How do your beliefs about success and failure shape your goals and aspirations?
Beliefs about success and failure cast a long shadow from initial goals through eventual results.
I used to have a hard time believing that anything would ever work out for me. As a result, I never fully committed to anything, so things didn’t work out. No shock there, right? The lack of commitment turned setbacks into failure because I’d quit before I could fail any further. Then I felt horrible about my lack of accomplishment in life and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t making any progress in any area of my life.
I had both a fear of failure and a fear of success. As I was approaching my college graduation at the tender age of 45, I started to have a constant, low-level panic about what the next steps would be in my life. Success often means change and new challenges. That’s almost as scary as the embarrassment and stagnation that can come with failure.
I decided to add “Embrace the adventure!” to my list of mottos, or mantras, or affirmations– whatever you want to call them. Adventure is in the process, in the small successes and failures along the way. Learning to embrace the defeats as well as the triumphs is hard. It is worth it to develop a belief that risk is what makes adventures exciting and that falling on your face sometimes is just part of it.
Take this blog, for example. I don’t want it to be about the money, but I need money so I wanted to figure out how to make this a business of some kind. I just haven’t been able to monetize it. I jumped the gun on Amazon Associates (their affiliate program) without any idea of how I would work that into this blog, and I recently got kicked from the program for my lack of sales. Past Me would have felt like a complete failure and learned nothing from that experience. I’d have written it off as more proof that nothing works out for me.
Instead, I accepted it and tried to learn more about what went wrong. I made at least two mistakes: (1) This specific blog doesn’t lend itself to product sales, no matter how much I like those products. Working them in is a nightmare because that just does not mesh well with the content here. I have recently started working on a lifestyle blog about living less in the digital space; that would have been a much better fit, since there are items and services that I have used that I could comfortably talk about. (2) No matter which blog I chose for that purpose, I should have built a following by posting useful or entertaining content more regularly. Live and learn, as they say.
It’s a lot less stressful to fail when you see it as mistakes to learn from without internalizing it as a personal flaw stemming from not ever being good enough. Some beliefs are toxic. Better to not swallow them whole.
I set bigger, more ambitious goals than I used to because I figure getting half way there on faith and determination still leaves me in a better place than setting tiny goals, failing, and quitting. I really do believe that fortune favors the bold, but mostly because the bold try things.
The Mia Experiment 