things that other people don't realize is every one of us and I am speaking for the eight billion people on the planet want to know that others run the same thing and that we're not really strange and different.

Speaker 2: 21:19

But I think, in saying that, it's learning the different techniques in even processing mind-body emotions and ensuring that, when we all inevitably experience failure, that it doesn't paralyze us or forces us to give up, and I think that's the part of it that is actually quite interesting because, as we're talking about, we're all going to experience failure in many ways, many ways, in huge ways. It's inevitable for us all, and that definition of what failure is changes from person to person. So that's why we have to go back to understanding, in the different examples that come to mind, of where failure happened to us or existed. Is that? Where did we? What beliefs, as you?