Embracing Fear and Reinventing Midlife: 3 Ways Life Lessons Helped Me Overcome Failure

We all know the phrase "I had to learn it the hard way." 

But what can we learn about ourselves from difficult circumstances and life lessons?

Reflecting on personal failures can reveal growth and serve as a stepping stone to greater success.

I've experienced that first hand and I imagine you have your own version of how hard won lessons, though painful, ultimately helped you to grow.

In this second episode in my series on failure as a catalyst for success,  you'll hear:

✳️How we can learn valuable lessons from failure and how it can lead us in new directions
✳️ 3 powerful lessons I learned from my failure as a voice actor
✳️ How difficult lessons learned from voice acting helped pave the way for my success as a podcaster

I believe we should embrace the compelling concept of "doing it scared" and seize opportunities, even when fear tries to hold us back. We need to learn the lessons we need to learn for a reason.

Failure is never really failure.

It's creating the space for deep learning , personal growth and building our resilience muscle.

Listen to this episode and remind yourself that you too can reflect on the lessons from past failures, learn to appreciate the journey and pave the way to your future success.

Mentioned in the episode:

• Embracing Silver Hair and Midlife Reinvention: A Conversation with Tangled Silver Magazine Publisher Robin Salls
• Embracing Failure: Turning Setbacks into Stepping Stones for Success on Your Reinvention Journey
• Download my "Do It Scared, Do It Anyway" Cheat Sheet!

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Your feedback means everything to me! If you enjoyed this episode please rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Castbox or leave a comment at reinventionrebels.com

Please spread the word! Let's encourage more women to unapologetically embrace their Inner Reinvention Rebel and boldly pursue their wildest dreams.

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Visit me at reinventionrebels.com

Transcript

0:00:00
Have you ever failed at something but learned a valuable lesson despite the pain of your failure? I've been there. Way too many times. Thank you very much. Yet, the pain helped me grow. I couldn't see it at the time, but it was part of something bigger.

0:00:18
Today on the Reinvention Rebel's podcast, we're talking the power of life lessons to shake things up. Move us forward and help us see new possibilities. Because sometimes, those hard earned lessons are important steps in our evolution to get to where we are today. Well come to reinvention rebels. Stories of brave and unapologetic women fifty to ninety years young who have boldly reimagined life on their own terms to find new purpose and possibilities. I'm your host, Wendy Battles. Ready for a dose of inspiration? Let's get to it. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Reinvention Rebels  podcast. I am so glad you're here. I'm your host Wendy. This is the place to come for information and so much inspiration about what is possible in midlife and beyond when we decide we are getting after those things that light is up. When we decide we're ready to go on a re and engine journey, and when we do it in a bold unapologetic I'm doing things on my terms now. Way, I call those women re invention pretzels. They are fierce. They are often fearless, they are remarkable, and they are figuring it out. Even though sometimes we do what I called doing it scared yet doing it anyway. That's what these women are up to and that's what you're in for when you listen to the podcast. So I am so happy, you're here. I do wanna say that I had such a good time.

0:02:10
Last week, interviewing Robin Sall's of the Tangled Silver magazine. She is so inspiring. If you're in midlife, I don't know about you, but I am definitely on a hair journey. That gray is coming in. And, you know, we're each trying to figure out what's right for us. And one of the things that Robin talked about is that there's no right or wrong way to figure out our hair as we age. Some of us have amazing silver locks and we've let it go gray and it looks so good. Some of us are in what I call the hybrid mode like me right now. Kinda coloring and then not coloring and just having a little funny experimenting with it. And then there are so many women like me who have been coloring and keep on coloring and all of those things are awesome. It's just figuring out what's right for us. What I really loved about our conversation is how she talked about the powerful, very empowering silver sisters community and how these amazing women really connect around that and empower each other.

0:03:12
If you didn't have a chance to listen to this episode, it is so good and Robin is so wise. I really encourage you to do so. You know, of course, I've linked to it in the own notes. I'm also excited because this week I've been wrapped up with the goals with Soul Virtual Summit. It is organized by my friend Kate House who is some kind of amazing, a fellow podcaster, and she's brought together these amazing women from all over the country and and some outside the US. To share really impactful short podcast episodes over the course of four days. So every day, there are different episodes, and I hopefully, you already signed up and you are listening. I loved doing my session with her. It was about transforming from the inside out that it's an inside job. It was called the inside jobber transformation and, oh, it was so good. We had the best conversation. So I hope you're tuning in and soaking up all of the wisdom from those sessions.

0:04:19
Today, I'm back for Part two in a series about failure as a stepping stone to later success. I know. So now as we fail, it can be really disappointing and it doesn't always happen when we wanted to on our timetable. I'm like one of those people I want it now, but of course, that doesn't always line up. And I believe that the universe is always supporting us even through our failures, even when we can't see it even when we are not sure how it's gonna work out. And sometimes we don't understand why we failed or things didn't go the way we expected. You might remember that in part one of this three part series, a couple weeks ago, I talked about how failures can help us become persistent They help us build persistence and perseverance. You may recall, I told this story about my health coaching business and how I gave up way too easily, but how that laid the groundwork for podcasting. I now understand what it means to persist through ups and downs and keep going. That was a powerful lesson learned from that failure. Of course, you can check out the episode. I've linked to it in the show notes.

0:05:27
I want to take that conversation a step further by discussing the power of lessons, even super hard ones, and how they really can help us move forward. I knew we've all heard that phrase. I had to learn it the hard way. And of course, it kinda sucks. Right? Who wants to do that? I bet you can relate to that. I'm sure that happened to you. I've had my fair share of those learning things the hard way.

0:05:51
But when you're a kid, lessons don't have the same meaning certainly that they do when we're an adult. We can process, we can think about it, we can contextualize, things and we have a framework that we just don't have as a kid. So when things don't work out, it is really devastating because we don't have the perspective to understand it's all gonna work out. And that life is so much bigger than this one thing. But as adults, we certainly can once we can step back a little bit and get over the initial disappointment, we can take a look at what's going on and think about it through this lens of there may be a less in in this thing that didn't work out the way I wanted it to. And what I found is that the lesson is often much better. It's more impact full and it often pushes me in direction I wanted to go but in a more powerful way. So I get over that initial disappointment, I get the perspective, I see the lesson in it, and then it enables me to move forward. So I wanted to tell you about another story today.

0:06:54
And this one is about when I started doing voice over work back in the nineties. And from that experience, I have learned three really important lessons that have everything to do with what I'm doing today with podcasting. But at the time, I never would have been able to make that connection. Podcasting wasn't even something that existed back in the nineties. Right? So it's interesting how sometimes we are failing forward. Sometimes things happen and we get some experience that might not be applicable right away, but years later, it can make all the difference. So this is how it started.

0:07:29
Back in the nineties, I did a lot of speaking in different jobs. Sometimes I was interviewed for different things and people always said, Wendy, you have a great voice. And I was like, oh, okay. Sure. You know, I gotta take that, listen to it, but at some point, as Things often align with the universe, I happen to see that the learning Anix was offering this one night course on voiceovers. And you I don't know for I don't it wasn't a lot of money. You go and you spend, like, two or three hours and you get to read some hockey. And then if you if they think you have potential, basically, it's all to get you to, you know, spend money to make a demo tape so that you can work on your voice acting career. So, of course, I was all in because I'm the kind of person that I'm open to trying new things, even when I have really no clue what I'm doing. So I was like, yeah, let me give this a try, so I went to the course and it was a lot of fun. Then I paid out how much money, but to make this demo tape, And interestingly, the producer I was working with was a little difficult. And I had a hard time and sometimes even taking the direction and figuring out what he want me to do. But I did it. I made this demo tape. It sounded really good.

0:08:43
Back then, the way that you got work. The what was suggested to me is that you ordered this guide from the state of Connecticut where I live from the Department of Economic Development. In that guide, there was a list of every single production studio in the state of Connecticut. You know, this is back before digital and you could kind of produce your own work. I literally sent my demo tape, which was on a cassette tape to all of these studios.

0:09:09
Again, you know I'm kind of stabbing in the dark. Never done this before. I really don't have any experience, but I'm like, well, I need to give it a try. So I did that. And, interestingly, I started to get some work. I started getting phone calls from producers. And it's really interesting that I ended up developing some really good relationships with some producers where we just, like, had a great connection and then they would ask me to come back for other jobs and it worked out really well. And then I got some, like, work doing voice mail messages, you know, voice trees for companies.

0:09:42
It was it was a mix of things. No. Mind you, I I had a day job. I wasn't quitting my job for this, so it was really on the side things. And I had some really cool jobs. Like, I did this very cool job for IBM Microelectronics and it was believe it or not. I know we don't have these anymore, but it was recording for a CD ROM they were using to recruit college students on college campuses. You know, for career opportunities. So that part is all good.

0:10:06
Now the challenging part is that I went to a job and it was it was a tough one. I had to play a harried housewife who didn't get a mortgage and had screaming kids and needed bigger house and I was having a really hard time getting it right. And then everybody said, okay. Take a break. And I was so scared. I was gonna get fired. I was like, oh my god. I can't get fired from this job. This is a real big studio. But I got it together. And I did it and that was all good. But then, it happened that which another job. And the client was there and was with this producer I'd worked with many times before. It just wasn't working out. And I can't believe it, but I got fired on this spot. In a very nice way though, I gotta say, but I felt terrible, of course, because you know, who wants to get fired from a job and is not great for the ego, but it was an important lesson.

0:10:51
Now, just put that in your little list of things that happened because the thing about being a voice actor is that It's like being an actor. It's hard work. You have a lot of rejection. And what happened is that I got into the stereotypes about there's not enough work for women. It's mostly men. It's really hard to do it. It's really hard to make it.

0:11:12
So I got all in my head about these things and that was a recipe for me to over time stop doing it to give up. Which is kind of what I mentioned in the last episode that I have a habit of giving up too easily. I kind of tried a lot harder. I even had a meeting with an agent in New York, I didn't get signed, but those were all signs of going in the right direction, and that's where persistence would have helped. But at the time, I just was like, I don't think I can do this anymore. I need to, you know, have another job. So I I didn't continue. Those some of those things got to me.

0:11:44
And when I got perspective later on, though, I started see that there were some lessons in that. And when I say later on, I mean, fast forward, two decades later, I got back into doing voiceovers, I made a fresh demo tape, and I was ready to kinda shop it around and my heart just wasn't in it. I just wasn't enthused about doing ads for products. That's just not what I was thinking. But Interestingly enough, I think one of the things that can happen from failure is that it leads us in another direction, and one of the places it was leading me was ultimately to podcasting that I'm taking my skills as a voice actor and now having done tons of speaking and use my voice in so many other ways, for recordings, for other things, that was all part of this larger plan that I couldn't see at the time when I was quitting. My voiceovers in the nineties, but is paying dividends, you know, many many years later. So let me tell you about the three lessons I learned.

0:12:41
From this experience of not continuing with the voiceovers and feeling like I failed. One, we need to invest in ourselves and shortcuts aren't always the answer. Sometimes we need training. Remember I said that I'd gotten fired and I often feel like I knew what I was doing. I was doing it by the seat of my pants. Well, training would have really helped me build my skills. And feel more confident.

0:13:00
Fast forward all these years later as a podcast or what did I do? I invested in myself when I was starting the podcast. I took a course about how to get started because I didn't know where they met that, and I didn't assume that I could just figure it out. I knew I needed help. So lesson number one is that we need to invest in ourselves and be willing to ask for help in whatever form that might show up. Number two, just because you fail right now, it doesn't mean that experience isn't valuable. Because it could be that that is laying the groundwork for your future experiences, as I just talked about, with the podcasts. So failing at the voiceovers, did many things in between, still using those skills with my voice, and here we are. Years later, now it comes in so handy to have this voice over experience. And I will say that when I went back to to try to restart my voice over career in twenty eighteen, I invested in training. So I did work on some of those skills and those skills have proved to be really, really helpful now.

0:14:05
Our past failures are often sitting the stage for our future endeavors. And then lesson number three. These lessons we learn can be applicable to so many different parts of our lives. So it's not limited to just the podcasting. You know, the voiceovers aren't necessarily just related to the podcasting. But I used some of that voice over work when I was a health coach. And I then I started doing so I started doing in radio interviews and I started doing TV spots on our local ABC affiliate. The skills that I learned and the experiences I had were preparing me for this interim step. So I use that as as part of my health coaching, but then ultimately this bigger picture as I grew into podcasting. So I think it's really interesting that there were really powerful lessons I learned. They weren't all obvious at the beginning. I was able to appreciate them when I had more distance, but they've made a big difference in me seeing how those failures are definitely stepping stones toward that bigger thing we're working toward, even though sometimes we don't know what that is. But that years later, we can see how all of those pieces of the puzzle actually interlock and fit together in pretty powerful ways.

0:15:21
My thought for you today is to take a step back And think about times when you have failed, despite the fact that you didn't feel good, you have failed, what lessons did you gain from those failures as you look back at them. What have you learned that is applicable to what you're doing today? And what way did those lessons ultimately benefit you in your growth and evolution. Some things for you to chew on about today's episode. So all of us remembering that those failures are stepping stones to our larger success. Don't get so caught up on the setbacks. And think more about how we can use that to fail forward into more meaningful things that are helping us along the way in our journey. I have to hope that this was good food for a thought for you today. I'm so glad that you're here.

0:16:15
I do wanna mention that this idea of doing it scared, doing it anyway is so compelling that when you get that inkling, there's something you wanna do and you're scared to do it. I wanna encourage you to go for it. We all know life is short. We all know that things happen every day. So much more powerful when we go for it. Now if you're thinking, Wendy, I don't know how to go for it. I I'm too scared to even get started. I am gonna tell you. And encourage you about downloading my do it skip, do it anyway cheat sheet to help you get started. There's a little push in the right direction to work through your fears and figure out how you can move toward that thing you really wanna do. I cannot wait to see you back here next week for another fantastic guest episode with an amazing and a tighter. You are going to love her reinvention story. She is so inspired. So more to come on that. But until that time, please keep shining your light the world needs you and everything you have to offer.

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