Ep 139: The Three Paths After Failure

It's about having the clarity , self-confidence and unstoppable belief to go after and get everything you want . If you'll come with me , I'll show you how Well . Hello friends . I hope you had an amazing week . Today . I want to talk about failure and I don't know . This is kind of a hot topic , I think , for all of us . By the time you get to midlife .

We have all failed many times at many different things and I think you know some of us learn how to roll with it and some of us can get really stuck and fixated .

And one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this today is I got what from me was a very poignant email from a person who's not my client , who follows me on Instagram , and they're clearly struggling in a couple of different areas and the topic for them was failure .

And it was a very long email and I won't go into all of it , but the theme of it was I just can't move on , I feel stuck . I feel like a victim of a lot of different things that are happening in my life and I'm having a hard time like moving on right .

And for them , just a couple of the themes were they were part of this theme of tech layoffs that was going on earlier this year and haven't yet landed a new job . So for any person who's ever been through a layoff where it's happened to them , it stings right . It's really tough . It's tough on your self-belief , it's tough on your personal finances .

It's a difficult , difficult thing , and I think not enough companies take that seriously enough , especially those that are handling it with an email or a group zoom . It's like you could at least be a little personal and empathetic about it , but not everyone is doing that .

So she's struggling with this and then , right before that happened I think six months before or so she said she actually had to come to the conclusion for her she can go into all the details of ending her marriage of 10 years and she is really stuck on that .

Even though it was her decision , she feels like she didn't really have a choice and so I think for both of those things , she just feels like life came at her . She had to respond to life , Didn't have a choice in either one of those things in her mind .

And now , instead of focused on moving forward , she's very , very stuck on what has taken place in her life over the past several months and what it all means and all that stuff . So I don't know if you can relate to any of that stuff . I think most of us can in one way or another . We all encounter failure .

We encounter failure at work , we encounter failure in our relationships with our friends , with our spouses , with our boyfriend and girlfriend , with our children , like our parents . You know , it's not easy .

Life is not easy and even the most planful of us and the most disciplined of us like and sort of how we approach our life every day , it's just not always going to work out .

And I think I don't know my theory on this is that sometimes , when we're earlier on in our career , in our life , I feel like it's easier to make allowances for things not working out . I know that was true for me , may or may not be true for you , but you know , when I was in my twenties I made a lot of big changes in my life .

Didn't make any of that be a failure about me . It was just like , oh , now I want to go do this , and it just seemed more like an adventure , right , and I kind of feel like as we get into our mid career point .

So you know , midlife for me I define it as starting more like around the late thirties and going to , like you know , the late fifties , call it Um .

I feel like that's the period where we kind of stop giving ourselves a pass on things not working out the way we wanted and we start making it mean something that probably doesn't serve us , and there's lots of reasons for that . I've talked about this a little bit before on the podcast .

But I believe you know where we sit in , midlife is a place that society doesn't really help us out a whole lot , you know , and our first , you know , call it 39 or 40 years , like , we have this most of us pre-programmed societal checklist . It's not written down . No one tells us , hey , this is the checklist .

But we kind of know what the checklist is for most of us and some of us will be very empowered and we'll redefine that earlier on , and I think everyone should , by the way , should have your own checklist for your life . But , you know , I kind of feel like society has these expectations they put on us .

And then there's just things earlier on in life that we kind of quote unquote , have to do Like we're born we learn how to walk , we learn how to talk , we go into our schooling years , we learn all of those things that we need to learn , and then we head into our post school years and there's all of these other things that we go do we start our career ?

Maybe we start it and then restart it and then restart it . If we change paths several times and , by the way , I think that's perfectly normal and something that I would even advise people to do Take chances , like put yourself out there , like see what you want to go , do , experiment a little bit , right , so we do that .

Then we , you know , we're dating and we eventually , most of us , many of us , will pick a partner and we may or may not have children , and then we pick the city and the home and all of this stuff , and that kind of brings us to midlife .

And here we are right and we have this set of things and I kind of feel like in a lot of our minds we kind of think well , we've picked our path , we've done all the things . We've , you know , made the decisions and now our job is to live in those decisions and bring them to their fullest fruition .

You know , have the perfect relationship , have the 2.5 children , you know if that's what you wanted . You live in those decisions and you know you pick your career path and you , you decide where do I want to go and how far do I want to go and exactly what do I want to do with it and all that stuff .

And so we feel , like you know , we should be living in those choices and every five years , upgrading the car , upgrading the house , upgrading the vacations . Like you know , we kind of all think that way into a society , many of us . And life doesn't always go on that plan . You know there's lots of twists and turns .

Some of them come from us and choices that we make , and some of them come from other circumstances our boss , our partner , our children , you know our health , economic circumstances , like there's factors both inside and outside of us that can change what a living with our choices at midlife means .

And that's what I want to talk about today , because when you experience failure at mid career or midlife . It's probably isn't true universally , but I think it's true for most people . I think it's one of the places that we can really get stuck , and I want to talk today about what I consider to be the three paths coming out of failure .

This is just the way I coach on it and it's the result of a lot of reading and study and just the observations I've made and coaching so many different people now for the past two , three years , and even , as I've done that , reflecting on my own life more and my own failures and the times when I moved forward from that failure in a helpful way and the

times when I kind of wallowed in it for a while in a non helpful way , right . So I've kind of clarified all that . This is how I teach it , and I think it's helpful to look at it this way , in three paths , and each of those paths coming out of failure are a choice .

We just don't think that , and so that's what I want to talk about today , and before I get into the three paths , I want to talk about one important thing that kind of was a catalyst for me in arriving at these three paths , and it's very personal

. It has to do with my decision to divorce .

It was many years ago now , but it was a tough decision and one that I struggled with for a long time , and I won't go into all the reasons why , but I want to talk about it only because I made a decision when I did that , and it was a very purposeful decision , and it wasn't a decision that I arrived at by talking to a therapist or behind a coach .

It was something that I decided based on my own observations of other people friends , work colleagues , people in my life that I had observed , who had done the same thing but not , in my estimation , handled it in a way that was helpful to them . And the decision was very simple .

I , granted , agonized and tortured myself leading up to that decision and anyone who was in my life at that time knows that , because we probably talked about it and you know all of that . My good friends know how difficult that decision was for me .

But once I had made it , I decided at the very outset that I was not going to be defined by that decision and that I was not going to be talking about it for the next five , 10 , 20 , 30 , 40 , 50 years . I wasn't going to do it , but that doesn't mean that I didn't take it seriously .

I did spend a long time thinking about it and years agonizing about whether I should do it or not , but once I made the decision , I decided instead to get really clear with myself on all the lessons that I learned from that failure . That was my , that was my marriage , and that doesn't mean it was a mistake , because I don't think it was . Actually .

I'm glad I made the decision and I would do it again . But you know , it didn't work for either one of us and I haven't talked to him in many years .

But I'm sure he's happier and better off , and I don't think any of us either one of us wanted it , but it just the set of decisions and the things that happened in the marriage just made it better for us to not be together anymore .

It's kind of how I look at it and I will say this , though having made that decision , that doesn't mean that I just said , oh , but that's over and let's move on . It also doesn't mean that I agonize about it every day , and the people who are in my life now as friends they'll tell you that I definitely never talk about it . I don't talk about him .

I don't ever really talk about the marriage , and when I do even think about it , I usually think about the good times , and that's very purposeful , because there were good times right .

There were certainly many times that were not good and that's what led to us not being together , but there were lots of reasons we were together and that's what I choose to remember and think about .

I don't think about all of the problems that led to the divorce in a way that is not helpful , and what I mean by that is I made a series of choices and I'm still . In many cases , even though it's very many years ago , I still .

Sometimes , when I'm coaching myself on other things , one of the things that I do is I look over my life and I think about where else has this come up , and sometimes , when I ask myself that question on a lesson that I'm learning or trying to harvest , I think about my marriage and I think , oh , yeah , I mean there were some times when I showed up this

way , when things like this would happen , and yeah , this is a pattern for me , and so I try to take from that a lesson , but I don't ever sit in blame or victimhood or and I don't think about it as my marriage in an all or nothing way .

It wasn't black or white , it wasn't one person's fault , it wasn't one thing , and I think that's one of the things about failure it really usually isn't about just one thing , and there are lots of lessons usually to take from anything , whether it's something that you tried in your career and failed with , or something that you started a business and are trying a

set of tactics . Not all of them are going to work perfectly Like it's never usually one thing on why something doesn't work out , or whether it's a relationship .

There's lots of dimensions to people and lots of dynamics happening in a relationship because of two people coming together who are very different , from different backgrounds , different ways of thinking , and sometimes what they want is different and they're not even clear on that when they enter the relationship . Right , and it comes up later , right .

So what I wanted to talk about today say all of that through the lens of my own experience , because I think that that decision I made to not be defined by that failure was one of the most powerful decisions . Granted , I'm still harvesting lessons from that not every day because I don't think about it every day .

I've really let it go and I moved on from it . It really only comes up for me , as I said , when I'm coaching myself on other things , because I really wanted the things that I teach myself to do and then I teach my clients to do is to say where else has this come up for you ?

Because it's a helpful question to ask yourself when you're trying to understand more about yourself and really harvest all the lessons , and when you get honest with yourself to that degree . That , to me , is when real personal growth starts .

So I want to talk about the three paths , and when I do this , I just want to say , before I dive in , I am not saying that the things that happen to us , that we feel like we don't have a choice in like this person who wrote me the email that's really the catalyst for this episode I'm not saying those things are fun and I'm not saying they're easy , and

I'm not saying that it's easy to even have perspective when something that you define as catastrophic happens in your life If you get a bad diagnosis from a doctor , or if you have a spouse who decides to leave for whatever reason , or if you're handed the pink slip at work , right , or if you own your business and you lose your biggest client .

Like , I'm not saying any of those things are fun , those are all a downturn in our life . But what I am saying is that I think of life as like a deck of cards . We are all given the cards right . It's like a poker thing , and you just don't know what hands are going to

be dealt . And even when you think something through very carefully , like the spouse you pick , or the decision to have a child or not , or what job to take , or the new city to move to , you can analyze it . You can and I'm an analyzer , believe me , I can . I can , in my past especially , do the analysis , paralysis thing .

I try not to ruminate like that anymore , but it was a thing for me for a long time . So I get it . You know , when you think things through and you try to be very logical . But life doesn't always go off logic .

There's lots of twists and turns and there's lots of hands that we're going to be dealt that aren't fair and that don't make sense and that , honestly , you're just sad , you know , and devastating sometimes . So when I talk about these three paths , I want you to keep in mind that I have a lot of empathy for this .

I have experienced and people who've known me my whole life will tell you like my path was not the Silver spoon . You know sashay down the primrose lane . It was really tough and I didn't come from a privileged background . I didn't know what I wanted to do in my life .

I didn't even have parents who gave me many wonderful things , but that career path and the schooling path wasn't necessarily one of them . I was always encouraged to do well in school but honestly , I wasn't very disciplined as a student in my high school years and I was a straight , you know , b with a couple of sprinklings of a student .

I didn't crack the books ever , ever , you know , and I didn't think about college . I was a creative person and I got out of college and I went , became a hairstylist and I'm glad I did . I did cool things .

I studied at Fidel's soon in London and I had some really cool clients and those clients in many cases many of them are very wealthy and accomplished business owners and doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs and stuff in St Louis and those people were the ones that sent me down my current career path .

They inspired me to go back to school because they were an example for me of what was possible , right .

And then I had to put my own way through school at that point , so it was late 20s , and then all the trial and error that comes out of any college experience , you know , when you're trying to figure it out and you don't have a role model or mentor or people to open doors for you like it .

It was definitely to get from there to a very quickly , a multi six figure career and the first 12 years of my career working in some cases over the course of my career , for some of the largest companies in the United States , maybe in the world it was not easy , right .

So I'm just telling you all that to let you know that I've got a lot of empathy for the nonlinear path , for the scrappy , gritty person who's trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing , right , and so that's what I want to talk about today . So I'm going to dive in now to the three paths , but that setup is very long .

I wanted to do it because I wanted you to know that when I'm in the middle of this , if it triggers you , I'm not saying it to trigger you , and I'm not trying to be a jerk , I'm trying to help you understand that , no matter what life throws at you , you have a choice .

There are three what I would call Uber paths to take not Uber , the car service , but archetypes of a path you can take , and I really want you to choose a specific one . So let's dive into the three paths . So path number one coming out of a failure , something happens in some part of your life that is devastating , catastrophic .

Whether it's a path you choose or it's a path that someone else hands to you , there are three ways to do it . Path number one is that you make the failure mean something about you , and this is what I would call an unconscious path , and here's what I mean by that .

It is really easy to look at the circumstances of our life and to say , well , that wouldn't have happened to someone else , like it must mean something about me . It's happening to me .

It's especially easy to think that if you look back over your life , when you experience something and it's happened before or something similar has happened before , then you can look at those two things I used to do this and you put them together and you say well , it has to be me . Who's the common denominator here ? It's me .

Therefore , this failure means x , y , z about me . I'm doomed , I can't do it , I'm not good at relationship , whatever

it is . We tell ourselves these stories coming out of it and we believe it right , because we look at the thing that happened and we think , well , of course , this is what it means . I'm interpreting this , I'm trying to take the lessons from this .

We can really do a number on ourselves by telling us we're just being logical , we're just looking at the truth , we're just seeing what is for what it really is . And we look at it and we make that failure mean something about us that doesn't serve us , that it's our fault , that it's always going to happen to us , that we can't do it .

And here's the problem with that . That thought then gets stored away in our mind . Something happened . We've defined the cause of it . We've made it mean something terrible about ourselves . We've put that into our mind . That now becomes a thought that gets served up when anything even remotely similar happens to us going forward .

And the problem with that is it keeps us in this emotional state , because we know that our emotions are caused by the things that we think right and believe and that causes that thought . You know , when you make something mean something about you , that's not good .

It causes recurring emotions of self doubt , fear and uncertainty , and we know that our emotions are the reasons why we take or don't take action .

So if we think something unfavorable about ourselves , and we think it so many times that it becomes a belief , and that those thoughts and beliefs cause you to feel recurring feelings of self doubt and certainty or fear , well , guess what you're going to do ? You're gonna be stuck . You're gonna stay right where you are .

You're gonna be afraid to take any action in a different way because you believe that the failure was your fault , like if you got laid off maybe this is the third layoff you've had in your life you think , well , of course I'm always going to be laid off . You're afraid , you feel somewhat doomed .

Maybe it causes you to shoot for jobs that are really way beneath your skill set because they feel less risky . Or maybe it even causes you to blow interview after interview because you're really projecting this self-doubt , fear , uncertainty thing . The thoughts we think going into an interview really dictate how we show up in that interview . Right .

So that's path number one . It's not a good path . Path number two out of failure is that we make it mean something about someone else . So this goes back directly to the decision that I made coming out of my marriage when I decided to to get a divorce , and we had that discussion and went down that path .

I decided at the very beginning I'm not going to be at the woman talking about this in 20 years . I'm not going to be the person bad-mouthing my ex-spouse . I'm not going to be thinking about it every day Like this was hard coming to this conclusion .

I'm doing it because it's the right thing I thought for both of us and I'm sure I'm right about that and I'm going to move on . I'm going to try to take the lessons from it and , by the way , I still am but I'm not going to be trotting him out all the time as the reason why my life is a piece of crap right now if I'm in a downturn .

So making a failure a layoff , the failure of a marriage , even the ending of a friendship , a business downturn , making that mean something about someone else , is not helpful . It feels good . It does feel good because we don't have to kind of look at ourselves . It is very easy to look for the evidence that someone else is to blame , right ?

Here's the problem with that . While it feels good and it does feel good it kind of doesn't too , because what does that do to our emotional state ? When we feel like someone has done something to us that has devastated us in some way , it keeps us stuck in anger , blame and judgment .

Where does anger , blame and judgment lead us when it comes to taking action and moving forward in our life ? It doesn't . We stay rooted in the anger , blame and judgment , right , that's not inspiring us to move forward . That's not inspiring us to pick up the pieces and move on . That's not inspiring us to be our best every day .

We are 100% fixated on the boss who didn't give us a fair shake . We are 100% fixated on the spouse who cheated , especially if those people were imperfect . I just want you to hear that one too . People aren't perfect .

We're not perfect , and neither is anyone else , and we all do crazy things sometimes and things that are unfair and unjust and that don't make sense . And it can be really easy to look at just someone else's imperfection and find the evidence of how exactly it's their fault , because it's probably some combination of the two , and then we get stuck .

We get stuck in anger and hatred and judgment and blame and we're not moving forward when that happens . So that is path number two . When we make a failure , mean something about someone else Not helpful . Path number three is the helpful path .

Paths number one and two are the unconscious path , the path that is easy to arrive at , based on the outside circumstances only , and neither one of those paths will serve you . Probably Path number three is the empowered path . I also think it's the more challenging path in some ways because it requires a lot from you .

Path number three is decide what you learned from that failure . Right that decision to mine that failure , as painful as it might be for the lessons . It can sound very self-helpy , it can sound very trite and cliche , but it is 100% the path to personal power and the path to a much happier , empowered life .

And I do believe that when you decide to do this and you fully commit to a life where every day you're trying to get better and you're really trying to learn lessons not like 24-7 , but in a helpful way , in a way that's empowering and that serves you , and when you ask yourself that , what I think is the money question , like where else has this come up ?

For me ?

That is where , if you're really committed to this , you can look across every failure and every downturn in your life and you can really , if you're honest with yourself , pick up on the patterns of your own behavior in response to different things because we all have them and learn from them and decide is that how I want to show up in the future or not ?

Is that really what I want my response to things to be that happen like this , or is there a better way ? Is there a different way ? Is there a different choice that I can make ? Right so on path number three , that is , the conscious path . That is a choice that requires something from you .

It requires you to turn into the pain , not to look away from the pain , the pain of that failure , and to get honest with yourself about the things that other people did that might have been fair or unfair , but also your responses to that and maybe even some of your own shortcomings in that failure .

We all have them , like there's nothing scary about looking at them . We can't pretend that we're perfect . I guess we can pretend , but it's not helpful , it's not accurate . You know , no matter how righteous , no matter how good , no matter how disciplined we try to be , we all fall short .

And looking at that , being able to look at that imperfection in a way that is helpful and not self-denigrating , is very I think , very empowering when you decide to learn something from it . Here's what's great about it it leads you to a very empowered emotional state .

It leads you to feel things like curiosity , motivation and clarity and from that emotional state , guess what you're doing ? You're moving forward . You're excited about moving forward . You're not fixated on the past . You're only fixated on one thing learning the lessons from the past so that you can move forward in the most empowered way .

So this is one you might want to think about and even go back and listen to again . I think the three paths coming out of failure are important and I think if you choose path number three and , by the way , you can currently like the person who wrote me the email she is currently stuck in a combination of path number one and path number two .

She is blaming her employer and her former spouse for things and she's blaming herself for things . So she's chosen two paths and I think many of us do that . By the way , it's usually not just one right . You can decide .

Even if you've been stuck on path number one and path number two for five years or 25 years or 35 years , you can decide to get off those paths and to choose path number three .

It feels impossible , I know , the longer you've been at it , but you can just decide to set it all down , to not make the failure mean anything about you or anyone else , to just be one of the cards you were dealt and you can look at the helpful ways you dealt with that and the non-helpful ways you dealt with that .

For one reason so that you learn the lessons and so that those lessons help you move forward in your life in the most empowered , happy , fulfilling way .

So that is a synopsis of the answer I sent to the person who sent me the email , and when I was typing it all out , I decided I wanted to share it with you because I think life just isn't easy and it literally never goes to plan . I think we look at other people's Instagram feeds and we think , oh , to be that person like their life is freaking perfect .

Yet another fabulous vacation . Yet another beautiful outfit like yet another perfect date with your beautiful significant other . And the truth is , their path isn't perfect either . They're just making the best of it , and you can decide to do that too , no matter how many tough cards you have been dealt .

The next card could be the ace , and if it is , you can decide to make the most of that new opportunity .

As long as we're here and as long as we're still breathing , there's a path in front of us , and I wanted to do this episode because I wanna invite you to choose path number three , and no matter what you're stuck in right now , it is just a simple decision to stop blaming yourself or someone else and to just choose path number three and start focusing on the

lessons you wanna take from it , and then turning and looking into the horizon , the forward part of your life , and deciding where you're going from here . That is the key to getting unstuck after failure . So I hope you found this episode helpful .

If there's something you're struggling with in this area and what I'm saying resonates with you , but you're not real sure what to do about it , I do invite you to go to my Instagram feed at the Purposeful Career , by the way , if you haven't subscribed or followed me , please do and go to the link that's in my bio .

Click on that link and there's a button there that you'll find that says schedule a free 30 minute call If you're struggling with this . This is a very important thing to me personally and , as a coach , like I , tend to focus more on reinvention and transformation . But you can't get there if you don't let go of the failures you're hanging onto .

That's a boat anchor in your life , and we all experience things . No one's life is perfect , no matter how perfect it looks from the outside . So I would really love to help you move forward and we could spend 30 minutes talking about it . So I invite you to do that . If you are struggling in this area , please go do it .

We can do it via phone or via Zoom call . That's your choice . I give people the choice . So , anyway , I hope you found this episode helpful , and what I want you to really know is that doesn't matter how long you've been hanging onto a failure , doesn't matter how rooted you are in believing that this is always going to be your life .

You can change it with one decision , and it is a choice . Just decide . You're not gonna be defined by it and decide that you're gonna learn the lessons from it , and then go do that and that is how you start moving forward again . All right , so I hope you found this episode helpful and until next time , make it a great week , my friends .

God bless , thank you , have another great day leading us . Here's to it . There you go . Just one more second . Just one second . There you go , go . Whoever is struggling , come back here , take care of everyone else just in turns . Welcome back out to this case . Welcome to the Center , to your special position . Join me at thepurposefulcareercom backslash next level .

Don't forget the thepurposefulcareercom backslash next level . Join me and together we'll make your career and life everything you dream of . We'll see you there .