Rising up when it all falls apart – the difference between failing and being a failure
This week I will hand back the keys to the practice
where I’ve been offering reiki treatments. Long-time readers of my blog may
remember that 12 months ago, I took a massive leap of faith and committed to a
one-year lease on a room at a health and wellbeing practice here in Sydney. I
planned to offer reiki treatments two days a week (read that blog post here),
and hoped that I could grow a client base and eventually make this, combined with
my angel card reading service, a career alternative. It was a big financial risk… and
it has not, unfortunately, paid off. The very worst result that could have
happened – the one I was most afraid of – has indeed happened. And I’m OK with
that. Now.
For a long time I was not OK. In February it became
apparent that my business was not working.
That, on top of a (temporary but prolonged) drought in my primary source of
income, plunged me into a state of despair... not to mention debt.
When I realised there was nothing I could do but
watch money flow down the drain until my commercial lease ran out, the sense of
disappointment was immense. I had lovingly stacked my hopes and dreams, along
with significant sums of money, into this business, and it had not worked. I
had wholeheartedly trusted that having faith was enough to make my dreams come
true... and I was wrong. I couldn’t not see this failure as an indictment on my
skills and my worth. The failure of my business felt like
proof that I was a failure as a person. My inner bully’s cries of “I
knew you’d fuck it up!” were deafening.
Business leaders around the world consistently
describe the experience of losing everything as integral to shaping their
success. JK Rowling famously had her Harry Potter manuscripts rejected 12 times.
“I was the biggest failure I knew,” she said. When Bloomsbury Publishing took a
punt and printed her first three books, it warned her not to quit her day job.
As we all know, Joanne went on to achieve stratospheric levels of success. Yet
on 12 previous occasions, she had failed. It was not her moment to shine… until
it was. The Universe has a schedule all its own.
Failure is a blistering, heavy word. The most unhelpful thing
anyone said to me when I was coming to realise things were not turning out as
I’d hoped was: “Just think positive – it’ll all work out.” Please, never say this to
someone going through a significant challenge. It implies they’re not trying hard enough, that a lack of faith is
the cause of their struggle and that getting what they want is a mere case of
wishing for it (a wildly inaccurate interpretation of the law of attraction).
So, so unhelpful.
What *was* helpful for me as I licked my wounds was reframing the situation. There’s a difference between failing
and being a failure. The former means I haven’t had success yet; the latter
indicates I am flawed on a personal level. Once I understood the distinction
between the two – and stopped beating myself up – I found my way to a space of
acceptance. Instead of seeing myself as incompetent I was (eventually)
able to depersonalise the experience, and recognise failure as a necessary step
in my development. Brene Brown says: “Failure is an imperfect word
because the minute you learn from it, it ceases to be a failure.”
Although the Universe didn’t meet me halfway on this business plan, it
did issue me with an invitation to grow. Learn from this, and you’ll
become more resilient. Learn from this, and you’ll navigate future obstacles
better. Learn from this, and new doors will open up to you, opportunities better
than you could have scripted. The secret of life, as Paulo Coelho expressed so
exquisitely in The Alchemist, is to fall down seven times and
get up eight.
There are all sorts of reasons why my reiki
practice likely didn’t fire. It could have been the wrong area. It could have
been (and most likely was) simply the wrong timing. It was 100 per cent not
lack of skills nor lack of effort on my part. I know that I could not have put
anything more into that business. I have no regrets… now.
So when I take my certificates off the wall and
push my business cards through the shredder, I will remember the difference
between failing and being a failure. I will remind myself that I am not defined
or diminished by this disappointment. And as I let go of my expectations I will
hold space for shiny new opportunities.
Your move, Universe.
Regrets? I've had a few. Nothing wrong with that
I’m always suspicious
of people who declare that they have no regrets.
I bet you know
someone who has stated, with a sense of pride: “If I had to do it all again, I
wouldn’t change anything.”
Really? Sure about that? You wouldn’t decide to wear a different dress
to your mate’s 21st so you didn’t turn up wearing the same thing as his
girlfriend? You wouldn’t have avoided that pothole so you didn’t hit a tree and
write off your car? You wouldn’t have ended your dead-end relationship sooner
so you could have been happier earlier? You wouldn’t have applied sunscreen
every single day so you didn’t end up with an alarming amount of wrinkles in
your 30s? (That sunscreen song from the 90s was right about UV protection, you
know).You wouldn’t change anything?
I don’t believe you.
Let me tell you, there isn’t much I wouldn’t change if
I could.
I would back myself and aim higher in my career instead of opting to
float in the achievement-free zone of freelancing, so that I would have
something to show for the past five years, to name just one.
I totally understand that everything that has happened has shaped my
life and my character for the better, and that I couldn’t have learned the
lessons I’ve learned any other way. The suffering was necessary then, but it is
not necessary now. I also understand that regret is unhealthy – not to mention
unhelpful, considering we have no means of turning back time (still hanging out
for that time-machine technology, Doc).
I know all this, and
yet I still have regrets – but I don’t regard that as a bad thing.
Personally, I don’t
think there’s anything wrong with acknowledging that things have not worked out
the way you had hoped. I do agree, though, that holding on to pain around what’s
happened will hold you back.
So here’s my approach.
Instead of embarking on a futile mission to embrace all that shitty stuff, I’m
working on acceptance. I can’t change what I’ve done, or what’s been done to
me, but I absolutely can change how much I let those things affect me now. I
see acceptance as a middle ground between celebrating unsavoury events and
languishing in regret. What this means is freedom from self-flagellation over
my choices, without labouring under the delusion that I should* be happy about
things that did not, and never will, make me happy.
It’s possible to be
grateful for the lessons while still wishing their circumstances had been
different.
If something sucks, I’m
not going to pretend otherwise. You can’t put glitter on a poo, as an old
editor of mine used to say (he was talking about a poorly written story, but
the same message applies here). This doesn’t mean playing the ‘if only’ game
though. Everything is not awesome, but it is
OK. Maybe we should just focus on that.
*I hate the word ‘should’ – it’s loaded with so much expectation
and a sense that you are failing at something – and I use it sparingly. In this
case I think it was warranted.