Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #283 Elizabeth Day: Life Lessons on Failure, Shame and Infertility

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

CAUTION: This episode contains mild swearing and themes of an adult nature.   A few weeks ago, I hosted my first ever Feel Better Live More LIVE show, which took place in a beautiful theatre in London. I’m really excited to share a recording of that conversation with you today.   My guest was the brilliant author, journalist and podcast host, Elizabeth Day. Elizabeth hosts a podcast called ‘How to Fail’ which celebrates the things that haven’t gone right. She has also written two books on the subject of failure and so it seemed fitting to begin our conversation talking about this thought-provoking topic.   Life is full of uncertainty but Elizabeth believes that if anything is certain in life, it is that we will all fail. But what is important, she says, is how we respond to that failure - if we allow it to be, failure can be the key to growth, strength and self-awareness.   We covered so many important topics that I am sure will strike a chord with you. We spoke about the importance of authentic connection and how important being vulnerable and sharing our failures with others is. We also discussed how shame often holds us back from doing this. In fact, Elizabeth shares her own experience of this during the breakdown of her marriage and how she was ashamed of admitting her feelings to others but how when she did, she was astonished by how people around her responded in a positive way.   We also talked about competitiveness and people-pleasing, and Elizabeth very candidly talks about her own journey through IVF and what it taught her.   Elizabeth is a firm believer in the idea that life will generally teach us the lessons that we need to learn and we discuss how this way of thinking can be beneficial when we come across conflict and obstacles in life.   This is a beautiful, deep and honest conversation - I thoroughly enjoyed speaking to Elizabeth and I know that everyone in the audience that evening felt part of something really quite special. I hope you enjoy listening. Thanks to our sponsors: http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://www.calm.com/livemore Order Dr Chatterjee's new book Happy Mind, Happy Life: UK version: https://amzn.to/304opgJ, US & Canada version: https://amzn.to/3DRxjgp Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/283 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

It's inevitable, no matter who we are, failure will happen to you. The only thing that you can be in control of is your response to it. And that's where your character is formed. It's my profound belief that in the fullness of time, every single failure can teach us something meaningful, something that we needed to know. So fail with meaning and don't be afraid of it. Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better Live More.

Now, a few weeks ago, I hosted my first ever Feel Better Live More live show. It took place in a beautiful theatre in London. And of course, we recorded the conversation and I am delighted to be sharing that recording with you today. My guest was the brilliant author and journalist, Elizabeth Day. Now, Elizabeth hosts a podcast called How to Fail, which celebrates the things that have not gone right. She has a new non-fiction book out now called Magpie, but she's also previously written two books on the subject of failure. And so it seemed fitting to begin our conversation talking about this thought-provoking topic. Life is full of uncertainty, but Elizabeth believes that if anything is certain in life,

it's that we will all fail. But what's important, she says, is how we respond to that failure. If we allow it to be, failure can be the key to growth, strength, and self-awareness. Now, we covered so many important topics in this conversation that I am sure will strike a chord. We spoke about the importance of authentic connection and how important being vulnerable and sharing our failures with others is. We also discussed how shame often holds us back from doing so. In fact, Elizabeth talks about her own experience of this during the breakdown of her marriage and how she was ashamed of admitting her feelings to others, but how when she did,

she was astonished by how people around her responded in a positive way. We also talk about competitiveness and people-pleasing, and Elizabeth very candidly talks about her own journey through IVF, and what lessons she learnt from that process. Now Elizabeth is a firm believer in the idea that life will generally teach us the lessons that we need to learn and we discuss how adopting this way of thinking can be really beneficial when we come across conflict and obstacles in our lives. This really is a beautiful conversation, one that is deep, honest and open. I thoroughly enjoyed speaking to Elizabeth. I know everyone in the audience that evening felt part of something really quite special.

I hope you enjoyed listening. And now, here it is, my live conversation with Elizabeth Day. Good evening. Is this on? Can you hear me? I can't hear me yet. Can you hear me now? Oh man, I can't really see you guys very well, but I know it's a full house tonight, which is just something else. Thank you all for coming out tonight. This is the very first Feel Better Live More Life.

Many of you probably listen to the show, I imagine. And, you know, I love podcasting. I think podcasting honestly can change the world. I genuinely believe that. I think what we all need these days more than anything is long-form conversation, nuanced conversation with context to really understand what other people are feeling, what they're thinking. And frankly, I feel very lucky that I get to put out a podcast each week. I get to talk to people who I want to talk to.

So many guests in the audience tonight, previous podcast guests. I want to talk to so many guests in the audience tonight, previous podcast guests. And I just love it. And I just love the fact that it's impacting the lives of so many people. So when I got the chance to do a live event as part of this podcast week for the podcast show, I just grabbed it basically. And for me, I was thinking, well, who would I like to speak to as my first guest? And of course, there's a lot of names that went through my mind, but one name that kept popping up for me is the lady who I've invited to be the first guest tonight. Many of you will know Elizabeth Day.

She's a bit louder. Many of you will know Elizabeth Day. She is absolutely wonderful. She first interviewed me on her show back in February. It was a beautiful conversation. She was so gifted how she brought things out for me. She's someone who is very quickly becoming a really good friend of mine, actually. So, without further ado, please welcome to the stage the author,

the host of How to Fail, and Best Friend Therapy, journalist, author of this brilliant book I've got here, Philosophy, and her brand new novel, Magpie, which is another Sunday Times bestseller. She's just incredible. This is the first time we're doing this. I hope you enjoy it. Please welcome to the stage, Elizabeth Day. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was such a lovely intro. Thank you so much. Imagine if I said I don't think we are becoming friends.

We are. You're amazing. And this is such a pleasure and an honor to be your first ever live guest. I'm so thrilled. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you. You have become sort of very well known for putting failure on the map over the past few years. As a little girl, was it ever one of your dreams, when I'm older, when I'm an adult, I'm going to be an expert in failure. I love that question.

What a great question. The short answer is no, because podcast doesn't exist then. Being a child of the 80s. But it was a dream of mine to communicate. And my first way of doing that was writing, because I loved books from a very, very young age. And I was very lucky in that my parents read to me and it was a house with lots of books in it. And I remember just loving the tangible object of a book. And so aged four, which I know sounds absurdly precocious, but that's when I decided I wanted to write books myself. And then everything else has stemmed from that. And I had a career in journalism and then I wrote

my first novels. And then the podcast came unexpectedly into my life in July, 2018, which we can go into more detail on. But I do remember my first failure as a child. And I think it's because as I've discovered doing the podcast, it's far easier and far more human to remember the things that have gone wrong, to remember that one time someone criticized you rather than the hundred times someone said something nice. And so it's one of my earliest memories. And I was about two years old and my sister had chicken pox and she was in bed. She's an older sister. And I just wanted to make her feel better. And I knew that when grownups were sick, they liked hot water bottles. I toddled off to find a hot water bottle, but I didn't know how to fill it. And obviously I was two, so I luckily didn't know how to use a bottle. So I just went to the bathroom and I knew there was a hot tap and a cold tap and I chose the hot tap. I didn't wait long enough for it to heat up. So basically this hot water bottle filled with tepid water. And then because I was two,

I couldn't screw the cap on tightly enough. So when I toddled back into my sister's bedroom and gave it to her and she clutched it to her fevered chest it just like spilled out all over her pajamas and she started howling and she was even more upset than before and I felt like such a failure I felt terrible about it and it's stuck in my mind ever since and I wrote about it in a book and my sister read it and was like, I don't remember that at all. So I do remember failure. You describe yourself on many occasions as being intensely competitive. Yeah. And I want to talk about that. But in relation to failure, as someone who considers themselves very competitive, or certainly has

done for a lot of their life, it strikes me that talking about failure, in some ways, there's almost odds with that. We often say, don't we, that authors write the books that they need to write for themselves. And given how much time you spent writing about failure, talking about failure, I guess there's something there, isn't there, whereby this is something you had to address for you. Definitely. And it does feel like a bit of a contradiction, unless I'm competing to be the best at failure. But no, I'm joking. I think I'm competitive in certain ways in the give me a metric and I will try and nail it. I will try my hardest to get the best marks to win the race. And that exists separately in my head from my yearning to share and connect.

So I believe that if I have a purpose, it is to connect and communicate with others. And I need to do that to feel human. And I believe and have come to know that the quickest form of connection is by sharing vulnerability, by sharing the failures, the things that have gone wrong, the things that you didn't manage. And that's a shortcut to who someone really is. And so the two things can coexist for me. And I actually don't think that my competitive aspect is innate to me. I think it's a learned response to various problems that probably don't exist anymore. But because I'm so used to it, it's difficult for me to get out of

that mindset. And I need to make an active effort to get out of it and to remind myself what really matters. And it's not someone saying, oh, you're number one in this arbitrary list. It's actually someone saying, thank you for that podcast episode. It helped me through a really rough patch. And it's more meaningful when it's an individual rather than a mass. So I'm striving to get better at not being as competitive. Yeah. And I'm always, I should say, sorry sorry that I'm mostly competitive with myself

I I have high standards for myself and that can be quite an exhausting way to live I want to talk more about competition maybe we'll come back to that a little bit later um you mentioned there that you realize when you share when you are vulnerable that it's a shortcut it's a connection do you remember when was the first time you realized that that's again that's given me an enormous pause for thought um I can remember, I actually think it was quite late on for me, very late on. I think it was in my thirties, which for me were a decade of intense transition where I had met someone who I got married to and that turned out to be the wrong relationship for me. And I felt an enormous amount of shame in admitting that even to myself. And so I didn't admit it to anyone for a really, really long time.

And when it finally got to the stage where I felt that to continue in that relationship would be at the cost of losing myself and I had to leave, I was astonished, pleasantly astonished by how the people closest to me responded in such a positive way. As in, they were just unquestioningly supportive. All of the things that I've been fearful of, the shame, like people who'd come to our wedding and given us gifts, I felt such shame over that. It sounds trivial, but it was actually indicative of a far bigger feeling of shame and responsibility and guilt. And actually my best friend, Emma, who's in the audience tonight, just immediately got it and said, I love you more when you're not on a pedestal, when you're being real, when you're being authentic and vulnerable. And that was a huge wake-up call for me.

So I think it was probably that moment. Yeah, that's very powerful. And I guess having a close network, close friends who you can take off those masks and be yourself is incredibly powerful. Sharing though with your friends is very different from sharing on a podcast like yours, which has a huge reach. So as someone who also shares a lot

on my own podcast, I guess I'm really interested in this because I feel that my podcast for me has taught me, has showcased to me the power of sharing about being vulnerable about sharing things that may be you know the truth is for much of my life i'd be too ashamed to admit to anyone but i remember i think it was episode 37 i had um this wonderful gentleman called dr gabble mate on show. And I remember admitting some stuff to Gabor in conversation that I don't think I'd ever said in public before. And I remember just seeing the response and seeing how it connected with people. And I don't think that for me, there was one big moment where I suddenly realized, oh, this is important.

But I think the more I did it, the more liberating it felt for me, the more freeing it felt, the more it connected with other people. So I certainly feel my podcast has taught me that probably more than my own personal life. Do you know what I mean? I do. I do know exactly what you mean, which is that sometimes what you think of as the most personal thing can have a degree of universal resonance that you could never have imagined if you kept it inside yourself. And I think that's the thing about shame. The precondition to shame is silence. Once you make the decision not to be silent, the shame dissipates. And not only that, but it's a generous act for other people who might

be feeling the same kind of shame. And similarly to you, the podcast was where I first opened up about my fertility journey. And that was something that, again, I hadn't ever spoken about beyond my core group of friends, but also society I don't feel really spoke about way back in 2014 when I was going through it. And I was so shocked to discover so many other people felt the same. And they were grateful that someone had said something. And that, in turn, made me feel less alone and more seen. And that's the beauty of a conversation that's grounded in vulnerability. And you mentioned earlier that thing of wearing a mask. And I think for a lot of my childhood, and perhaps I know that you might be able to relate to this, and perhaps many listeners and members of the audience here will be able to relate to it.

I grew up in an environment where emotions were largely repressed. That's a generational function, but it's also a function of the fact that I grew up in the north of Ireland at a time when it was riven with civil war, basically, and where you had to be very careful what you said. And the most meaningful things were often left unsaid because it was a dangerous climate to exist in, especially when you have an English accent like me. And so I got very used to wearing a series of masks. And at some point, I made a deliberate decision to be different from that because that's not how I wanted to live my life because it feels like you're consigning yourself to a life half-lived if you never take the risk of being yourself.

you never take the risk of being yourself. Yeah, the risk of being yourself. I mean, it's quite a contradiction in many ways, but I completely agree. It is a risk, isn't it? Anything when it comes to connecting with others, whether it's a partner or a friend, there kind of is an element of risk, but it's by taking that risk that we actually do connect and yeah conversely actually I think when we try and play it too safe like I also have done for much of my life um you don't really connect you know you don't connect with others you don't even connect with yourself you you start to actually I think you are you start to disguise yourself to yourself. Yes. You don't actually know who you are anymore. Totally.

And I think you can be very fearful of the unknown, which is completely understandable. Because if you're seeking to exert control, an illusory control over your life, then obviously you don't want to go into the dark corner and you don't know what's kind of lurking there for you. But where else are you going to grow into if it isn't the unknown like actually another word for the unknown is the space left to be explored and i think that that's a really important thing to remember that actually there's like opportunity and adventure and growth and self-worth that can often lie in that dark

space that you're so scared of. And it is taking that leap that will open all of those opportunities for you. I remember a few years ago, a chap coming in to the consultation room, a young man who was basically addicted to online pornography. who was basically addicted to online pornography. And I can still remember the way he came in and the way he looked at me, i.e. he couldn't look at me. Eyes were down. He was literally ridden with shame. I think I was the first person he'd actually told.

And shame thrives in secrecy. Yeah. And it was so liberating for him. I know, I thought at the time, but I certainly know since. To actually be able to open up, tell someone. I actually remember saying to him, I've seen many people like you this week. It was, you could just see, well, I'm not alone because shame often does that. You think you're the only one and it wasn't actually that difficult to help him get through that and understand that that was a symptom of a lack of belonging, a lack of community in his life, but it all started with him being able to open up. And I think many people these days, unfortunately, don't feel as though they have those people who they can open up with. Or maybe they do and they don't feel comfortable

doing it. So they go to like a third party, like a doctor or a therapist, which again can be very powerful. But all these things like shame, addiction um guilt that they thrive in secrecy don't they yes it's that thing of fearing that you're the only one yeah and i and i suppose that's what lies behind that whole premise you know every mental health awareness campaign is rooted in the idea that it's good to talk and you must talk and it can be life-saving to talk, which is absolutely true. But sometimes I think that when you're in the darkest depths of despair, it's really hard to talk. It's really hard to verbalize what you're feeling. And sometimes for me anyway, it's easier to write. And that's why it's incredibly important that there are text

helplines as well for people who are in very dark frames of mind. But that's how I make sense of the world. And that's how I continue to share and continue to release any sense of shame that I have. Do you have that with your writing? Yeah, I think I feel that at the end of each book or even through the process of writing it, I understand myself better, particularly with this last one, I must be honest. In many ways, I feel both the podcast and the books, although in some ways they're very selfless things to do because they help so many people, in other ways, they're actually very selfish things to do because they help so many people in other ways they're actually very selfish things to do because i get so much out of them personally and the two can

coexist yeah i think we've been taught that they're mutually exclusive but they're not because actually you need to pay yourself as much attention and as much kindness as you would pay your best friend or the reader of your book or the listener of your podcast it's that cliche of putting on your oxygen mask first no for sure i want to talk about we'll get to your new book magpie shortly philosophy a handbook for when things go wrong is just brilliant honestly it really is it's just um i'm going to quote you on the next edition please do brilliant look to rongan strategy that's all i need please do that's what i came here for it's about it's about many things and i want to get into the these kind of rules as it were but failure right failure is something that many of us struggle with, even saying it, even thinking about it.

And I looked up the definition of failure in the dictionary before I came on stage tonight, and it is a lack of success. Is it? Well, one of the definitions. My initial thought was a lack of success. Well, that kind of then depends on what you're defining as success. Did you then look up success in the dictionary? And did it say the opposite of failure? No, exactly. Well, that would have been...

That damn it dictionary. But you have got your own sort of definition of failure, haven't you? And I think it'd be quite instructive to kind of start with that. Yes. So, my definition of failure changed during the time that I started the podcast. So, I started the podcast in July 2018. And I hadn't really thought about what failure actually was. I hadn't done that thing of looking up in the dictionary. I just sort of thought that I knew. And actually, part of the joy of the podcast is understanding how other people view failure and what they

categorize as their failures. But after about two years of doing the podcast, I realized that I needed to get more precise about it. And so my definition of failure is when something doesn't go according to plan. And then you have to think to question, well, whose plan is it? Is it my plan? Is it society's plan? Or is it a plan that is informed by social conditioning? And then you question the very metrics of what success and failure are. But the other side to that definition is that sometimes

there are failures so cataclysmic that there doesn't seem to be any plan at all. So a failure like a global pandemic, a chronic illness, a death, those failures cannot be easily assimilated in the way that, say, a failed driving test could. So it would be monstrous of me to sit here and say, you can just learn from all failures and it makes you a better person because some failures will be life-shaping and they won't just go away. But it's my profound belief that in the fullness of time, and you must allow yourself the grieving process, but in the fullness of time, I believe that every single failure can teach us something meaningful, something that we needed to know. That's not to say that the failure in and of itself has meaning, but we can choose to

find the meaning by living alongside it. So that's my definition of failure. There's a definition of happiness by Mo Gowdatz that you've written about in the book and I've spoken to Mo about on my podcast like you have and I see it I see a kind of similarity in a really nice way where Mo talks about happiness being greater than or equal to our perception of events minus our expectation yeah right which I think is really beautiful yeah and you're saying failure is what our perception of events minus our expectation. Yeah. Right, which I think is really beautiful. Yeah.

And you're saying failure is what happens when things don't go according to plan, which kind of speaks to, you know, your expectation about the plan and it not getting there, you know, it not meeting up to that. And so what do you think is the relationship between failure and happiness? Well, first first of all I love Mo to distraction

and um he came on my podcast in 2019 and changed the course of the podcast but also changed the course of my life like I honestly consider him to be my a dear friend but also my own personal life guru because that way of thinking was so unbelievably helpful to me alongside another part of his algorithm is that you are not your worst thoughts and the anxious narration of your stressed out brain is not who you are as a person and there is a way of training yourself out of that. And he talks about giving his brain a name and he calls his brain Becky because he imagines her as this annoying girl at school who was always pointing out the things that would go wrong.

And when his Becky brain offers him something that is very negative, like you're a rubbish parent or you're a failure in business, he stops himself and says, Becky, what's your objective evidence for that assertion? Because if you don't have objective evidence, I'd like you to take that negative thought and replace it with a positive one. And it sounds unhinged and there'll be a lot of stopping yourself in the street,

talking to yourself, but it genuinely works because you question the premise. to yourself, but it genuinely works because you question the premise. And I think that's the relation. Always question the premise of what you've been told makes for a successful or a happy life because we are all individuals. And so our answer to that question will by necessity be unique and individual to us. It's not what society is telling you and it's not what a company is trying to sell you. Your definition of each has to be fully grounded in your intuitive knowledge of who you are. And to get to know that instinct,

you need to find your own path to it. But a lot of the time you need quiet and stillness and peace and to switch off from the white noise around you. And I think that's the relation. It's like I could constantly make myself feel like a failure over and over again by having plans for myself that are far too lofty and unrealistic. I used to be someone with a five-year plan and my five-year plans were things of infinite and varied beauty. And I would know exactly what job I'd be doing. I'd know exactly what relationship I'd have,

where I'd be living, what kind of coffee I'd be drinking. And then I'd get to that five-year point and I'd be five years older. I'd be living in a different city. I'd have given up coffee. I was doing a different job and that relationship had ended. And so I didn't want any of the same things, but because I hadn't achieved them according to the plan that I'd set myself five years earlier, I felt like a failure. And after a while, I just thought, I don't want to live my life like that.

And so that, I think, is the relation between Mo's algorithm and how I think of failure. It's all really about being in the present moment, but also, and this isn't Mo, but I'm a firm believer in the power of constructive pessimism. And what I mean by that is, imagine the worst thing that could happen. So if you're going for a promotion at work and you're scared about the interview process, what's the worst thing that could happen? The worst thing that could happen is that you get found out, you get fired,

you lose your job, and you spiral from there on out. Could you cope with that? You might not want to, but could you cope with that? And you probably could cope with that. So in a world where you conceive of the worst possible outcome, the best possible outcome also has to exist. The best possible outcome, you get the promotion, you become CEO, you become a billionaire by the time you're 35. Also unlikely. The extremes are unlikely. The most likely route is somewhere down the middle. And I find that a really helpful way of evaluating what risks I want to take rather than having this rigid five-year plan. I love that because having the five-year plan, by your definition of failure, things not going

to plan, you're just setting up a kind of almost an unmeetable target. Totally. Just throughout the plan. Yeah, throughout the plan, Yeah, throw out the plan. Exactly. And I guess it's not that there's necessarily anything wrong with having a rough plan. I think it's certainly to me, if we cling too tightly to it, we don't allow space for life to happen, things to change, us to evolve as people. So for me, plans, I kind of think more of as kind of i think just like a compass of sort of where i want to set the direction for my life going

forward but leaving lots of room and space for things to develop and evolve depending on who i meet how i might evolve what i might think in the future rather than having that fixed plan i totally agree that you can have a mood board a metaphorical mood board for the future. And obviously, you know, you should save for a pension. Like you can have that kind of plan, but it's more about being able to do something practical today towards that. And if you can't,

then there's no point worrying about your future self because you haven't met that person yet but you know yourself as you are now and I think you're you're you're totally right you can have a kind of rough idea but for me I think my issue was I'd over intellectualized and over analyzed life so I was trying to like squeeze it all into some kind of timetable. And actually, that was making me unhappy because like you, I really value being able to respond to things in the moment and feeling like, oh, that's an interesting person or a great opportunity. Let me do that rather than feeling stuck. Would you describe yourself as spiritual in any way? I would. I don't know if other people would I would and I have always had a belief in something

greater than us and there are many different things that you can call that some people are uncomfortable with the word god which I completely understand but you can call it the universe we can be very scientific about it and just call it the fact that every single atom that exists has existed here forever. Have I got that right? You're more of a scientist, okay? Which means that anyone who has ever died, any being who's ever died, makes up the atoms all around us. Isn't that mind-blowing? And in us, mind-blowing. So I think there's a great convergence of science and spirituality. And yes, I believe that there is something greater than us, a more evolved

being of some description or a collective consciousness or soul that we can lean back into and have faith in. and have faith in? The reason I ask is because as I have gone through this book, there's lots of little bits in it which make me feel, yeah, I wonder if Elizabeth is or regards herself as spiritual. There's something I underlined on page four, which if you don't mind, I'm going to read out to you,

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drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. I firmly cling to the belief that the universe is unfolding exactly as is intended and that although we are as imperfect humans can't hope to understand it all at the time life will generally teach us the lessons we need to learn if we're open to the possibility yeah I still believe that and again I know that that's not for everyone but I believe that and that's how I choose to live my life I think your words there are really telling that's what that's how I choose to live my life. I think the words there are really telling that's what that's how I choose to live my life I love it I actually I also subscribe to that belief I also choose to subscribe to that belief because I feel it helps us deal with those inevitable obstacles and stresses that are

going to come up if I believe that there is actually a reason or this is meant to happen I'm meant to learn a lesson here yeah as you say not everyone has to believe in that I find just generally I'm happier and more content when I believe that yeah that sort of approach I would think helps someone deal with failure is that something you feel you've always had or you feel that you've really tuned into more since talking to people week in week out for what four years now yeah on the subject of failure I've definitely tuned into it more I've had it for most of my life like I remember I didn't grow up in a religious household,

but I remember around the age of seven feeling that there was something bigger than us. But it's been genuinely through the people that I've met during the podcast, through the extraordinary conversations that I've been privileged to have, and I know you feel the same with your guests, that I feel like I've connected with other people who see the world as I do but who have also informed and evolved my thinking on it so absolutely it's definitely become a much bigger part of my daily practice now yeah failure as a concept as a term i'm fascinated you've spoken to a lot of people now who reveal their three failures to you which you among them i was among them and man i honestly i think

the truth is formulating that email to you was probably the most stressful things I've done in the past few months like I found it so difficult to um to write to you and tell you I was like I've got a I've got to tell a list of these three failures I'm going to speak about said yes to coming on the show and there was a discomfort there because I realized through that process that I've spent the vast majority of my life avoiding any situation where it was possible that I could fail yeah just won't put myself there a sport that I couldn't be the best at I wouldn't play it I'm not interested in that you know I and actually when I was reading your book and you mentioned Malcolm Gladwell,

I found that super fascinating that he was, you wrote about how he said when he was 16, he stopped running because he realized he couldn't be an Olympic runner. And then he re-took it up at 50 and realized how much of his life, what a waste of his life to not have engaged in something that gave him so much joy. I so connected with that because I feel I've done similar things like that. Of course, we spoke about this on your show. I'm interested, are you seeing differences between the way men and women see failure or think about failure, talk about failure. And then I guess going beyond men v women, are there differences between different races, people from different backgrounds? Have you seen any patterns there? That's a super interesting question. And I will take the second half first which is that I think there are people in the

modern world who are given continuous chances to fail upwards one might look at our government and see some of them there who these are beacons of privilege. They are people who have had everything. They've had the most elite educations. They're born white and male and into the image of the world. And they get repeated chances. someone who's a carer, a person of color, you are not given as many chances to fail. And that is something that I absolutely feel that I have to acknowledge any single time I talk about failure, because my experience of it as a white middle-class woman is by necessity going to be very different. But interestingly, I had a fascinating conversation recently with a forthcoming guest on How to Fail, who is a brilliant novelist, and she is a young black woman. And she believes that talk of privilege is actually flattening the discourse, because she's someone who studied maths at Cambridge, had an incredibly lucrative job in the city for 10 years. And she's like, you know,

had an incredibly lucrative job in the city for 10 years. And she's like, you know, actually, I have privileges myself that get obscured if we're just talking about who I am as a black woman. And she prefers not to focus on race for that reason. And I thought that that was a really interesting and evolved way of looking at something, which because I am who I am, I don't have as much nuance in that. So I'm constantly being educated. In terms of men and women, I definitely noticed when I first started the podcast. So it launched in July, 2018, and I genuinely didn't really know what I was doing. I just knew that I wanted to do this kind of interview. I drew my own logo, as you can probably tell with felt pens one night. I hired a sound engineer who I found on Google.

I DM'd a hummus company and asked if they wanted to sponsor the first season, which they did. And then I basically asked my friends and contacts to be my first eight guests. And I'd been a journalist by then for 15-odd years, so I had quite a lot of contacts. And what I noticed was that every single man I approached said to me I don't think I have failed so probably not for me this podcast and I was like okay but would you would you just consider doing an interview he was okay I'll do I'll do the interview but I haven't failed so I was like, it's up to me as the interviewer. And every single woman I approached, bar one, said, God, I failed so many times. I can't whittle it down to just three. And it was fascinating because when I got to do each of those interviews,

of course, those men had failed and they were wonderful guests and they really opened up. It's just that they hadn't categorized their mistakes or their phases where they experienced less success. They hadn't categorized it as a failure in their own head. Whereas the women had no issue with that. And what I think was going on there was that if you are lucky enough to be born into a world that is friendly to who you are from the outset,

you're less likely to think of a failure in that way. You see it as an overcomable obstacle on your path to eventual success, because eventual success is guaranteed for you. But if you are a woman, a marginalized person, a person of color, you're far less likely to see that. And a failure can be a really difficult and permanent knockback. And that was just really interesting. I'd never thought of that in quite that way before. And I think it's partly why we still live in a world where overwhelmingly women won't put themselves forward for promotions if they meet six out of 10 of the criteria. There's been some research done in Carnegie

Mellon University about this. Whereas a man who meets six out of 10 of the criteria. There's been some research done in Carnegie Mellon University about this. Whereas a man who meets six out of 10 of the criteria will think, well, I'm overqualified and I've got this in the bag. And they will go for it and they will put themselves forward. Now, I have to say that that was 2018. And that has changed beyond measure, the more of the podcast I've done and the more that the world has changed around it. And now I get amazing men like you who come ready, willing, able, and humble and open up genuinely about their failures rather than using it as an excuse to hum or brag, which used to happen. But now I don't see any difference. And I think that we do men a disservice by assuming that they're not categorizing it as failure because they're already arrogant.

It's actually because so many of them weren't able, they weren't equipped emotionally and they weren't given the license emotionally to open up about those kinds of things. And now, you know, we live in a far less binary age in all senses and I'm so grateful for that and I feel like all genders are so much more open to vulnerability and I'm really proud to be a tiny part of that yeah I think we said there about the difference between men and women I think is so powerful especially not to then jump to that obvious conclusion. But actually,

there is more nuance because we're all influenced hugely by the way that we're brought up and how we see the world, how our parents did, what the people around us did. If we did have, you know, people around us who were succeeding, we probably expected we're going to succeed as well. And therefore, you're right. You can totally see how our perception of whether that is called a failure because failure still I think has a negative connotation around it I think that's one of the big problems for me when I think about the term failure failure can actually be a beautiful thing right it can be a wonderful thing it can be a tool for growth and progression and evolution in who we are. But I still think you hear the word failure, certainly for me, certainly I think for a lot of society.

I think the first thing that comes up is kind of a negative thought. Failure is bad. Yeah. Well, I think it's quite a dehumanizing term. Like you hear about systems failures don't you you don't hear about someone who just had a bad day i mean you do but it's not it's not seen in the same way and that's why i'm really passionate about de-stigmatizing the language because language is so incredibly powerful and one of the examples that I give is my own experiences with fertility medicine,

where, again, this is going back quite a few years, but when I first did IVF in 2014, I was repeatedly seen by male consultants and some of them were great. But the one thing that a male consultant could never fully empathize with is what it was like to have a miscarriage. Like they hadn't had periods. So how could they, it's a leap of imaginative empathy that happened to lie beyond some of those consultants by no means all. But I was repeatedly told that I was failing to respond to the drugs. And this is something I've spoken about a lot before. A friend of mine was told that she had an inhospitable womb someone else was told that their cervix was incompetent like this is language medical jargon honestly well i know failure to thrive failure to

respond it's like it's it's nuts and i so want to hear what you have to say about it because medicine is all about the human and yet so much of the language is dehumanizing and is designed to make you feel like you're the system that's failing and when you are a woman who has grown up in a culture that rightly or wrongly has made you believe that your biological prerogative is to have children and you're not doing that you already feel like a failure in your own head and then to be told that there's this additional layer of failure where for some reason you're this weirdo who won't respond to these drugs that you give everyone else

was really hurtful and that's why the language is really important and actually I've been contacted by lots of people in the medical profession since speaking openly about it who are so willing and open to change and i had this beautiful experience in the last couple of years of being treated by a woman who used such warm language so she can this is probably way too much information she was talking about my internal organs she you know, I had an issue with my womb. And again, I've been used to being told things like, oh, it's inhospitable, etc. And she just said, your womb is a beautiful room. And it has these columns, and we need to remove the columns to make more space. And I was like, that, just that seems so simple, but it made me feel so seen and safe. And like, I wasn't at fault so just tiny things like that but tell me about your perception of medical language I mean there's so many ways to

tackle this I think it's incredibly problematic I've come to the conclusion that a lot of what we're taught as doctors and the jargon around it only serves to make us more and more disconnected with the people we're talking to. You know, they say at medical school, I think you learn the equivalent of a new language. So, you're literally learning that many new terms and words. But the problem is then when you want to communicate with people who are not, who've never learned that language, then you've got a bit of a problem unless you can translate it in a way that means something to them. And I think the way we communicate as doctors, I really feel it's crucial to the outcome as well. It's not just a nice thing

to do. It influences how someone feels. It influences whether someone feels they've got autonomy over their life and their body and what happens or whether they feel like a passive kind of recipient of something. Even the way we label people, I'm very careful now in a way I probably wasn't 10, 15 years ago. Like I'd like to think I was, but I think I've learned and evolved where I don't even like saying, you know, you've got depression, for example, or you've got type 2 diabetes. For me, it's always, well, look, at the moment, your blood sugar is consistent with a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, or you've got symptoms that, yeah, they are consistent with a diagnosis of depression, but by not labeling them, so you are depressed, you know, I have depression, that then makes the illness become a part of who that person is. And then it can be very difficult

to free yourself from that label. I love it. And I wanted to ask you a question about where you think medical terminology arose from. did it arise from the need for a clinician to distance themselves? Because if you're connecting on the level that we've been talking about with vulnerability, with openness, with honesty to every single patient, is there a risk that you just can't take all of that pain on, that actually you need to slightly step back from that empathetic flexing of a muscle? Yeah. I mean, I don't know the truth where this has come from. I don't know in detail the history of it, but I imagine it was done with the right intentions. And I also think medicine used to be very much of the model where patient comes in,

there was a kind of paternalistic relationship where the doctor would tell you what was wrong and tell you what you needed to do. Therefore, you know, did you need to connect? Was it not just, you know, tell me the prescription, tell me the diagnosis? Whereas I think it's evolved because a lot of what we see now, you know, I think 80% to 90% of what we see is in some way related to our collective modern lifestyles. And therefore, that didactic approach, I don't think works very well. It has to be a partnership. The patient has to be an active participant. How can you be an active participant if you don't understand the language the other person's speaking? And you said before about what that

female fertility doctor said to you, and you felt seen, you felt heard, right? You felt held. You know, this is what we all want in all of our relationships. It's no different with a doctor. Final question on this though. So my father's a doctor. So I literally have a paternalistic relationship

with medicine and he's a very good one. I'm retired now. But I interviewed at the height of the covid pandemic and an icu doctor called jim down who then wrote a book about it and after i interviewed jim i spoke to my father about it and he said well did you ask him about the fact that failure in medicine is this huge shadow that remains unspoken a lot of the time because you fear it because actually if you make the wrong call in a situation that's literally life-ending do you so do you think that you think about medical school even and i think

you know doctors in general in my experience and i'm well aware there are some doctors in the audience some of my good friends so they might have a different uh viewpoint to this but for me i think medicine attracts a lot of super capacitive people I think a lot of people end up in medicine not because they wanted to do it but because they were good at school and it was a good career path and I think failure is something it is medical school is quite capacitive I certainly remember being in the old Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, you know, being scared of being asked the question by the professor and being literally petrified I'm going to get something wrong, which is no real way to learn productively, is it?

I still remember as you asked that question a moment when I was in my second year as a junior doctor. Back then, you know, you were junior house officer in your first year and then after that you're a senior house officer and I remember I was at the Western General in Edinburgh and I stopped off on a week of nights and we didn't really have much cover in the hospital I was like oh after me there's no registrar they're just a consultant they're at home. That's you and your other SHO literally running the hospital at night. You've only qualified a year ago. And I remember a sick patient came in to the coronary care unit. And I can't remember the exact ins and outs of what happened, but I certainly felt a bit out of my depth. I think I was trying to get some help but I do remember the next morning the consultant on the ward rounds made me feel as though I had done something wrong

or I delayed something that was really important and you know that doesn't feel good you know and I'm sure many doctors and medical students have had that experience where you're like oh man should I have done something earlier you know and you kind internalize that. I don't think there's any good mechanism to talk about that stuff in medicine. No. So yeah, that kind of stuff sits with you and I think drives you on to think you have to be perfect and you can't make a mistake. But why would a doctor not make a mistake? Which human being doesn't make a mistake? We sort of think, don't we, that maybe a doctor has to be the superhero who never makes a mistake. But how realistic is that based upon how

fallible all of us are as humans? Totally. I think we're extra scared about doctors making mistakes because of what it might mean for us and the trust that we place in them but that was exactly my dad's point that there is no way in the hospital system to acknowledge failures and move on from it because everyone's sort of scared about it and that's super interesting hearing your insight because I failed to ask that question of Dr Jim Down and so I've been just searching for a doctor ever since that I could ask that of so thank you no no worries you have these seven failure principles which I want to get through but before we do that because I think they're very very instructive and they're going to be very helpful for people you have been very very open about a lot of your failures or what you consider to be your failures.

I guess there's quite a few I wanted to talk about. There was one that really got my attention. It was to do with anger. Yeah. anger. Yeah. Failure to express my anger instead masking it with socially acceptable sadness. Yes. Can you elaborate? Yes. I'm thrilled to elaborate. I've leaned into my rage in my 40s. So that all came about because I remember, again, I'm just going to quote Emma um who is my best friend she's also a psychotherapist which is just the best possible combination and she's who I do best friend therapy with my other podcast and uh it was when I was going through that marital breakdown that I referred to earlier and she said to me how are you feeling and first of all I found it difficult to answer because actually I think I tend to go numb when I'm in crisis and to disassociate from my body but then

I said I'm feeling really sad she was like do you or might you feel angry but you feel like sadness is more palatable and it really unlocked something in me because actually there was so much that I was angry about but I hadn't ever allowed myself to acknowledge it and I think it's because as a society we're not tremendously comfortable with anger and we're not comfortable particularly when anger is expressed by people or genders who we stereotypically expect to be compassionate and kind and pliant and pleasant people pleasers. And as a girl who was raised in the 80s, I was one of those. And I remember vividly when I was about 10, locking myself into a cupboard at school because I was about to lose my temper and I locked myself

into this cupboard and I had a talk I like gave myself a good talking to you and I was like you cannot be this angry person because no one wants to be friends with you you need to leave your temper behind and from that day like I've never lost my temper unless I'm behind a wheel in a car like road rage is absolutely where it comes out for me because I feel protected only when I'm driving on my own and no one else is there to witness it and um I I think a lot of people can relate to that and I know that a lot of women can relate to it and so throughout my 20s I sort of masked my anger and then in my mid-30s, my life kind of imploded. And I realized I was really angry about how I'd allowed myself to be treated and what I'd allowed society to tell me was acceptable.

And if I can talk a bit more about women specifically, angry women are misinterpreted through the centuries. And they're either made absurd or shrewish or crazy or unhinged or completely maligned as sort of benign. So someone like Rosa Parks, who sits in the whites-only bit of the bus and launches a whole aspect of the civil rights movement through history, has been portrayed as a sort of benign old woman. Oh, a little old lady who just one day was sick of it. She was a furious, a righteously furious civil rights activist for years up to that point. And that's just one example. There are loads of other examples of women whose anger, they've been disenfranchised from claiming it. And so

I just realized that part of the reason that happens is because anger, when used appropriately and when used in solidarity with other people's anger, can often be an enormous force for good social change. And I think we saw that with Black Lives Matter, for instance. What is protest if it isn't anger founded in the need to make a change for the better? And so I've really learned now to acknowledge my anger when it rises rather than tamping it down and denying it and pretending it's something else. Because actually then you end up, like we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation, you end up masking yourself to yourself and that's not a comfortable way to live. Something I think about a lot these days is about emotional stress. And I say a lot these days that emotional stress is real. It's not neutral.

It has to be processed in some way and when I think of your story there you know little girl lock yourself up in the cupboards give yourself a talking to and you never then lose your temper again you know that is pretty profound maybe 20-25 years before you actually sort of deal with that what was the cost of suppressing your anger? You know, what, what, how did that show up in your life? Because that anger has got to go somewhere, right? It doesn't just vanish just because you decided not to show your temper in public. Yes. I think alongside anger, I suppressed a lot of my own desires. So my way of going through life was to try and be really good and to try and tick every box, to pass every exam, to please every employer when I got into the workplace,

to say yes to the overtime and to the jobs that other people didn't want to do in the hopes that I would eventually be rewarded for being a good girl, a good person. And the knock-on effect of that, and I did it in my romantic relationships as well, when a boyfriend would say, where do you want to go for lunch? I genuinely wouldn't know. I'd say, I don't mind wherever you want to go. To an extent that it ended up sickening me. I said, I don't mind wherever you want to go. I don't, to an extent that it ended up sickening me. Like I just, I lost sight of what I wanted in my life because what I was doing was creating a scenario where I was people pleasing to such a degree that I was outsourcing my sense of self to other people's opinions of me. And at that point you realize that it's not sustainable. At some point, I believe you have to

make a decision to live your own life according to what you want. And so I think that's how it played out. I got into a series of relationships, romantically, in friendships, at work, that did not serve me, but they definitely serve the other people involved. I just spent all of my time trying to please them. And the irony is, is that I didn't end up pleasing them because I ended up letting them down because I wasn't being honest about myself because I'd forgotten who that was. And I think that's how it played out. That I had to get to a point where I hit a wall to get to a point where I hit a wall and it could not continue. And the cost of that was that I imploded my life and I ended a lot of relationships, most notably that marriage I spoke about. And that's like a huge thing to do and it hurts other people. And I think that many of us are taught the

myth that people pleasing is a selfless act. And actually, the extent to which I took it, it ended up being selfish because I needed to take the time to know myself, be in tune with my desires and to understand what I was feeling and what I wanted from life. So much I want to talk about with respect to people pleasing. I resonate with so much of that. I think I describe myself to you on your show as a people pleaser in recovery yeah um which I think fits sits very nicely with me I think one of the most instructive things I think I've learned about people pleasing and I can have compassion where it comes from, because I think honestly,

for most of us, it comes from a place of lack about not feeling good enough in who we are. So we have to act in a certain way to get that validation and love from other people. But it was when I came to learn that actually, in some ways, it's quite a manipulative thing to do. We're actually trying to manipulate other people's perception of us. How does that sit with you? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits

that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you

back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour and I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most

things it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me

how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. Uncomfortably, but it's probably true. I think both are true. I think the sense of ensuring safety because no one is annoyed with you, that can be quite a primal thing. And that feels very real or did feel very

real to me because like you, I'm a recovering people pleaser. And yes, I think there is absolutely an element of manipulation to that because you're trying to control the uncontrollable. You're trying to seek safety by controlling others' responses to you. And if you're good at it, that can absolutely be a form of manipulation. And I think I was doing it unconsciously, but it wasn't making me happy. And it definitely wasn't making the people I was with happy either. Because there's a fundamental lack of honesty there, I think. And now I really check myself actually. Literally today, I had to write an email to get some information that I needed, that I was owed. And it was an email directed at someone who is not being very good at their job. And I had to stop myself from saying, I'm just checking in on this. I stripped out the word just. I was like,

I don't want my email to have mitigating words that are designed to make this person feel warmly towards me. I need to get my point across and I need to make sure that they do what they said they were going to do. And so as opposed to saying, I was just wondering, and would you mind, and I'm so sorry to bother you and, you know, lots of love, XXX. I was like, no, I need to communicate a straightforward message because that's not just about me. That's also about paying respect to the other person. They need to know where they stand.

They need to know what my expectation is and they need to know what the contract is. Yeah. That's really powerful, I think. Really, really powerful. Because even when we walk that path of recovery from people pleasing, like many people are doing or certainly trying to do, you can fall into those little old habits and correspondence like that. Soften everything. Make sure they like you as you do it. And as you say, it's a disservice to yourself.

It's a disservice to other people. And there's a kind of fear, isn't there? It comes down to a fear of fear isn't there it comes down to a fear of being honest yeah and a fear of being disliked as well which probably has its roots in many millennia ago when it genuinely was a matter of life or death whether you were going to isolate yourself from a tribe or not like being part of a tribe was a means of protecting yourself and that instinct is still extremely strong in us as it should be because it's also a driver against loneliness like we seek out the companionship of other people and there's been lots of research that shows that

not having friends is more damaging to your life expectation than smoking 20 cigarettes a day. So it has an important function, but I think sometimes we take it to an extreme and we override the positive aspect of that function and we're just trying to grab any safety we can get. A lot of these things, if we take them to extremes, they become problematic. As I get older older the more i realize that very few things are true in the extremes yeah you know whether we talk about

you know people pleasing well it's kind of like well there's nothing necessarily wrong with uh doing things that people around you like it's where is that coming from? Exactly. That's the key, I think. Where does that drive come from? You mentioned competition at the start of our conversation. And it's interesting what you said was, I don't think being competitive is actually who I am. It's alert behavior. Now, that fascinates me because when I was researching for this conversation, I heard a conversation with you where you were hypothesizing that maybe that is who you were. I guess my question is, did you used to think that being competitive was who you are? That's who Elizabeth Day is. And is that quite a recent realization that actually it isn't?

So when I say I don't think it's innate, I don't think I was born with it. I think that I have been nurtured to become competitive by myself and other people. And now it is a fundamental part of me that I have to look at fondly if I possibly can and just think, oh, funny you being competitive again. How absurd, but that's sweet. It's part of you. That's how I need to think of it. I can't deny that part of me because we all know where denial leads to. And so I need to treat that part of me with compassion.

But I think I learned to be competitive very young because I have an older sister who's four years older. And four years is a really interesting age gap because she would always be able to do things better than I did. Always. There's actually no competing with that. But I would strive to be like her because I thought she was amazing and I wanted to be more like her. And then I got into a situation where I applied that mindset at school. And when I happened to do well in an exam, I got praise for it. And I got praise from the people I loved for it. And I wanted more of that. And so it became this cycle that I kept on doing it. I

kept on attempting to achieve and perform and compete because I thought that what I got in return was love and validation. And actually, it wasn't. It was someone saying you did well in an exam, which is a completely different thing, or it should be from your identity. But my identity got really mixed up in that. And I think as a result, my 20s were a really tough and tricky decade. And I think they are for many people, because for many of us, it's the first time that we've come out of full-time education and adult life is bafflingly free of that kind of exam related signposts that can tell you you're doing a good job as an adult you actually need to find your own way and navigate at a time when you're also having to

forge a career forge meaningful relationships and friendships earn enough money to pay the rent, and it's really exhausting to try and do all of that if you're stuck in that internal feedback loop. Being competitive from the outside, it can look, yeah, that's a really helpful trait because it's driven you to work hard. You've had an incredible amount of success in your career, journalist, author, podcaster. You know, you are someone who society would regard as very, very successful. What are the downsides to having that trait of competitiveness?

So I think you're right. Part of being compassionate with myself is also acknowledging that my competitive drive is fuel that I have been able to turn to and use to work really hard. The downsides are that when I'm stressed or tired or overwhelmed, the place that I go to to put my stress is into a kind of competition. So it's a competition channel that I tune into because I'm very used to feeling like that. And I get very critical of myself when I'm in that mode of thinking. And it's a way of metabolizing stress that actually comes from elsewhere, but competition is how I know how to do it.

And so what that looks like on a practical basis is I always expect more of myself. So I've been really lucky and I've worked hard and I've achieved some things, but there are also always more things to achieve. There are always more people to connect with. There's always more guests to get on my podcast. There's always more things to achieve. There are always more people to connect with. There's always more guests to get on my podcast. There's always more books to sell. There's always more ideas to have. I just, and it's not, it's absolutely not greed that drives that. It's fear that it's all going to go away.

And it's also excitement that I want to be able to connect with as many people as I can and I want to be able to leave a tiny mark on this world that leaves it a better place and so I can never feel fully relaxed in what I have achieved and it's something I don't like in myself and I'm really grappling with it. Yeah I mean the reason I'm so passionate about this is because this is something I've I would say suffered with and I don't say that lightly I have been competitive for pretty much all of my life super competitive but I'm not anymore. I know and I need you to teach me your ways. Well, I can only share with you my experience and what I've seen but my fundamental view now and this applies to everyone actually is that who we are is not who we have to be, it's who we became, right? Much of who we are, much of our personality,

we think it's us. You know, people would say my whole life, you know, wrong and super competitive, you won't lose, right? I very much like you was a pretty sore loser with board games when I was seven. And I was reading this morning that I think you were a pretty sore loser with board games. Lots of similarities in our stories. So many. We both like Neighbours, for example. I read that this morning. The soap opera, not the actual Neighbours.

Yeah. But I think being competitive has been a very lonely place to live. And my competitiveness was fueled by a feeling of lack. So I'm not enough in who I am. I got my self-worth from the validation from other people, hence the people-pleasing. And I know from your story, you share this in common with me, that you got your self-worth from getting good grades

and being validated by your teachers or whatever. Or for me, it was for my parents. But if you think about it, developing the personality traits of being competitive is a fantastic strategy because it's going to help you keep feeding that need to do well. Because like you, I've also ticked many of these boxes of societal success and it looks as though everything's going great. But honestly, until three or four years ago, I don't think I felt truly content inside. And a lot of that is because I've let go now of that competitiveness. I genuinely am not that person anymore because that hole in my heart that I felt for much of my life, that I wasn't enough, turning up as just me and that I had to be

something else. Since my dad died just over nine years ago, I've done a lot of internal work. I've stopped looking out there for answers. I've turned it around to look inside. And as I feel now, I actually really like the person I see in the mirror, right? As I like myself, dare I say it, love who I truly am, I have no need anymore to be competitive. It doesn't help me anymore. And actually, it has gone. And so, I genuinely believe everyone has the possibility to reimagine what their life might look like but I think in order to actually move beyond it we actually have to understand where it came from and what role it served I'm so sorry about your father and thank you for sharing that because I aspire to that.

And you're a whole year older than me, so I feel like by the time I'm 44, I'll have nailed it. But I think you're so right, and I know that logically. I know that that's where the answer is. And I think that for a lot of my life, I've used an analytical system for a soul problem, soul, S-O-U-L problem. And it's never going to solve it. There are two different systems at play there. Exactly. And for me, a big part of this was a form of therapy called internal family systems,

which I did a podcast on about i don't know 10 weeks ago something like that which connected with so many people i actually did a session on the show with the guy who founded it and it's really transformative because you go back to where that came from like for me let's say a seven-year-old little boy developing the idea that he's not enough and you go back as your adult self and you have to trust initially because if you're used to everything being rational and understood, I remember the first session I did, you know, you have to really trust. Is this doing anything? It is unbelievable how many people this helps because you go back in, you make peace with it. Literally in that moment, you talk to that

seven-year-old self or that eight-year-old self, whoever it is, as your 44-year-old self. And you say, yeah, I understand. You know, you actually have a conversation. And when you go back in, understand where it's coming from and reprogram it, and it's actually relatively simple to do, you just find that your life afterwards changes. Like, I'm not trying not to be competitive. It's not like an effort now. I just don't feel it anymore. And it's so liberating. So first of all, I'm going to go back and listen to that podcast episode. And secondly, how did it feel for you getting a number one

Sunday Times bestseller? This was actually a real life scenario, what, five, six weeks ago. That actually was a real life situation that showed myself, oh man, I really am changing. showed myself, oh man, I really am changing. Because, you know, you're a fellow author, right? You know, I'm sure most authors would give their right arm to be a number one paperback Sunday Times bestseller, right? Ask me five years ago, I would have said the same thing. Like literally what happens, I can remember it, it was Tuesday my editor at Penguin my senior editor she I got a text from her saying can you give me a call I thought this is weird like this is quite normally it's email go on so you didn't immediately think what have I done wrong because that would be my response I did part of me because that's my natural problem what have I done have I messed

something up somewhere um so I phoned her and she was like jumping through hoops, really, really excited. So the whole team at Celebrate, we just found out this Sunday you're going to be number one on the paperback list. And I'd never been that before. And honestly, right, I can tell you five years ago if that had happened, I would have been, I would have jumped through the roof. I would have texted my mates.

I would have called them all. I honestly just felt quite a contentment. I thought, yeah, cool. Okay, great. I'm really pleased that what's going to help people. I promise I'm not just saying that. I actually thought, actually, I still need to wash my daughter's sports gear for tomorrow and the kids need feeding. That's generally what was going through my mind. There was just a quiet contentment rather than an artificial ego elevation, which I think I've had in the past. Now, that doesn't mean I take it for granted. It's very, very different. It means that I'm no longer attached to that external validation and that success like I have been since I was a kid. And it feels absolutely fantastic. It feels liberating and free. And it's funny, Elizabeth, because

I was chatting to a mate before the book actually came out. And I genuinely had got to a place with this book where you don't want to say, you know, we put ourselves out there each week on a podcast or with books. And, you know, when you're someone who very much needs the opinions of others to validate who you are, it can be pretty hard being out in the public eye. And I know you've said before, you struggle with criticism sometimes online or those sort of things. I had genuinely made peace before this book came out. Honestly, with zero arrogance, I actually said to my friend, you know what? I know this is a great book. This is the best I can do at this point in my life. Whether this is a success or not says nothing about who I am as a

person, right? Maybe it will connect, maybe it won't. It's still a great book that I'm really proud of. I don't think I've ever felt like that before, before a book came out. And so the irony is, you mentioned about spiritual thoughts and feelings so the irony is you mentioned about you know spiritual thoughts and feelings the irony is is that I've never had a book that's more successful yet I'm totally detached from needing that external validation it's so interesting because it says nothing about you as a person and also the weird thing is actually the way, the kind of two-dimensional way in which society deems something successful says nothing about the quality of the work. That's the thing that I've just realized. It's like actually someone harassed who's running

late for their flight, who's running through WH Smith at Heathrow Airport, who grabs a book from the shelf and is a product of their entire life experience up to that point, the emotional and the physical baggage they're carrying to get on the plane. And they light the color pink over the color orange and they reach for a book and that's the book that gets sold that day. I just realized recently like, oh, so little of it is to do with what's contained within. And I think you're right that true enlightenment comes from being engaged in the task itself rather than the outcome. Yeah. And going back to what you said before, it's, you know, when you used to not allow yourself to feel anger, would hide it with sadness,

like acceptable sadness. The only reason I've got to this place is because I went into these uncomfortable emotions. I had, you know, often it requires these big moments in life, doesn't it? Like a parent dying to suddenly cause you to ask these big existential questions. That was it for me, where I then go inward and actually go into these kind of dark places that you've covered up, that you don't allow yourself to feel, that you distract yourself with what I call junk happiness habits. But that's, for me, where the gold lies. That's where true freedom is. And as you say, like, you know, I'm a big music fan. A lot of the albums I love have hardly sold anything because they didn't have the right PR or marketing, whatever. I still love

those albums. The cheeky girls. Pardon? Cheeky girls. Well, you know, how did you know? Have you had a look at my playlist? Do you know what I mean? So I think there's, it's easy to say, it's harder to do and actually feel it. And that's why it was really quite a nice feeling this time when it was like oh I'm actually not attached to this like I used to be yeah um one of your failures that you have spoken about is um well I guess your miscarriage and your infertility. Yeah. How are you feeling about those things these days? It's a really big question. And so as not to take up the next two hours of everyone's time,

I'll just say that it is one of those painful, grieving experiences that I live alongside rather than being over. And I think that grief is often like that. We live alongside it and it's like a droplet of red paint in a vat of white paint it forever changes the color and I've had a really long journey I spent the best part of a decade sort of trying and as yet failing to have a baby in the biological way and I And I'm still engaged in that. But there are aspects of it, of recurrent miscarriage, of IVF, of all of the things I've been through that I'm profoundly grateful for. I'm grateful for the fact that it's taught me that I'm so much more resilient and

stronger than I thought. I'm grateful for the fact that it's taught me that I'm so much more resilient and stronger than I thought I'm grateful for the fact that it's given me a life I never expected which there can be some pain attached to that but also there can be a great deal of liberation it encourages you to think differently about the kind of life that you want to live and I'm also extremely grateful that it's brought me into contact with amazing women and men who are on this journey with me. And I might not ever have met them. We might only ever have exchanged one DM or they might have come to one of my shows and they might have sent an email after a podcast episode. And I feel we are this army engaged in the same battle and I no longer feel alone. And so I'm extremely grateful for all of those reasons because I think it's given me a far more profound understanding of

life's infinite texture. And it's given me a lot. But it's caused me a great deal of sadness. a great deal of sadness and I hope one day still to be a mother and that's where I'm at with it yeah you wrote a um a beautiful mother's day post this year on your instagram feeds which I read this morning and you know it was really um it was just so beautiful so touching and it really made me stop and think actually um perhaps you could share some of the thoughts and sentiments that went into that yeah so Mother's Day can be a real trigger point for many people who don't identify or aren't parents in the way that they would like to be. And I see one of my roles, given the platform that I do have, to speak to those people because I think that so often we can get ignored in a culture that really fetishizes a certain kind of parenthood and so I wrote this post about how if you're currently engaged in this battle to conceive or to become a parent in whatever way you desire if you're actively engaged in that struggle what I believe that's doing it's preparing you for

parenthood in ways you can't even imagine you're already a parent because of the fight that you're fighting for your child who doesn't exist yet and that's how i make meaning of it it's like all of this is equipping me i am a warrior in a battle and i am equipping myself for the ferocity of love that will come on the other side of that and i wrote something along those terms yeah do you ever allow yourself to imagine you know what what happens if this doesn't happen for you do you do you ever go there or is it still very much hope well i think anyone who has been on this sort of facility journey gets very practiced at balancing hope and expectation alongside the knowledge of loss. And it's a very ambiguous and difficult headspace to occupy, but I've got really used to it. So I

hold all of those things in my head simultaneously. And one of the stresses I think is that, you know, we live in an age where we talk a lot about the power of manifestation, and that's so wonderful in so many ways. But it does mean that sometimes if you fail at something that you've imagined with such hope and such yearning, and you've imagined it so powerfully, and it doesn't happen, you internalize that failure. And that's sometimes been my experience that i can't hope wholeheartedly because i'm also realistic and because of everything that i've been through and i'm of a certain age but when i tell you and this comes from my spiritual and intuition

and intuitive beliefs when i tell you i just know i know it's going to happen so i know it alongside all of those different emotions yeah how has your experience over the past 10 years with this influenced your brand new book magpie the novel that's just come out? Well, Magpie was written in two halves. I'd written about 15,000 words before the first national lockdown hit. And at the beginning of that lockdown, I'm now married to a lovely person. We found out we were pregnant and that was a really unmooring place to be. I'd had two miscarriages and then a global pandemic happened. And then we discovered that we were pregnant really quite unexpectedly. And I couldn't write. And so I set Magpie aside

because there was just too much else going on in my head. And very sadly, at eight weeks, we lost that pregnancy. And in the aftermath of that, there was this shattering absence and a great deal of sadness. And it also felt like it was such a lonely time for so many of us, lockdown. And so we were kind of confronted with our grief in a way that normal life allows you to step outside of it. We just had it there. And one of the only things that I could do then was to write because writing and reading is how I make sense of the world. It's how I communicate. And I wanted something to exist where otherwise there would just have been absence.

And that's when I wrote The Rest of Magpie. And it was hugely influenced by what I was going through. And I wanted to write a book that was a novel of the kind that I would have liked to have seen my experiences reflected in when I was going through them, when I was going through IVF, when I was going through the first of those three miscarriages. I didn't read that in fiction. And I think we've got a lot better at talking openly about these things. And there's an increasing amount of nonfiction being written about it, which is really wonderful and powerful. But I wanted to put it in a novel. And I wanted to put it in a novel that was accessible and gripping for anyone who hadn't been through any of that trauma and so I hope what

you have with magpie is a really really compelling read and there's one massive plot twist in it and and I don't yeah I don't think I would have written that book had I not gone through what I'd gone through and I'm very grateful that I have an outlet to put all of that emotional experience into i guess it speaks to something you said before about failure that um you know that there's always an opportunity to learn something from it yes whatever that might be and you caveated it as you always do so beautifully you know you made which was something i will say one thing i've noticed um for you I don't think I know anyone better at always prefacing any answer with a caveat first or acknowledging let's say privilege or anything like that um thank you that's actually a really lovely thing for you to

say I'm glad I've noticed you do you do it all the time is that something that comes naturally to you you know where does that come from do you think i think it does come naturally to me i'm trying to think where it might come from i think i've always felt like again caveat i'm aware of how absurd this might sound sitting here on stage as someone who is white and privileged and middle class but I've always felt like an outsider and I'll explain that because when I was four we moved to Northern Ireland and I had this English accent and we lived in Derry and if anyone has watched the amazing show Derry Girls the weird English cousin in that show that was me so I was someone who I didn't have a great time at secondary school. I became someone who didn't speak that much

because I didn't want people to identify me or have perceptions of me through my accent. And I became an observer, a listener, and someone who really, I think, felt compassion for the underdog and the people who were misunderstood. So I think I've had that from an early age. And then honestly, being a journalist and doing a lot of interviews, you become very practiced at listening. And I think that it's such an important quality

for anyone to have. And so if you're listening, then you'll hear people have so many different life experiences. And it's crucial to make people feel seen, as I've discovered myself on my particular journey through life. And I had this experience recently where I did a podcast episode and I asked an elegantly phrased question and a trans listener emailed me saying, I know you probably didn't intend this, but I felt really unseen when you said that for these reasons. And it was such a beautiful email because it wasn't angry. It was, it was understanding, but it was making a point that it was very important to him to make and I think 10 years ago I still would have received that in a very defensive mindset and being like well I didn't mean that so and actually I just

heard what he was saying I was like I don't I hate the thought of causing that person pain and I apologized for it on the podcast and I felt this is so much better because we've listened to each other and it's just so much better to acknowledge if you've got something slightly wrong no I I love that and I think for me this is one of the reasons I'm so passionate about us all learning to emotionally regulate better and not respond when we're feeling triggered and actually go in and figure out well why why did I get triggered here what what what is it inside of me that's showing up in this moment rather than putting the blame somewhere else because when we're able to do that if you were that listener and you're able to you know because if that's an angry email to you the whole trajectory goes different you know I imagine you you will hear

it differently you will receive it differently there might be a defensiveness but if it's if the emotional sting's gone or it's been processed and then it's sent yeah that the outcome is very different that way we communicate it is just, so important. And I don't think many of us realize sometimes how the state of our nervous system, how wired it is at any particular moment influences the way we perceive the world and see the world. And you see this online, you know, people expressing unprocessed emotion all the time and i just don't think that's helpful for that person that's why i'm i'm very passionate that the ability to regulate our emotions understand where they're coming from is it really is a

superpower and also to explain to someone else who might not get it that there just needs to be more room in the world to say, I don't know, please tell me. And for that to be okay, we don't all have to have an immediate response and an immediate opinion. We can ask someone to teach us. Yeah. I've been trying for about an hour to get to these failure principles um we've been through quite a few without actually yeah calling them as they are you know failure

just is well not your worst thoughts almost everyone feels like they failed in their 20s i mean we've covered those um i love number five failure is data acquisition um i think the one i'd love to just go into is number four breakups are not a tragedy yes mind-blowing isn't it yeah but i think there's something in this and i guess did you mean when you were writing that, were you primarily talking about romantic relationships or romantic breakups? Because I kind of feel that applies to friendship breakups as well. No, I was using romantic relationships as a way in to discuss that principle, but it

can be applied, as you rightly say, to any form of relationship, friendship, work. be applied, as you rightly say, to any form of relationship, friendship, work. And the premise of it is that a relationship of any sort is not a failure just because it ends. Because sometimes you outgrow a relationship or sometimes that relationship or that person has taught you what you needed to know and they move on. But when something ends, you still have all of those learnings, all of those memories, all of those experiences, like that's still part of you. And I was taught this by Alain de Botton, the philosopher, and he compared it to a parent raising a child. A functional good parent raises a child in order for that child to be able to leave home and survive on their own. What if you applied that kind of thinking to any kind of relationship? Perhaps

your ex who broke up with you has, in whatever way, taught you the lessons that you needed to know that have equipped you for your future relationship, that have taught you, that have been data acquisition for your future relationship, for the relationship that's going to be better for you because of what you've learned. And that was a way for me of, as you say, taking the sting out of heartbreak, because it's so heartbreaking when you go through a breakup. And I mean that in friendship terms too. You know, I've been ghosted by a really close friend a couple of times and it's incredibly difficult to come to terms with because there's no explanation there.

So in that vacuum, I choose to make my own meaning, my own explanation from it and think, well, what have I learned from that? And it's always helped me think of that person so much more fondly in retrospect. Yeah.

I think all of us can look back on previous friendships, romantic relationships, whatever they might be. And I guess if we're honest, there are lessons. There are lessons there, whether we chose to engage in them, whether we were able to engage in them or not. But there were lessons that you can then apply. And you beautifully write about it in philosophy that people are sent to you to teach you that lesson. And again, it's these sort of things that really make me feel this kind of deeper connection you have, you know, that there's something greater than us. I'm drawn to the way you described it before. I choose to believe this.

That's empowering, isn't it? Because you don't have to believe that all relationships have been sent to you to teach you a lesson. But I feel that for most of us, it's more just a gift you have to work at it because ultimately what you're doing is is taking that leap into the unknown is making yourself vulnerable is literally taking a leap of faith that you're going to believe that something is there that something is greater and you have to achieve that by doing it as well as living it. I think one of the things that I circled in the book that you have learned from previous relationships is to not magically expect the person you're with to know what's in your head. Is that a fair reflection of what you wrote? Yes, absolutely. I think for a really long time, you know, I grew up with 1980s rom-coms and they are wonderful films for entertainment, but you shouldn't live your life according to their

parameters. And I think one of the things that I came away with the notion of is the idea that your perfect soulmate will completely understand you, will complete you. You are a shattered half of a person until you meet this mythical soulmate. And they will automatically know everything that you need in your heart's desire. And actually, that's some bullshit. You need to do the work on yourself and complete yourself first

before you're ready to meet anyone else. And then you just tell them what's going on. Like straightforward communication is one of the most underrated and the most important romantic qualities yeah i completely agree i mean you know one of the things i mentioned this on my book tour recently but like honestly one of the most transformative things in my marriage has been the realization that my wife doesn't always want me to fix something when she shares a problem with me sometimes she just wants me to listen yeah and you know it took me a

while to learn that but now we have a really great way of communicating with if she's opening up with something I will literally say hey vid would you like me to listen or provide a solution? She goes, I just want you to listen. I love that. You see, that's so straightforward. You literally like tell me what you want and I'll give it to you. And I'll tell you, it sounds so unromantic. It's the best thing we ever did because…

It's so romantic. Honestly, I genuinely think it's a wonderful romantic gesture. The truth is, is that it has been transformative because I think the biggest problem in all relationships romantic or not is a failure to communicate effectively a failure to actually express what we want instead of thinking that person should know what I want yeah and then why and then playing games together and I play games that simple question stops all of that even though i may think i know what that solution might be which i do sometimes i i will actually go whether you think you do or not she doesn't want to hear it from you at this moment so and occasionally it'd

be like no do you have any ideas like okay so i'm really passionate about this kind of direct communication being you see you wouldn't have seen that in an ac's rom-com would you you wouldn't do you have any ideas like okay so i'm really passionate about this kind of direct communication being you see you wouldn't have seen that in an 80s rom-com would you you wouldn't have seen that you would you would expect your partner to know what you want right unless we're talking about when harry met sally which is one of the greatest movies of all time but that's because they started out as very very close friends so they were used to communicating in that way but that's the exception to the rule anyway we're not here to talk about rom-coms um to bring this to a close um we've covered all kinds of different areas tonight of course the underlying theme has been failure the podcast is called feel better live more when

we feel better we get more out of our lives. I guess you would say when we fail better, when we get good at failure, we're going to get more out of our lives. For people who are struggling with failure, who are struggling with their lives, who don't want to, I guess, make peace with failure, have you got any final words of wisdom for them? Yes. So I would say it's not actually about failing better because I want to reassure people that there is no way of failing at failure. You can fail however you want. And some of those failures, you won't be able to get over immediately. And that's absolutely fine. But I do believe that in the fullness of

time, there will be meaning carried within that failure. So instead of failing better, it's about being at peace with the idea that it will happen because it will happen. It's inevitable no matter who we are. It's a very democratizing thought. Failure will happen to you. The only thing that you can be in control of is your response to it and that's where your character is formed so rather than feeling like you have to fail better fail with meaning and don't be afraid of it i love it elizabeth it has been a joy chatting to you you've been an amazing guest guys give it up for up for Elizabeth Day. Thank you so much. Thank you, Rhondon. Thank you. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do have a think about one thing that

you can take away and start applying into your own life. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. Always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it. Because when you feel better, you live more.