#13: I Experienced Failure. What Now?

There is no such thing as making a confusion between temporary defeat and failure. Failure happens when we give up. Just sharing a little secret, my friend: temporary defeat is part of success. Get ready to uncover ways to deal with the idea of failure, get stronger, and take this boulder out of our way once and for all.  Listen now!

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Transcript

This is The Neat Lifestyle Podcast, episode number thirteen. In today's episode, let's talk about "I experienced failure. What now?" So, stay tuned. 

Welcome to The Neat Lifestyle Podcast. My name is Katia Mesquita. I'm a personal organization expert, an online business entrepreneur, and your host on this weekly variety show. I'm excited to bring you an extra dose of inspiration to become more organized, stay organized, and make things work better for you. My goal in this podcast is to help you achieve a more functional, harmonious, and meaningful life. I can't wait to connect with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and now let's begin. Hello, hello, and welcome to The Neat Lifestyle Podcast, now present in 25 countries all over the world. Thank you so much for pushing play today. I wanna send a special thank you to my listeners here in the US and also to my listeners in some other countries, the UK, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, South Africa, Brazil, Germany, Greece, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Croatia, Japan, France, oh my goodness! I love you, and I'm sending you good vibes. So many of you have reached out to me via DM on my Instagram, and yeah, that's so great! 

I'm your host, Katia Mesquita, and in episode number ten and also in episode number twelve, I created a contest in which you DM me on my Instagram telling me your struggle, okay? Something messy going on with your life for a chance to win a free coaching session with me, and I'm happy to announce a winner! Yeah, so shout out to Chef Ace, who is a talented chef based in London. Congratulations! He already received a message on his Instagram with all the details. Now it's time for your new beginning, my friend, and I'm honored to be a part of that. And if you sometimes feel like running in circles and getting nowhere, if you want your life to run towards something, you know, achieving something more significant, but you were not quite sure where or how to start, shoot me a DM on Instagram. Tell me your struggle, what's a little messy in your life, and a brief description of who you are, what you do, for a chance to win a 1-on-1 session coaching with me, okay? 

Everything starts with getting more organized, and that's what I do. I help people get more organized so they can reorganize their lives toward success in their goals with fulfillment. Getting your life more organized goes far beyond just tidying up and putting stuff away. If your home is organized, but if your time, your work, your relationships are a mess, it's not going to work very well, and it's very common people get stuck, burned out, and unhappy, okay? When they are doing pretty well in just one area of life, but the other areas are messy. So, let's create some harmony in that, okay? I'm not going to talk about an exact balance, absolute balance, because there is no such thing as absolute balance, okay? But we can harmonize that. And yeah, only you can decide when enough is enough and do something effective about it. But what do we do when things get really messy and we experience failure? What next? Stop everything? Give up on your goals and mess up all the rest? No! Let's stop right there. 

Are you taking a temporary defeat as a failure? Failure is when you give up, okay? And when we experience a temporary defeat, we are supposed to get the lesson, change the approach, and keep persisting. So, experiencing a temporary defeat is part of success. Persistence in changing the approach until you get what you want is the key. One of the keys of success, okay? Is persistency. But, of course, you gotta persist in the right thing, so you need to identify that, right? So, you gotta be smart about it and work a little bit more on personal growth to be the kind of person able to identify if you are persisting in the right thing, okay? In order to persist, we keep testing this and that, putting our work, learning, checking for other points of view, other people, other books, changing the approach, and being like scientists. 

Think of Thomas Edison. Thank God he persisted thousands of time in creating a light bulb that lasts. He wasn't the only one trying, but he was the one who created a version of light bulb that would last long enough for us to use in our homes. And he's got this inspiring quote that says, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it something? Because it's like testing. It's like being scientists. I tried something, it didn't work. Let me try another way. Let me just first find out if I am in the right route, okay? And then keep persisting, keep changing the approach until I find the way. That's why wonderful things were created. Not like giving up. Imagine if he had given up in the first or few attempts of building the light bulb. How would the world be now? I don't know. I have no idea, but would not be like today.

And paraphrasing Einstein, "We cannot keep doing the same things over and over expecting different results." And can you imagine how the world would be if, you know, Thomas Edison considered himself as a failure and stopped trying in the first few attempts? So many great inventors created brilliant things because they were persistent. And maybe it's our turn now to take our goals and our dreams more seriously, be brave about them, and persist in taking different approaches until we get there. And the good thing is that during the journey we find good people, we find good books, we find mentors, we find great coaching programs, we find new friends. We keep finding things along the way and experiencing great things, growing. And then, when you get there, it's so rewarding, and I'm sure you have special talents. I'm sure you have a vision. Everything new starts with a vision. 

Let's take Steve Jobs, for example. He envisioned a concept of a smartphone and created the iPhone. His question wasn't if his team could make it possible. His question was how they could make it possible. We find a way to make our visions happen. I'm bringing up Steve Jobs here, and I can understand if some of you don't like him for any particular reason, but let's just understand that even when you may not like the person, there is still some good inside the person, and we cannot deny that the iPhone was an exceptional, amazing concept and the other smartphones were inspired, let's say like that, inspired by iPhone. So this is an amazing creation. I remember my mom when she said, "Oh, okay, now I want that telephone, that cell phone that you can swipe, you know, with your fingers." She was so excited. She got it. She's having a great experience with that, by the way. 

But my point is we find a way to make our visions happen. Only you have your vision. And Steve Jobs probably had a lot of people saying that it will be impossible to create that concept of the iPhone, but he ignored that. He didn't let anybody's opinion interfere in pursuing what he envisioned. Don't let anybody put you down or demotivate you. What do you fear? Do you have a fear of failure? I would have fear of not trying and do nothing in my life. I feel alive when I breathe with fear and do what I need to do despite the fear. Jack Canfield says, "Everything you want is on the other side of fear." That's powerful. And that thing that you fear the most, that's the clue of something for you to overcome, to work on. 

A brave person, a courageous person, is not a person who doesn't have fear. A brave person is that person who do what needs to be done despite the fear, controlling their emotions, okay? And we'll have fear until we die. Why not be smart about learning how to handle it so you can be able to do the things you want? I'm so fortunate to have read that book that I already mentioned in the previous episodes. For those who didn't have the opportunity to listen to the previous episodes, it's a book that helped me deal with fear and other unpleasant feelings, including unpleasant bodily sensations, and how to breathe with the fear and overcome the fear. This book is from psychologist Joan Rosenberg, and it's called "90 Seconds to a Life You Love." I have two versions of this book. I have the ebook, okay? Where I just type on my computer some keywords. And I'm always consulting this book with some keywords to search for some quotes or some special things to apply in my coaching programs to help my clients, and I also have the audiobook version, which is great because sometimes, you know, when you are doing something that is not complex, like doing your dishes, for instance, sometimes we feel like losing time doing our dishes. 

So, what I do to feel better is I usually, when I'm doing my dishes, I usually listen to some audiobook or podcast or something that can add value to me, can add more knowledge or something like that, or a music that can change my, you know, my mood. It depends on the mood of the day, but I always consider audiobook version of a book. It's really nice. This particular book changed my life because it helped me go for my dreams. And there is a powerful fragment of a quote from Wayde Goodal that says, "If you don't protect your dream- you will fulfill someone else's dream." And I'm gonna paraphrase that to say, "If you don't fulfill your dream, you will fulfill someone else's dream." It's either, you choose, fulfilling someone else's dream or the determination to overcome the fear of fulfilling your dream. I'm going to put the link to this book on the show notes of this episode for you, and if you want to try the audiobook version of it, and if you live in the US, you can get this audiobook for free using my affiliate link. That will be also in the show notes. Another thing that is very interesting that happens is, especially when we are starting to experience success, is the fear of success. When things start to go great or too good to be true, our dreams start to come true, things are going well, we start to freak out because it's kind of something new for us. Things are going well, it's something out of our comfort zone. So, we need to also overcome fear of success, and this is very interesting. We need to find some kind of harmony between our desire of success and overcoming the fear of success because feeling great can make us feel uncomfortable when everything's going well. Have you ever thought about it? 

Now, another secret of success is not simply doing things or having things, okay? It's about evolving, changing ourselves, and becoming the type of person who attracts success. It's about personal growth. It's about what I mentioned in episode number three about my "Be, Do, Have" journey. If you didn't have the opportunity yet, I really encourage you to listen to episode number three because you get the basis of a "Be, Do, Have" concept that helps people to become more successful in life. To experience growth in our lives, we need to develop ourselves in the first place and then become the type of person who experiences growth and success. And about fear of success or fear of, you know, our fears, a lot of fears. I overcame a lot, okay? I had a lot of work to do about overcoming my fears. One of them was my fear to get exposed. I was this kind of person who, like, until what? About five months ago, was very, very slow, inactive in social media, but I knew that to put my dream out there, which was creating this online business and have this freedom of working with my computer anywhere I want and helping people, you know, and making some kind of difference around the world, I needed to overcome this, and I needed to step into social media. 

And there was another thing. I had some kind of, I'm not going to say limitation, but some kind of thing to work a little bit on because I'm still learning English. So, sometimes it's kind of hard to me be exposed, and you know, sometimes I stumble on my vocabulary. I don't find the words or it takes too long for me to find the right vocabulary for that. But it was that despite not being the way I wanted to be now, for going and creating a podcast, I did, no matter what. Okay, it's not perfect, but so what? It's helping people, so that's what matters to me. And I started with a script created by me, but now it feels great because I don't know if you noticed, but now I am kind of doing more spontaneously, and I am not kind of following the whole script. I'm using as just outlining things to talk about with my own words. I'm practicing this now, and it's like when you are learning how to ride a bicycle, and you have those little wheels for support. I don't know the name of that thing, but when you were a child and you start to take that support out of your bicycle and you start to ride your bicycle on your own, it's kind of what I'm feeling now in this episode, okay? And I'm sharing with you. It was supposed to be something private just for me here, but okay, I just want to let you know that I didn't come here to this episode with everything perfect, everything beautiful, everything working great, okay?

I come here dealing with my struggles as well and overcoming them, okay? And it makes me feel so happy to see the results, to see, you know, people's lives being somehow touched by the words I bring, by things I learned from my mentors, and I'm just sharing or bringing quotes, putting things together. Yeah, to do my part, okay? Even like a drop into the ocean, I don't mind. I'm doing my part, and I know that there is something that can bring value. But do you know one thing that helped me overcome fear? It's something a little weird, but I'm gonna share anyway. When I learned about the top five regrets of the dying. I heard it from a friend who recommended me this life-changing and insightful book, the top 10, no, the name is the Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. It's actually a memoir written by Bronnie Ware. She used to work as a caregiver of people dying, and she received so much wisdom. It's very, very interesting. We don't usually like to talk about death, but I wanna bring some points here. Let's face it together, okay? We are all gonna die, right? Sorry if I'm breaking the news, but this is the ugly truth. We are all going to die, but if we face it, okay, and we can have a beautiful life. We don't need to worry about death, but we can do something really good about the life we have and live happier. 

So, the first one, the top regret of the dying, is I" wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." The second one was, "I wish I hadn't worked so hard." And now I'm being very careful about it. I used to work my you know off. Sorry, I'm not gonna curse here. So, I was working in the morning, in the afternoon, at night, and you know, thinking that, okay, it will make more money, I'll make more money with that, but burning myself out was creating an imbalance that kind of made me lose the money I was getting, somehow. Because when you don't rest and you go to work tired, you create an environment to make more mistakes, and some mistakes require to, you know, it's costly. They are costly, and you have to pay for your mistakes, okay? To fix them. So I saw that I was losing money, fixing the mistakes I created by going to work tired. You know, this is just one of many other things that happened, especially with my health.

So yeah, pay attention to this, about taking some time for yourself, some time to enjoy life. Life is happening right now in front of you, okay? Time with your kids, time with your pets, time at the beach, time with nature, your loved ones, time to enjoy the music you like, time to breathe, to think, to listen to answers from your prayers, okay? When you pray, you usually feel like, may feel like, uncomfortable, thinking that a prayer is just a one-way conversation, but actually, if you dedicate some moments to be in silence, okay? Every day, have some moments in silence, you can start receiving insights, okay? Inspirations, whatever you call. Ideas. That's why so many people have good ideas in the shower because that's when they get quiet, they get in silence and listening to that little voice that comes from within, okay?

It depends on what kind of voice, but this is not subject for today's episode. There are two types of voices in our heads, okay? It's very similar to when you watch some cartoons, and you have, I remember watching some cartoons in which the, you know, the character had, like, an angel in one ear and a devil in the other one. It's kind of similar, but we can develop ourselves to identify the good one, okay? I usually talk in my coaching programs, but I can mention sometime in another episode, okay? Anyway, the third one is, "I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings." So many people are afraid of expressing their feelings, and expressing their feelings is something that may connect them to other people. Letting other people know how you feel, no matter if you feel something good, okay? It helps connect. And if you feel something not good, it helps to communicate something that is not working so that they can have the opportunity to think and probably have a different approach next time, okay? It's helpful for more diplomatic solutions when you share your feelings, when you express your feelings. Now, regret number four is, "I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends." I'm so happy, so fortunate that I'm still in touch with my friends, even though it sometimes take long for us to talk, but, you know, whoever reach out to the other one first, we always talk. I'm open, okay, and it's good. 

Number five, "I wish I had let myself be happier." Some people just think that happy, being happy is something that make look them weak. I mean, make them look weak, and it's totally the opposite. But unfortunately, many of them just realize that when they are dying in bed. But still speaking about getting inspired about things that gravitate around death, about reflection of death, I'm gonna invite you to do an exercise, okay? It's kind of weird, creepy, but it's helpful as a guide for our lives. It's for a good reason. You don't need to write anything down, no, it's just mentalizing a little bit, and then you can move on and do your stuff. But there is one thing that helped me a lot to think about what I want from my life, what I want my life to be, what I wanna do, what I wanna go for, about finding my purpose, my big why to overcome things. I did this exercise: Imagine what would be like the funeral speech of our funeral to be? You know, the speech will be given in the future by someone very close to us, and it's supposed to reflect on our lives and achievements, paying some kind of tribute to our personalities and memories. And what would you like them to say about your personality, about your life, about your achievements, about your memory? So think about it, okay? Just for a moment. This is gonna help you guide the future that you can start building today or rebuilding, reshaping, okay? Because sometimes we are taking a course in our lives, and we figure out that there is something, you know, to start over in some aspect. 

Sometimes, we just have to make this thinking a little bit, see if we are gonna reshape something, do something differently, reorganize our lives differently from now on, and who are you living for? I believe you are here for a reason. What's your existence for? Are you living or just existing? What do we do after we figure that out? After this exercise? How to get started? What to do first? You can start by declaring to yourself that enough is enough, and that you are committed to start doing things differently. That you will find your big why, your big reason to promote some changes, to improve yourself, improving who you are, and be the type of person who achieve what you want. Committed to overcome fear and better managing your emotions. Committed to put some work. It's like going to the gym. You cannot expect other people to do your pushups for you. Oh, it's uncomfortable. Commit to feel comfortable with the uncomfortable. Commit not to spending too much of your time in sadness, in regrets, and search for ways to feel better. Seek for help if you need it, but do something to feel better and keep going. Commit to embracing suffering and understanding that suffering is part of what makes us happy, because we need to experience some opposites in order to experience joy. You can experience the joy of drinking a glass of water when you have experienced the discomfort of being thirsty. You experience the joy of eating a meal when you have experienced hunger. You experience the joy of gaining something when you have experienced loss. Discomfort, pain, and suffering are supposed to be used in your favor as fuel to propel you to succeed in what you want. To give you that boost of energy, of drive, to go for what you want. So, stop seeing suffering as something to feel miserable about. This is a good thing. Use that in your favor. 

Get committed to going against the grain, and don't fear criticism or what others think of you. First of all, because they are already judging you regardless. And secondly, because you will find other people who will love you and admire you for pursuing your goals no matter what. Committed to being persistent and patient, knowing that each good initiative is like a seed that you plant and it will flourish. You still need to water it and allow its natural time to flourish. Committed to not comparing yourself to anybody. You are unique. Each person has their own story, their own struggles, their own path, and there is a sparkle within you. A sparkle of someone who can make a difference, no matter if the difference is like a drop of rain in the ocean. It still makes a difference and it still brings joy for you and for others. And just to finish this episode, I want to leave a quote, as usual, from Denis Waitley that says, "Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing."

I hope you had some takeaways from this episode. If you did, send me a direct message on Instagram telling how this episode spoke to you, and yeah, remember? A brief description of your struggle, about you, what you do, who you are, for a chance to win a free 1-on-1 session with me. The link to my Instagram page is on the show notes of this episode. We will select the best story. I can't wait to announce the next winner, and this show was also meant to make a difference in people's lives. You can make a difference by bringing something from you to the world or by supporting shows like mine, and there are many ways to give your support. Just to give you some examples, when you follow me on Instagram and share my inspirational quotes or my educational posts, you help the content reach more people. When you share your struggle, you give me extra inspiration and contribute with topics for the upcoming episodes. When you rate my show and leave me a review on Apple Podcasts or other favorite platform, you help the show reach more people, and when you go to my show notes and find the link to support the show or buy me a coffee, that coffee makes a difference. It costs you just three bucks a month, $3 a month to buy me a coffee per month. If you pick at least one of these ways to support my show, you are also doing your part and your contribution. That's all for today. Thanks again for listening. I'm Katia Mesquita, and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye! 

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you liked what you heard today, be sure to share it with those you care about so they can also benefit from it. If you aren't already following me on social media, do so by clicking on the link on the show notes or simply by visiting my website at neatlifestyle.com. I appreciate you so much. I hope you have an amazing day. I'll see you in the next episode of The Neat Lifestyle Podcast.