What to do when you feel like a failure

Have you ever felt like a failure? Like you just want to crawl into bed and hide? 

Or maybe you have a dream you’ve wanted to start but have been to scared to try because you’re afraid of failing?

But imagine what life would be like if you could change the way you react to failure. What would it feel like if failure helped you achieve your dreams? How many cool new things would you experience if you let yourself think differently?

Here’s the deal:  

Success is not the absence of failure. Success is the product of failure.

Failure is a key ingredient in success

You can train your brain to think differently and turn failure into a superpower. All you need is a new way to think about things and a few strategies to put into practice. Check out the show now and start and embracing the challenge! 

Here’s three tactics to put into practice today: 

What to do before:

Before you send off your next creative project or try the new scary thing, take a moment to remember why this work is important to you. If you connect with your passion and purpose you will be much more likely to embrace the challenges. 

It really helps if you have a short phrase that will remind you of why this work matters. Repeat the phrase and trust that you can handle the outcome. 

Already stuck and feel lousy?

Give yourself time to grieve and let yourself feel the failure. Embrace the suck! 

The key thing is to give it a timeframe that ends with a social cue. Reach out to a friend or support group you trust and let them know how they can help you move forward. The key to getting over failure is to take the next action in the direction of your dreams. Even when it’s hard, even when you don’t want to, the success of your dream lies in your ability to continue taking action. It’s ok that it’s scary; let yourself feel the failure, then connect with your community and let them help you take the next action. 

Failed and ready to move on?
Visualize your failure as a stepping stone to your success. Take a moment to note the qualities of opportunity the failure has created. Maybe it’s forced you to stand for what matters to you, or taught you patience, or helped you realize that being vulnerable is scary but that you can handle it. Make a list of the things you’ve learned from failure and trust that these are the very stepping stones that will take you to success.

Take action today and implement one of these steps! Let’s go forth and fail boldly!

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Music intro

Hey friends and welcome to the Gita Brown show; bringing harmony into everyday life. Today we are talking about what to do when you feel like a failure. We're going to inspire you with practical tips for your creativity and spirit. So have no fear if you're a musician, artist, writer, teacher, or just a creative minded soul, you have found your source for guidance and inspiration. So I'm Gita. I help creative people from all walks of life understand how they can develop a holistic lifestyle; so that they can be more peaceful, more joyful, and more creative. So I've been doing yoga for 30 years. I've been teaching clarinet for 30 years. I'm also a writer now. I am no stranger to feeling like a failure. I'm also a bit of a recovering perfectionist, which means that you feel like a failure a lot when you keep setting the bar so ridiculously high for your life.

So I'm going to take everything that I've learned about this and everything that the great masters and the lineage of yoga that I come from have taught me about this and want to distill it down for you. So that you can leave here with a different way to think about failure and hopefully give you some couple of ideas towards the end of how you can set yourself up for next time you take that next big risk. But let's step back for a minute and let's just kind of like acknowledge the suck here, right? Cause if you clicked on this episode and you chose this to listen to, uh, chances are that maybe right now you're feeling like a failure. Maybe you're in a relationship that is ending or not going as you wish it would have. Maybe you're, you know, going through a tough breakup or you've lost a job or you just had a big presentation at work and it just did not go over well.

If you're like me, maybe you're a writer and you've gotten yet another rejection for that favorite piece of yours that you've sent out 30 times. And you're just starting to feel like, man, I really stink. This is not going well. So Recognize this, my friend, you, first of all, you're not alone in feeling like a failure. Even the most accomplished people who are out there floating around looking like they're doing beautiful things at times feel like a failure, feel like they're not enough. You know? Or maybe you're someone who is fearing failure. Maybe you're about to put something new out there and you're like terrified that you actually are going to fail. So it can be really tough to be rejected publicly. It can also be really tough to be rejected privately, to have that sense that you're just not good enough. Going through your day sort of feeling less than less than your peers, less than your, your compadres, less than your parents did or anything can just feel awful.

It's just like this sucking vortex. It just drags us down. It can be really tough to watch other people have success when you are feeling like a failure inside. Totally sure that that success will never happen for you. And I get it. It can feel lonely. I know it feels frustrating. I've been there and it can just be embarrassing. Like just to mess up royally in front of a bunch of people is just not a good feeling. So let me just ask you a few questions before I share my own story of failure. One of my many stories of failure and then some tips. Let me just ask you a few questions. Just pause there. In that moment of just feeling lousy and I'm right here with you. What would life be like if you changed how you react to failure? How would it feel before you took a risk? If you knew you had a plan for dealing with the inevitable failure that comes with being a human being? What would it be like for you if you thought of your success and your failures equally? How would it be different for you every day? What would it feel like to move through the day if you thought like, Oh, failure is part of my success; rather than failure as the end.

Okay,

so I like to think about it this way cause I think it gives a little context. So often when we feel like a failure, we get stuck. I know I do. When I, you know, I got rejected by an agent about three months ago for a book that I'm working on and in the immediate 24 hours after the rejection, it just felt like "I will never get the book published." Nothing good will ever happen. It's going to happen for everybody else, right? Your mind just goes to this like totally wackadoodle place where you just think the sky is falling and it will never happen for you. But I think underneath that, once we get past that, just immediate thing that we're focusing on, our fear of failure is actually part of our human need for belonging. That's being threatened, right? It's usually not that immediate circumstance.

Even if it is dire, like we have lost a relationship or something like that. But even if we're looking at deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper underneath that, it's like we as human beings are designed to be part of a family, to be part of a family of choice, to be part of sort of a larger community, whatever that means for us individually. And that sense of being rejected from the community cuts right to like our primitive brain, right? That part of our brain that says we need to gather together, hunt our food, gather our resources so that we can survive and when we are rejected, even if it's just like you wrote a play and it got rejected from a festival, it cuts right to that primitive part of our brain that says, whoops, you're being cast out by your people. You are in danger. Your life is in threat and our whole mind and body goes into that fight or flight like animalistic response, danger, danger, danger.

You are about to die because that is sometimes what it feels like. It feels like everything is over and nothing will ever be good again. It will never happen for me. So understand though that that's a lot of times can be what's happening. It's like this core survival need that we have for each other. We have core survival needs for feeling safe, for feeling like we have belonging, feeling like we have community. And when that gets threatened, even on the most minor level, it can send that fear of failure into overdrive. And it's really important to know this so you can kind of set some things up ahead of time so you feel that sense of community around you even while that primitive animal part of your brain is saying danger, you're being cast out. So think about this for a minute. You are here on this earth right now.

That's kind of a crazy thing. You know, you can call it God, a miracle, random chance, nature, evolution, whatever you want to call it, whatever your belief system is. You are here now, this amazing coalescence of energy atoms, molecules, genetic expression is walking around this rocky planet that's a rotating around the sun in this solar system. That's kind of a, dare I say, a miracle. And if you are still here and you're listening to this podcast, I believe it means you have work that is left to be done. Even if you are sitting in a moment of abject failure, when you feel like you cannot do anything else, you can't possibly move past this moment. You are still here. And if you're here, you're here for a reason and that is the reason that you need to discover. But you must have work to be done.

Otherwise you want to be here anymore. You would have left this body behind and be doing whatever else happens once we die. Right. You are still here. So let's get busy doing what you're meant to do. So my story of failure, well let's just choose one of them, huh? The big one. And if you've listened to the show before, you've heard this before, familiar with my story, but you know, I have a pretty major failure in my life. Probably one of the biggest things that I was really ashamed about for a long time, but am no longer ashamed. I got divorced. I met a really fantastic kid when I was 12. I fell in love like Romeo and Juliet, bang. I mean he was the one. Dated on and off for years. Finally in college got married, you know, big house in the suburbs, two dogs, two cats, happy, happy, happy. Enter alcohol and drugs.

He becomes addicted and his alcoholism gets really, really, really, really bad. To the point where eventually he died from complications due to alcoholism; About six years or so after we divorced. so I was watching quite literally this person I loved, destroy himself in front of me and I was watching this relationship that for me meant an embodiment of love itself. I was watching the relationship die . You've got to understand my friends, my parents at this point, at that point, had been married for 40 plus years. Now it's going, you know, way past 50 years. His parents had been married. In my mind, divorce was not an option. In my mind, divorce was a failure. If that relationship meant that I could believe in love, and that love was real and that love could fix everything, the relationship died, it meant that I must've failed.

I wasn't good enough. I didn't love well enough to be able to keep the relationship and keep him. So to say I felt like a failure is like not even close to how I felt and that fear of failure kept me in the relationship quite a bit long, longer than perhaps was safe for me to be in. And a friend started talking to me one day and she said, you know what? She's like Gita. She kind of held my hand and looked me in the eye. She was like, just because your relationship ends doesn't mean that it was a failure. And I kind of looked at her like she had three heads because to me being married meant that you stayed married until you die and that's it. There is no other option for it to be a success. She's like, think of it this way, you guys have been best friends since you were 12 and she's like, and you're still best friends now, right?

I'm like, yeah, and she's like, and you will be after you get divorced. I'm like, Oh, we absolutely will be and we still were friends. We still kept in touch. She said you had a lot of success in that relationship. You built a life together. You had parties, you had a beautiful home, you took trips, you built memories. Your relationship was a success. It's just ending now. And it just like, it never occurred to me that I could look at failure in a different way. It never occurred to me that I was judging myself more harshly than I needed to. So if you're listening or watching to this, start to think for a moment about your own failure and the stories you're telling yourself about what it means about you. Right. We usually make some big pronouncement about what this failure says about you as a human being. How about it just means the thing you did was a success and now it's time to do something else. Maybe that's just another way to think about it.

I don't think that we serve anything well if you heap on guilt on top of something that has failed or ended, right? Which is what I was doing, the relationship failed, but then it was the guilt and the pressure and the bemoaning I was putting on top of it that was making the suffering even worse instead of just allowing it to end. So stop wasting time trying to revise the past. Take care of this moment right now. So you know, I'm a yoga teacher and my yoga lineage is Integral yoga, which is a very comprehensive lifestyle system. What most of you might think of as yoga is doing yoga poses and like wearing, you know, tight fitting clothing and bending all around is like one very tiny, tiny, tiny part of yoga. I got into yoga through meditation and did that for years before I ever even realized that there were physical poses involved.

But we do chanting and breathing and we do some moving and we do scriptural study and we do a lot of training of our mind and the way we think about things in Integral yoga. So my teacher Swami Satchidananda, who is the founder of Integral yoga, uh, when he came here to the States, he has this great talk he gave and he said this about failure. "Every failure is a stepping stone for success." I would listen to that quote over and over and over again during the last days of my marriage and particularly after the divorce. "Every failure is a stepping stone for success." So stop for a minute right now. Get into your failure. Just bring it into your mind's eye, whatever it is, something recent, something that's going on now, something from the past. It's still kind of clinging and making you feel that little like, Oh, I feel like a failure.

I really suck. Kind of feeling. Bring that, think about it. Now imagine it as a stepping stone, like literally. See, I like to see mine as an actual garden path. I'm a gardener. I love my limestone stepping stones. All the beautiful. I see that like rejection from that agent. Boom right there. I see that divorce boom is the next step and I try and visualize where I'm going, which for me is to share the love of yoga with as many people as I can. I see each one of those failures as taking me towards that goal. Maybe you can see the success, maybe you can't, but the important thing is to start exercising your brain and seeing your failure as a learning opportunity, right? Every time you start to reframe and say, Oh, okay, failure, failure, failure, say as stepping stone, stepping stone and start to visualize that next success, you are retraining your brain to form new neural pathways and every time you do that you're retraining the way that you think so that yeah, you feel the failure but you're not getting bogged down in it.

I'm going to get a little more concrete in a few minutes with a couple of strategies to really help you make this a little more tactical, but let's stay one more minute or two within a little bit of philosophy because I just want you to start thinking about failure a little differently. Just let it kind of wash over and sink in at the end. Again, I'll get really concrete and tactical, but let's just feed your brain some different ways to think it. Okay, so let's get out there for a minute. I used to play tennis and this comes straight from Swami Satchidananda. He has a great thing about a winners and losers and how we view things. So this is sort of like my take on one of his amazing stories that he shares on Integral yoga. I highly recommend any video by Swami Satchidananda. Go look up Integral yoga on YouTube, some really great inspirational talks.

So he talks about how failure and losing are just two sides of the same coin. So when I used to play tennis, you know the goal is to win. Win the match, and if you lose, then you fail because you don't advance in the tournament and your ranking goes down and all of that. But winning is just temporary. It's just temporary. There's always another match to be played. What's permanent is your soul. What's permanent is your higher self. So he has this great story of when you win a tennis match, when I would win, I'd win and I'd be so, so happy and I'd look across the net. Cause in tennis you come up to the net and you shak, the hand of the person, of your opponent that you've just been trying to like beat into the ground for the last hour and a half and you shake their hand.

And every single time I'm looking at that woman across the net and she is wearing the face of the saddest person I've ever seen. You know, you just won. I'm feeling like pumped. I'm psyched. And I'm shaking hand of this person who looks like she wants to crawl under a rock and die. I'm like, man, that stinks. But then Swami Satchidananda has this great thing, he says, well now flip it. Let's say you lost that match. Let's say you failed. Who do you see in front of you? You see the happiest person in front of you. You get to shake the hand of someone who is so happy and full of glee. Now you're looking at happiness. You have failed. They have succeeded and you get to bask in their happiness, you get to bask in that glow. And in that way, I started to see that it's just two sides of the same coin.

Sometimes I'm on the dark side, sometimes I'm on the light side. When I'm on the dark side, I get to rejoice in the success of others. When I'm on the light side, ah, I get to help and be harmonious with the person who's down a little bit. But it's both just one side of the same coin. It's all just one thing. Success, failure, failure, success. It's going to come, it's going to go. But who you really are is peace and love. So you remember that a little bit. Ooh, you have a recipe to move through failure and that feeling like failure a lot quicker. Um, I like to think that like nighttime doesn't spend a whole lot of time feeling guilty that it's dark and daytime doesn't sit there and go, Oh, I'm so much a failure because I'm so bright. They just are. So just be who you are, be where you are and don't heap on it.

Okay. Let's get tactical though here. Cause that's all kind of a lot of philosophy and just some ways to think about it. But let's think about how you're going to deal with this feeling of failure right now or perhaps one that is going to come in the future. First of all, do you want to strive and risk and continue to grow? I know if you are listening to this or watching this, the answer is yes because you would not have me here as your teacher if you're not like, yeah, I'm ready to grow and learn something. You are a person who is showing me by showing up that you are ready to learn.

So if you really want to learn, you gotta be intentional about how you're going to deal with failure. Because I have news you are going to fail again and again and again and again and again. Come fail with me. I'm failing all the time. I'm a writer. I get rejected at least five or six times every single week. Join the club in order to succeed, you are going to fail. So let's set up a plan for you right now for how you're going to deal with that failure. Okay? And the number one things I've started doing, and it really, really works, is to bless it before you ship it. So your first step is before you do that next thing, before you quit, before you end the relationship, before you take the risk at work, before you, you know, send off that manuscript or whatever the risk is before you step on stage, whatever your net next risk, the lesson before you do that. Connect with your higher purpose in your life before you send that thing.

Cause remember failure is getting locked in that moment, right? It's getting locked and stuck in that moment and that thing has become representative of who you are. But if you remember who you really are, your soul, right, your love, your passion, your purpose, then that other thing is just going to come and it's going to go. And you can recognize that it's temporary. So like for me, if I'm sending a piece out in the world, I have this thing I say as a writer all the time, "I trust that my work will find a home in the world." It may sound airy fairy, but it works for me because I just say I trust that this piece is eventually going to find a home. I trust that my work will find a home in the world and that way if I get rejected from 20 places, I don't worry because I know that the greater body of my work as a writer will find people to read it one way or another.

I stay plugged into that larger purpose. So remember that larger purpose .with the relationship, it could just be something like I intend to continue to love with a full heart. That's what I did with my ex husband. I just said I'm going to continue to love with a full heart. And I kept doing that and kept doing that and I still love him all these years later, even though he's passed on. I still carry that love and I'm so, so proud of that. So plug into that higher purpose and bless that thing that you are about to fail yet or have just failed at. So second thing is if you get a womp of an unexpected failure, my friend, give yourself time to grieve that rejection I got from that agent a few months back, I gave myself 36 hours and for 36 hours I was a little sad sack.

You can ask my husband, he will verify it. I moped around the house, I cried, I let myself think all the dark thoughts that I'll never be published. It'll never happen for me. No one will ever read this. It's all been a big waste of time. I mean just all that endless nonsense, right? But I gave it a time window and I said at the end of the 36 hours, I'm going to text my writing group people. I'm going to get back on that horse and I'm going to resubmit something no matter how small to somewhere else. I'm going to tweet, I'm going to do an Instagram thing. I'm just going to create little bits of art and send them back out. But the important thing is my friend. I gave myself that time to grieve number one, but I gave it a timeframe. Now that doesn't mean at the end of 36 hours that magically I waved a wand, the emotions were over.

It's just I sent myself a little cue, a social cue of, Hey, I'm re entering the stream again. Now with my, my relationship ended the divorce that the time was a lot longer at that time I'd given myself about a year to kind of just be with what had happened and ended healing a lot faster than that, but I'd given myself mentally a year to just let myself feel it before I really intentionally like started dating again. That's another story cause I ended up married within a year to my wonderful husband now of 10 years, but you never know what's going to happen. The important thing is you allow yourself that time to grieve. You give it a time window and you give it a little shift at the end so that you are going to shift your energy there and amazing things can happen when you do that.

Take it from me. Okay, third step. Visualize the stepping stone of failure that you have just created. Literally see it like it's a thing that you can step on. It's going to get you to that next level. It's just not a thing you try it on. It's literally the thing that is going to take you forward. So you've got those three little steps, bless it, and connect to the higher purpose of why you're trying to do this thing, this relationship, this endeavor. Number two, allow yourself time to grieve. Give it a specific window and make an intentional choice to connect with people at the end of that window so you can begin to move forward. And then three, visualize that stepping stone you have created and begin to see that that failure is an integral part of your success. Now, if you want to feel a little bit better about yourself, let me tell you some fabulous failures.

Tom Brady football player, he has won six Superbowls, but he has lost three. He's won six. Everyone talks about the six, but he has a lost three. Julia child, the famous French chef. Her famous book, mastering the art of French cooking, uh, was rejected before it was published. They said it was too long. Well, it ended up being just long enough and is one of the canons now of cooking. Uh, Stephen King's book, Carrie , fabulous book was rejected 30 times. There's that famous story that he actually threw it out and his wife rescued the manuscript. Um, guys, if you're going to succeed, you're going to fail. Success is not the absence of failure. Success is the product of failure. Can I say that again, please? And will you please say amen. Success is not the absence of failure. Success is the product of failure. Amen.

Failure is going to be your key ingredient to success. So your homework, because I'm a teacher, yet your failure plan in place, and please share it with me popping on over social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I love to hear what you're dealing with, how you're dealing with it, and how you're actually going to move forward. That's what I'm most interested in. How are you going to use this as a stepping stone to your success? We can honor the great masters of yoga like Swami Satchidananda, who taught me. Now I'm sharing it with you and we can continue to grow and develop together. Okay. My wonderful friend in failure. Let's close with a little chant for peace. This is a Sanskrit chant for peace. I'll do it in Sansrit. Then I'll give the English translation for you. Let's bless this session today. My friends, well done.

Lokah Samasta sukhino bhavantu

May the entire universe, and you my failure friend, be filled with peace and joy, love and ligght. Om Shanti If you'd like this, please share it with your friends. You can also pop on over to my website, gitabrown.com for updates, insider deals, uh, announcements about new classes. gitabrown.com or like I said, hop on over to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter at GitaCBrown. Let me know how your failure success story is going. Have a peaceful day. Om Shanthi.

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