The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 35 - Why You’re (Not) A Failure: Elizabeth Day

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. It’s all too easy to feel pressured by the societal expectations that are pressed onto us from a young age. But the fact is, they WILL make you feel like a failure. In this clip Elizabeth Day discusses how she was made to feel like a failure and explains why you should never let society make you feel like one ever again. Episode 77 - https://g2ul0.app.link/C0jYEaxmPlb Elizabeth: https://www.instagram.com/elizabday/ https://twitter.com/elizabday 

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the united states and i'd be recording a lot more over in the states they put a massive billboard in time square um for the show so thank you so much amazon music um thank you to our team and thank you to all of you that listen to this show let's continue society's expectations of how your life is supposed to be going will fuck you up and when i think about you know you've written this amazing book about called philosophy about failure i was thinking what is objectively like what is failure and um my conclusion was that failure is like a byproduct of social expectations, as is success. So could you talk to me a little bit about how social expectations have made you feel like a failure? Of course, yeah. I realised

I had to define failure after I had launched a podcast called How to Fail and after I had written a book called How to Fail. And then I kept getting asked this very reasonable question and I realized I'd never come up with a satisfying definition for me. So the definition I came up with in philosophy is that failure is what happens when life doesn't go according to plan, which totally taps into what you've just asked me about. Because then you need to start to think well where does the plan come from is it genuinely my plan is it genuinely what will make me happy or is it what i've been told i should expect my life to be because when i looked at some of my metrics for how my life should be and i put that in quotation marks it kind of came from like 1980s rom-coms and and patriarchal society and conditioning and the idea

that I've been raised in the 80s to be a nice pleasant pliable girl whereas boys were enabled to be mischievous and that was seen as kind of cute and charming and that led to me being an inveterate people pleaser which I know is something that a lot of people have in this kind of industry. And it also led to me imagining that I wanted to be married and have children. And that's what I tried to do. And in my 30s, I did get married to the wrong person. I ended up getting divorced and I tried but failed to have babies and went through various fertility treatments that were emotionally devastating in various ways. And it got to a point when I was 36, divorced, didn't have children, where I really did feel like a failure. And the reason I felt like a failure is because that's what society had conditioned me to believe of myself. Because

actually, after I'd got over the pain and the grief caused by that seminal relationship ending and by all of the IVF and coming to terms with my first miscarriage and all of that, I actually felt strong for having withstood it. And I actually felt kind of liberated too, because I had no plan for the future. And having no plan for the future can be terrifying. And it can also be this enormous opportunity to change your life and to redefine it according to who you really are once you've stripped back that pretense so that's one way in which I felt like a failure but I probably wasn't it was what I've been told to feel so I want to I want to like pick around this a little bit

because I can resonate with this tremendously. In fact, that's why my book has the name It Does is because I was conditioned as a black kid who was broke to believe that the thing that would make me a success was becoming this happy, sexy millionaire with a range over. And I mean, that's what I wrote in the front page of my diary that, you know, that's a kid from Africa who in Africa had nothing, but was, you know,'s a kid from africa who in africa had nothing but was you know my family were happy bring that kid into a context or a con yeah a context where the context is telling me

that unless you're this you should feel like shit um that's why as a kid i was like well i need to be happy sexy but to be fair if i'd wrote something else it would have been white straight hair right i was relaxing my hair chemically from the age of about 12 till about 16 so my hair was straight but i want to i want to go back to this this point about society telling you um what you should want did you ever figure out what you actually wanted such a good question also thank you for sharing what you just did because I know that yeah you believe like I do that vulnerability is the source of connection true connection and that was really beautiful um I think I have figured out who I am now but I sit here as a 42 year old having only just figured

that out and the reason I figured it out is because of all of those things that went wrong those relationships that ended, that imploded, the jobs that weren't right for me. That was what prompted me to do the soul searching. And I'm a big believer in things happening for a reason, the universe unfolding as is intended. Even if you can't make something meaningful as and when it's happening because it's traumatic and it's devastating, I tend to believe that there will be some meaning in there in the fullness of time. There'll be something that I needed to learn. I wish sometimes I'd learned the lessons more quickly, because I believe I kept being sent the same lessons until I really, really learned the thing that I needed

to learn. But I do think now that I'm aware of who I am because I've redefined my notion of success. So in the past, my success was not necessarily being a happy, sexy millionaire, although I wouldn't say no. In the past, I had a very different contextual upbringing from yours. And I'm immensely privileged in many ways. And one of the ways in which I am privileged is that there was a lot of kind of creativity and cultural discussion in my home. Like I was surrounded by books. I was never taught to feel that that was odd that I read all the time or that I wanted to be an author, even though there was no one in my family who did that so I had those kind of conversations and that's an that's an enormously wealthy way to be brought up and I even though we didn't have that much

money that was very wealthy and so for me then success was about doing well at school it was doing well academically and I realized that when I did well at an exam I got approval and that for me became a substitute for self-worth so for a long time I was on this feedback loop where I was like if only I could just do better and do better at more things eventually I'll feel I'm worthwhile and I was on a hiding to nothing because actually I was outsourcing my sense of self to everyone else's opinions of me and to kind of external validation. And I've now realized, and it's taken me a long time to realize this, that my only validation that means anything can come from within and from my cornerstone relationships. So like the four or five people I love most in the

world whose opinion actually means something to me, that's what it is. Now, having worked that out, how can I bring my authentic self into every area of my life? And that's why the podcast has felt and the books about failure have genuinely been such a gift to me because they've enabled me to connect with a really big audience whilst being my true self whilst taking the risk to be vulnerable and that for me is success being my authentic self in integrated self so like professionally personally and when I'm asleep or in my friendship group or when I'm stroking my cat it's always the same me