Hello there, it's Amantha.
I'm currently on a break, so I've handpicked a bunch of my favorite episodes from the last year to share with you.
Okay, on with today's best of.
Episode, what's your relationship like with failure? I mean, I know lots of people talk about being good with it and seeing it as an opportunity to learn.
From you know, etc. Etc.
But really, if we're being honest, failure kind of sucks and most people are not that great at dealing with it. So today's show is a bit more personal than the average How I Work episode, and I want to share some of my failures with you. But there's a reason why I want to do this, and I also have a personal challenge for you. My name is doctor Ramantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy invent Him.
And this is How I Work, a show about how to help you do your best work.
A few years ago, my team at invent Him completed a strength Finder assessment. I expected my report to tell me that my top strength was something like time optimization, as a similar test had revealed many years ago, or creativity or some other skill that I utilize every day, but no. Apparently, my number one strength was competitiveness.
Although this would come as.
No surprise to anyone that's played Settlers of Katan against me. My first memories of being competitive are from primary school. But in addition to being competitive, I was also a perfectionist. If an essay came back with an aid, I would feel disappointed that the plus was missing, and if I wasn't the first to finish a maths quiz, I would question my numerical ability, and if I didn't top the class in all academic assignments, I would feel like a failure.
In primary school, Bonnie Smart was my arch nemesis, and she lived up.
To her name.
I felt like we were the only two people who existed in our class, and whenever she beat me, I felt devastated. And while the mix of perfectionism and competitiveness can be a winning combination for career progression, not to mention getting good grades at school, it's not great for dealing with failure and setbacks. Growing up, I prided myself on winning and being successful. Failure was not part of
my self identity. I was used to succeeding at anything that I put my mind to which of course means that when failure does arrive, it hits you hard. My natural inclination was to hide my failures. My failures embarrassed me because I thought they meant I was a lesser person, Like if people knew about my failures, surely their positive impressions of me would be destroyed.
Through the work that I do.
It behavioral science, consultancy, invent him, I see so many people struggle with failure, wanting to hide it, punish it, deny it, and no good can come of this. The best way to learn is to fail. And when we start to talk about our failures openly rather than repress them, we actually increase our resilience. So Harvard's psychology professor Daniel Wegner coined the term ironic mental processes. Through a series of experiments, he found that when people try to suppress
certain thoughts and emotion, they actually resurface more intensely than before. So, for example, psychology professor Jennifer Borten and her colleagues found that when we ignore doubts about ourselves, self esteem declines and anxiety rises. So Wegner argued that we need to stop suppressing negative thoughts and emotions and instead express them, and ironically doing so should increase resilience and self belief,
which is where a failure resume comes into place. So I wrote my very first failure resume part of an experiment in twenty twenty, but now as we head towards the finish line of twenty twenty one, I've revisited it and I'm sharing a new version with trepidation once more. So I challenged myself to be more raw, more open, and pick some even more devastating and recent failures. So here are some big ones from the last few years,
and I'd love to see yours if your game. Failure Number one linking my achievements to my self worth nineteen eighty four when I was about seven years old to the present. Now, you don't have to be a psychologist to recognize that I had a serious case of achievement derived self worth. This is not a prophe psychological term, but it sounds like it could be. Whenever I would accomplish something new, I felt and still feel, the strong urge to tell other people and lots of other.
People about what I've just done.
And I tell them not to brand but because I believe it will make them like me more. And as someone who cares too much about what other people think, I really want people to like me as much as possible, and obviously saying this out loud, I can see how flawed this reasoning is, but I still do it. So
here's what I learned from failure number one. A couple of years ago, I read a Seth godinblog that said confidence is a choice, not a symptom, and it dawned on me that I didn't need to achieve certain things to feel confident and worthwhile, especially in my life.
And while I'm.
Making progress on this failure, it's been slow. It's hard to change something that's been hard wired for decades. But here is some evidence of change. I went for a walk with a close friend a couple of weeks ago and he asked me how I was doing. I said, relieve, because I just submitted the first draft of my book to my publisher, all seventy two thousand words.
His response was, what book?
So I had completely failed, not consciously to mention that I'd been offered a book deal with Penguin.
Six months prior.
Heay wit. Although sharing this win feels like I might have missed the point of this learning. Okay, failure number two not having the courage to leave my marriage sooner twenty nineteen. On August twenty five, twenty nineteen, I left my partner of thirteen years. No big event had precipitated the decision. There were no affairs, no abuse, nothing especially newsworthy. It was just a gradual realization that were not particularly
compatible as human beings. The most devastating part of this decision has becoming a single mother and now only seeing my daughter half of that time.
So while to my friends.
And family the decision seemed sudden, it was a decision that was used in the making, but fear kept me in a suboptimal relationship for years past its dudate, and two years on, I can say with certainty that I'm far happier on this side of the fence. So what I learned is that being scared to do something that feels really big is not a good enough reason to not do it. The scariest and hardest decisions can often
be the most rewarding. And while I stayed for longer than I should have because of my daughter role, modeling a substandard relationship to your child or children is not helpful role modeling, all right. Failure number three wearing a
mask to work twenty nineteen to twenty twenty one. So, following on from the aforementioned failure, perhaps if you've been through a similar situation, you'll know that the first couple of years out of a marriage can be pretty rough, and you know with everything that there is to navigate and separate. My default setting is to be open with my team, but during this time I felt the need to hide my stress from my workmates and keep it to myself. I didn't want to be a burden or
bring the mood down. In some instances, this credit a necessary distance between me and my teammates, and there were many days where it was beyond exhausting to maintain an I'm totally okay, I fasad when I really wasn't. So what I learned from this looking back, I question the cost of not being truly real about what I was experiencing outside of work. I felt really protective of my team and I didn't want to dump my stress on them.
But going to the other extreme, where I tried to.
Make light of what were some really heavy things I was going through, probably wasn't super healthy either, so I'd like to think that in the future I would and could drop the mask and just show up one hundred percent as me, And by doing so, I suspect that my own mental health and my relationships with my team would be all the better for it. And I should add that seeking support from a brilliant clinical psychologist was
critical for me in making it through this time. I saw him weekly during the hardest times, and I still see him once a fortnight. Okay, the next failure I want to share concealing my miscarriage from my Inventium team Back in twenty thirteen, so, when I was eighteen years old, I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome or PEACOS for short. PEACOS is one of the leading courses of infertility, so I never assumed that I'd be able to have children, even though I was sure that I wanted to have
one during this lifetime. So when I fell pregnant very easily in early twenty thirteen, I was beside myself with joy, and in the nine weeks that my body spent growing a little person, I spent hundreds of hours imagining the life that this yet to be born human would have. When we went for a scan at nine weeks, the obstetrician told us that the feeders had stopped growing several weeks ago. Two days later, I went in for a DNC to have this little person removed.
From my body.
The grief hit me like a landslide, but because no one at work knew I was even pregnant, I went straight back into the office as if nothing had happened. What I learned from this is that hiding something as life shattering as a miscarriage helps no one. I've since talked openly about it with my team on various occasions, and hope that doing so normal as is the experience, so that we no longer have to feel shame about miscarriages and hired our grief to people who we spend
so much time with. The last failure that I want to share is putting unrealistic expectations on myself in my role as a mum twenty fourteen to present. In February twenty fourteen, my daughter Frankie came into the world.
My life and priorities shifted.
Enormously as most of my energy pre Frankie had been poured into my work. A couple of years into this new role, I became more aware of the expectations I placed on myself as a mother. Because I was a working mum, I felt an edder to overcompensate. Whenever I was with Frankie. The unwritten rule I had was to be one hundred percent present and interacting with her one hundred percent of the time. It was exhausting, and I was constantly falling short of this expectation and beating myself
up about it. If I took my daughter to a cafe for breakfast and I spent a couple of minutes having a quick read of the weekend paper, I would immediately tell myself off and redirect my full attention back to Frankie. I identified with being an overachiever in my working life, and naturally, this expectation had transferred itself to motherhood. I always felt like I could be doing a better job, paying more attention, coming up with more stimulating activities, and
baking better cakes. No just kidding, I don't really bake.
And when I did.
Direct my attention somewhere other than Frankie, such as inter reading the weekend paper, I would feel guilty for the pleasure that this gave me, because surely the most pleasurable activity when you are a parent is spending quality time with your children all the time. It took me another few years, in a conversation with my therapist to realize.
That this behavior was not normal.
In Schema therapy, I score high on unrelenting standards. This is to find as the underlying belief that one must strive to meet very high internalized standards of behavior and performance, usually to avoid criticism. Easy to diagnose, harder to change. So here's what I learned. I know that I can have ridiculously high standards for my work, but I was completely unaware that these standards were also imposing themselves on
my role as a mum. So over the years, and at least on some days, I've slowly started to relax the expectations I have of myself as a mother. I now sometimes allow myself to just do my own thing, well Frankie does hers and as I talk to you about this, So, I worry that this may make me
sound like a bad mother. I worry that maybe I'll be judged by other mothers who are one hundred percent present for their children, one hundred percent of the time because they exist, don't they And I find it really hard to balance my overwhelming need to be the best mum in the world with also being kind to myself, which doesn't come naturally.
It is a constant battle, but one.
In which I think I'm making progress slowly, and in spite of all this, surprise, surprise, Frankie is still thriving. So that's my failure resume. And here is my challenge for you. Set aside, say thirty minutes this week to write your failure resume, think hard over the last few years would have been your biggest failures it worked maybe in your non work life as well. And then I challenge you to share it with a few people close
to you. Maybe you might even want to share it via your socials like I'll be doing with mine, which is scary, I know. And if you do decide to share it, make sure you tag me in the post because I'd love to read it and I hope you
find this process helpful. You can find me on the socials, on LinkedIn Atamantha Imba and on Instagram Atamantha I and on Twitter at Amantha How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you Martin Nimber who does the audio mix and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise.
I'll see you next time.