week 2

some observations…

I feel like everything I’ve studied about habit formation, getting over fears, and achieving success are all merging toward this nervous breakdown exciting project (I am borrowing this joke-truth from Dr. Brene Brown’s famous Ted Talk, because it so applies).

We always hear successful people in their fields tout the benefits of failing, their failures having been the best teachers that led them to where they are today. We see the inspirational quotes, listen to the inspirational podcasts, read the inspirational stories, and maybe through all of this we have managed to convince ourselves of the benefits of failing. If failure is so important, why aren’t we all unbreakably focused on trying things that might fail, like, all the time? There are so many reasons, but today I will argue one I’ve been thinking about a lot.

We tell ourselves that one day we might get to where we want to go and be one of those success stories. But today? Today, risking failure is just too hard.

It’s too scary.

Remember the last time that failure thing happened? It felt so, so awful.

We don’t have the energy for that today.

Our family doesn’t have the energy right now to deal with us after that.

Risking failure is so hard on its own, and it’s made extra difficult because of all the temptation to stick to things that people tell us we’re good at doing. Regardless of burnout or feeling stuck in a rut, or harboring a secret dream, the social pressure from our people tells us to keep doing what is safe. Maybe our loved ones are even telling us that we’re needed in continuing to do the thing that is safe. So “safe” and what we’re “good at” is the default mode, and the hard gets pushed aside, forgotten about, or kicked down the road. We can do the big, hairy scary thing that risks failure tomorrow, we tell ourselves. We’re needed today, so we’ll leave the dreaming to the kids— we are responsible adults with obligations to fulfill.

So tomorrow becomes the next day, and the next day becomes next week, next month, next year, and now we’re in a formidable death-grip of a habit of doing what’s safe and avoiding the uncomfortable, of avoiding failure. And we look up at the clock and the calendar and the time that has passed, and look down on what we’ve made of our dreams and our progress, and we really feel like a failure because we never truly reached for the thing that we wanted to do in the first place.

When we do, finally, collect our courage to step out of our pattern of safe inaction—for a moment—and try something… Well? It usually fails, as could have been predicted because we are trying something new and haven’t yet given ourselves enough opportunities to fail and learn and grow into our success. Then often well-intentioned support system will say something like “I’m sorry,” or “maybe it will work out differently next time.” Maybe they’ll even toss out a quote or two on the importance of failing. It’s nice, but we feel their disappointment for us and discomfort from our failing, and it sucks to feel like we’ve disappointed the people we love. So we tried, we tell ourselves, and yes, we’ll try again in the future but right now is the time for licking our wounds and finding comfort in the familiar, so we go back to the safe path and we don’t try again for awhile. And more days and weeks and months and maybe years pass, and the next time we try for something, we feel the weight of our last failure and our few cumulative failures and we walk toward the next opportunity already weighted down to the ground with a heavy heart and the expectation of disappointment. And we fail again, and it feels like we can never get a win.

Ugh. It’s so painful. I’ve been using “we” with the suspicion (or maybe just hope) that I haven’t been alone in this vicious cycle.