The Surprising Gift of Doubt
Let your failures propel you toward your dreams. This is a picture of me and two of my close friends at my MBA graduation from Pepperdine in 2017.
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What happens when you fail? Do you recover quickly? Do you beat yourself up? Or do you resolve to never try again?
I used to do all I could to avoid failure. On some level, I thought I could die from the humiliation.
When I was forty-three, I went back to school to get my MBA. My goal was to find out how to become the successful creative entrepreneur I’d always wanted to be. Turns out I didn’t need the tuition of a private university like Pepperdine to teach me a lesson life had been trying to teach me all along—the key indicator of success is failure.
Every successful person fails along the way.
Oprah Winfrey, one of the most successful individuals of our time, grew up in poverty and was fired from her first job for being “unfit for television.” Stephen King’s first book was rejected by thirty publishers. Software developers test the market with scaled down versions of their applications. They use the “failures” to quickly improve and get to the final version.
From media to hi-tech, you can’t achieve big dreams without being comfortable with the risk of failure. When I learned this, I had to make a choice. I was going to either play it safe and avoid failure or go for it. And, since my dreams mean so much to me, I chose to get friendly with failure.
In Episode 22, Marc Pitman, author of the upcoming book “The Surprising Gift of Doubt,” shares how he bounced back from a failed church planting and used that experience to make him the successful executive coach and global speaker he is today.
Marc shares tools that you can implement to transform your failures into gifts. Tools like prayer, relationships with like-minded people, personality assessments, and self-development.
One of the things we discussed that resonated with me is this idea that our mind is like a search engine.
When we think of things, our mind will search for past experiences to support those thoughts. So, if our thoughts about ourselves are primarily negative, our brain will reinforce those negative thoughts.
For example, if you tell yourself, “I forget names” your mind will search and support that statement with other instances where you forgot names. Yet, if you start to think instead, “I remember faces and so I can also remember names,” your brain will find evidence to support that more positive thought.
Just as google comes to anticipate where we want to go on the internet by our past searches, we have trained our brains on where we want it to go by our past thoughts.
So, if you want to bounce back from failures and overcome setbacks, build your self-confidence to live out your purpose and make your dreams come true, change the algorithm!
In this episode, Marc and I discuss how to do that. Listen to learn more. And, if you want more content on overcoming failure, Episode 8 “How to Redefine Failure” is one of our post popular episodes.
Show Notes
All Gifts Journal Prompts of Emotional Processing
Marc’s book The Surprising Gift of Doubt
Personality Assessments:
In this episode, I discuss breaking the cycle of work burnout and four areas to reflect on when stuck in a rut.