The Therapy Edit - On how to stop fearing failure

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

In this, the second of a special ten part series of The Therapy Edit, Anna talks through the second of The Uncomfortable Truths; I Am Going to Fail.The Uncomfortable Truth: Change Your Life By Taming 10 of Your Mind's Greatest Fears is Anna's 5th book and is set for publication on the 8th August!Pre-order your copy here and have it delivered straight to your door on publication day. Here's a teaser from Anna about what to expect in this long-awaited, transformative book.‘Some people don’t like me”“Bad things will happen to people I love”“I’m going to fail”… these words underpinned my anxieties and nightmares. I bet they feature in yours too.Our fears are anchored in the unavoidable truths of life; all things reach an end, bad things happen, and we lack the control we crave.As an experienced psychotherapist, who’s had years of therapy, I realised that ploughing endless energy into trying to control the uncontrollable is keeping us all tired, wired, and worried. Ignoring fears doesn’t make them less true, it makes them more powerful. I decided to try a different tact and it changed my world.Instead of doing everything I could to ease and avoid life’s uncomfortable truths, I sought a deeper acceptance of them. Through using this approach, my clients and I discovered that fear began to loosen its grip. We were living more intentionally and peacefully.So, face your fears one a chapter at a time, and discover who you are without worry, doubt and people-pleasing holding you back.

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Hi everyone. This is a little 10-minute episode where I'm going to be talking about failure. And this is taken straight from my brand new book, The Uncomfortable Truth, which is out on August of 15th. And I'm going to read some words from that book for you. but we're talking in this series all about the 10 uncomfortable truths. And in the first episode, which was last week, we spoke about how to become a little bit more accepting

of the fact that some people don't like you. And that's okay. And if we find ways to make these uncomfortable truths a little bit more okay, it actually really frees us up. Now, the one that we're going to be talking about today is Chapter 2 and it's the uncomfortable truth, the fact that I am going to fail. You are going to fail.

But before I share some words with you, I'd love you to think about how differently you would feel if you felt more accepting of this uncomfortable truth. I believe it would challenge perfectionism and fear because you'd try more things. And failure and to fail wouldn't be that same shaming statement of, I am a failure. I am a failure because you'd be more accepting.

A failure is just, a part of doing and it doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It just means that that didn't go so well, which I think is really, really powerful because we'd take more steps forwards. And if we weren't seeking perfectionism and if anything less, and this has definitely been true for me in the past. I've challenged perfectionism so much in recent years. But for me, if something wasn't perfect, I would feel like a failure. Not like I'd failed. I would feel in and of myself a failure. So as I've become more comfortable with failing, I've actually become more comfortable with not being such a perfectionist. And that has been so liberating. So I'm going to read

the cold hard truth out to you. It's a little bit uncomfortable. But the good thing is, is that we can find more acceptance. And I'm going to give you a couple of reasons as to why this one might sit, you know, like an uncomfortable truth in your gut. And then I'm going to give you a couple of tips as to how to find a bit more acceptance. So here's the cold, hard truth. You will plow time and energy into something and it will fail. All of that work will come to nothing. In fact, it will come to far more than nothing. Along with failure, you will have to wade through the feelings of disappointment. You may even feel dazed and confused as to why things didn't work out the way you hope they would. You question your identity. What does this

This failing say about you, you thought it was so right, so how come you got it so wrong? Should you even bother trying again? Are you broken? The collateral damage of failure can be immense. Failing to uphold a boundary in a relationship can find hearts broken and resentment boiling red and hot. Repeatedly failing to fulfill work commitments can lead to desperately wondering how the heck you're going to pay the bills, medical failings, can lead to grief and disillusion. You pin your hopes and expectations on an achievement and when it doesn't work, it can feel like a rejection. Failure is a part of life and we know that, but it's a hard truth to face if we're questioning whether we are the cause. It's hard when failure is followed by a barrage of self-criticism and shame. Did you just fail or are you a failure? You may look at the broken

hopes around your feet and wonder how on earth you're going to pick yourself up and dare to risk failing again. Now, oh, failure, eh? I think fearing failure keeps us stuck in life because so much of it is trial and error, isn't it? And the more we try to avoid failure, the more likely we're going to keep our lives small and safe and limited. And I think if we're honest with ourselves, we tend to try and avoid failure because we want to avoid pain. When actually, maybe when we come to the end of our lives, we realize that an even greater pain than failure is to have limited ourselves through fear. And I think when we speak to people that are kind of nearing the end of their lives and at the end of their lives and they're really reflective, right?

If you've ever had a conversation with someone who is at the end of their life, they're just wishing. They've done more, tried more, not worried about getting it wrong, not worried about what people thought. And I think the whole book for me is really just an invitation to all of us to not wait until the end of our lives to wish that we'd live more intentionally. I want that for myself now. And I want that for you as well. We want that for our kids, don't we if we've got kids? So in the book, I share five reasons as to why you might find it hard to accept this truth. And I'm just going to really briefly touch on two now before I give you some tips. So number one, it might be that you failed at some point. And it was

awful. Bad things came of it. The collateral damage. just felt too much to bear. Maybe you were impacted practically or financially or emotionally. So then of course it makes sense that you're going to avoid risking the consequences of failure again. Maybe your self-esteem and your sense of identity are actually tied up to success. So when you failed, your confidence took a really painful battering. And it just, yeah, it makes sense that if you've been through something hard, then you want to protect yourself from I'm failing again. So you think, right, that's it.

I'm done. I'm not going down that route again. And another reason we might fear failure and we might, this uncomfortable truth might be, feel too much to bear is maybe you were taught as a child that failure just wasn't acceptable. Maybe when you were growing up, it was all about achievement. Achievement was king. Maybe you were lavish, would love and attention when you did well. But you felt that disappointment when you failed.

And in that case, we can then learn as children that to achieve is to be accepted and to fail is to risk rejection or separation from a caregiver, which obviously when we're kids is so important that we, you know, it's physically and life savingly important that we feel that we have a connection with our caregiver. So to fail if you, if you're on the receiving end of a lot of kind of negativity, then of course it's understanding that you're going to fear it. So how then, with those two little insights, I've obviously got more, but I wondered if one of those might resonate with you. Which one resonates for me? I think for me, I feared failure because I just wanted to be good. Having grown up when I was really young, my sister having cancer, which you may know, there was so much going on around me, there was so much upset, there was so much fear, there was so much uncertainty. And I think for me, I just wanted to be good and I wanted to I wanted to achieve and I just didn't want to cause any worry at all. So for me, failing might have

meant to worry. It might have meant to cause concern, although my parents never pressured me kind of education wise. But I just wanted to be neat and tidy and easy. So to be messy, to fail, to kind of draw attention to myself or cause any kind of emotional upset or anything. Yeah, I just didn't want to do that. So I think. think for me failure just, yeah, it was almost opposing to the neatness that I wanted to portray. So two tips. Let's have a little think about how can you become a little bit more accepting of that uncomfortable truth of failure that comes with life, that fearing can just limit us, limit our experience. Number one, validate your feelings. Because when you fail,

there is often a sadness or a frustration that follows. And that's absolutely. fine. It's okay to grieve the fact that what you hoped for, what you desired, what you were working towards didn't come to fruition. Allow yourself to grieve the loss of that dream because in riding those waves of feeling and not numbing them or shaming them, then actually we start to become confident in recognising that we can withstand them and we can cope and we can survive them and yes, it's rough. But the collateral damage at that failure and that emotional response that does soften in time and things fall into place, maybe in a different way, but they do in time. Number two, another tip that I have in the book is remembering all the

times that you failed, which can feel a little bit counterintuitive, right? But I want you to have a little moment to reflect all the times that you failed and think about what did you learn. What did you learn about yourself, others, your work or life itself, actually, through that experience because it's failure that really shapes us and teaches us and turns us into who we are listening to this today. And actually failure can often dictate the steps that we take after that get us to where we are now. So it can sometimes be one of those things that when we look back, it's actually quite empowering to think of some of those times of failure that felt like they were to be all and end all. And actually they've just enriched who we are and given us more, maybe again,

experience or strength or confidence or compassion and growness. So there we go. Just some little thoughts on that uncomfortable truth of the fact that you will fail, I will fail. We have and we will continue to in big and little ways throughout the rest of our lives. So we might as well try. We might as well explore. We might as well give things a shot and broaden our lives rather than just sitting there trying to protect ourselves out of fear of getting wrong because I don't when I get to the end of my life and think that my fear of failure restricted me from living and I don't want you to get there too. So grab a copy of The Uncomfortable Truth and you will find so much more in there and I can't wait for you to read it. Take care. I am so excited to announce

that my brand new book, The Uncomfortable Truth, Change Your Life by Taming Ten of Your Mind's Greatest Fears, is available for pre-order now and is out on the 8th of August. And in this book, we tackle some of life's big, unavoidable, uncomfortable truths such as some people don't like me, I am going to fail. Life isn't there. Bad things will happen. And in this book, we tackle these big uncomfortable trees that rob us of so much headspace and energy as we try and control and avoid them. And as we move into a place of radical acceptance of these truths, you will find yourself living more freely and intentionally with more presence and confidence than ever before. So come on this journey with me and pre-order now at Wardstones in Amazon and we can celebrate

together.