Failing rules!
But then you’ll get better, and it’s not so bad!
Focusing on failure may have been a strange way to kick off a new year, but hear me out: failing is where we often begin.
Whenever we try something new, we’re bound to experience failure. Sometimes those failures are big and obvious; other times they’re subtle and only apparent in hindsight. Either way, it happens. And that’s ok! The important thing is to keep going (that’s when we succeed!), and to not beat yourself up for mistakes along the way.
Writing that advice is one thing. Doing it is another. I am the queen of beating myself up. In one of the few handwritten letters I saved from my dad, he tells me not to be so hard on myself. He gave it to me before my first varsity soccer game in 1999. Whenever I’d make a mistake on the soccer field, I’d crumble. Rather than brushing it off and continuing to play, I’d berate myself for messing up, lose track of the game, and get increasingly flustered. I wish I could say that I dropped that habit in high school, but unearthing that letter from my dad made me realize I’m still guilty of a lot of that negative self-talk and behavior.
I’ve been thinking about my soccer days, and how incredible it is that my sweet dumb brain took TWENTY YEARS to figure out the folly in my approach. Instead of getting angry at myself for missing the ball or misreading an opponent’s footwork, I could have said, “Next time!” and kept playing. I likely would have been a better teammate. I definitely would have enjoyed myself more.
The same goes for mistakes I’ve made while writing, starting a different job, figuring out to be a manager, learning how to grieve and heal from trauma, and navigating a new romance: The more forgiving I am with myself, the easier things tend to be.
So here’s the lesson: Failing is ok. Telling yourself that you’re a failure is not.
Last week I asked you for your personal mantras — antidotes to negative self-talk. Whether you refer to them as mantras, affirmations, or personal pep-talks, they were powerful and I loved reading them.
This response made me pause:
“I try to ask myself, ‘Who am I without the doing?’ and really think on that.”
There were quite a few mantras about happiness, which, in my experience, is one of the hardest emotions to hold onto.
“Happy am I, healthy am I, hopeful am I, whole am I.”
“My mantra is more of a question I ask myself when I fall into a worry spiral: What would a happy, confident, fearless person do right now? Whatever the answer is, that's what I aim to do, because it's a way to remind myself of the identity/person I want to embody.”
I heard from widows who know the “other shoe” syndrome all too well — the fear that when things are good, something bad is lurking just around the corner.
“My personal mantra right now is ‘Enjoy the goodness’. So many things in my life are good right now, and I’m trying to soak in those moments and not let myself get caught up in the what-ifs.”
“Being happy is a good thing. I deserve to be happy, and I want to share that happiness with others!"
I love this mantra for its specificity:
“I will stop reading into every stray email or text, imagining what people might be thinking or how I could have somehow upset them, and instead live in my actual reality, which is pretty damn good!”
And I especially appreciated the people who focused on reframing their thoughts.
“I am enough. Especially since my negative self-talk is often, ‘Why wasn’t I enough?’ Time to turn that thinking around.”
“My feelings are valid. I've been repeating that to myself lately in an effort to accept emotions (specifically sadness and frustration) rather than beating myself up over feeling them and spiraling further into negativity.”
Just as we can reframe our thought patterns, we can reframe failure.
Dean Keith Simonton, a distinguished professor of psychology at UC-Davis, found that some of the best-known creative masterminds found success because they attempted more experiments. In other words, they failed, a lot. That’s also how they succeeded. As Tom and David Kelley explain in Creative Confidence, “That is the surprising, compelling mathematics of innovation: if you want more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure.”
Which brings me to the last mantra I’d like to share:
“You don’t have to have it all figured out to move forward.”
Here’s to moving forward—and embracing our failures along the way.
xoxo
KHG
p.s. This subject line + preview text is from a text message that Jamie sent a friend the day before he died. Monday marks the two-year anniversary of Jamie’s death, and I’m planning on sharing some lessons I’ve learned from him in the next issue. In the meantime, hug the people you love and remind them to go for the things they’ve always wanted to do.
p.p.s. If you’re enjoying My Sweet Dumb Brain, please forward this newsletter to a friend and encourage them to subscribe. You can also share this issue on social media. And if you have questions (next month’s topic is “love and loss”), ask me! Thank you for being part of this community.
Good job, brain
I'm currently reading: Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens. I’m just a few chapters in (no spoilers!), and I’m already captivated. It took Owens 10 years to write this debut novel, but the effort paid off: It’s a #1 New York Times bestseller, and is being made into a movie.
I’m currently inspired by: People who go out of their way to share good things in the world. This tweet thread from Erin Ruberry lifted my spirits last week.
I'm currently aiming to: Be really, really ridiculously patient with myself this week. The days leading up to deathiversaries are notoriously hard for me, and this upcoming one is no exception.
Additional resources
Another mantra I received is, “There are no prerequisites for worthiness.” The reader who shared it gave Brené Brown credit for that brilliance.
The lovely Kerry Graham, who happens to be my second cousin, wrote about committing to self-compassion. (Related: Maybe we need to have a family chat about this negative self-talk issue!)
Here’s an embarrassing confession: When I received the “Who am I without the doing?” mantra, I initially read it as, “If I’m not doing things, I am nothing.” That’s the opposite point of the question, and says a lot about my relationship with productivity (which is another topic for another day). Thankfully, the wonderfully wise Catherine Andrews sheds more light on the question and how to think through it in the inaugural episode of her podcast.
For your sweet dumb brain
A few weeks ago, I asked you to imagine the best-case scenario for something that’s keeping you awake at night. Now, I want you to do the opposite. Think about something that you’re scared of doing and then ask yourself: What’s the worst that could happen? Really think about what failure would look like — how much money you’d lose, time you’d waste, embarrassment you’d feel, bridges you’d potentially burn, etc. By making failure tangible, you can come up with a back-up plan, and things won’t seem quite so scary. (h/t Masuma Ahuja)
My Sweet Dumb Brain is written by Katie Hawkins-Gaar. It’s edited by Rebecca Coates. Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash.