Bloom Your Mind

Ep 149: Failure Tolerance

• Marie McDonald

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Most of us were taught that failure is bad. That if we fall short, it means something about who we are—our worth, our capability, our potential. But what if failure isn’t a problem at all? What if it’s the path to everything we want?

In this episode, we unpack what I call failure tolerance—the skill of building your capacity to try, fall short, feel the feelings that come with it, and keep going anyway. Because here’s the truth: when we avoid failure, we actually fail on purpose. We choose inaction to dodge discomfort, and that turns a 50% chance of failing into a 100% guarantee.

You’ll learn how to flip that pattern—how to stop avoiding failure and instead get good at it. When you do, everything changes. You stop seeing failure as evidence of your worth and start seeing it as iteration. Each “failure” becomes a puzzle piece in building something extraordinary.


What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • Why avoiding failure is actually a form of guaranteed failure.
  • How to expand your failure tolerance so you can take bigger risks with more freedom.
  • The two key skills that make iteration possible (and fun):
    1. Evaluating what worked, what didn’t, and what you’ll tweak next time.
    2. Learning to feel your emotions when things don’t go as planned.
  • Why mastering these two skills opens every door—to creativity, impact, and possibility.
  • A behind-the-scenes look at how I do a live “retro” (retrospective) on one of my own recent attempts, breaking it down step by step so you can apply it to your own projects.

We’ll also celebrate an exciting milestone: the first few women joining the Moxie Mastermind before enrollment even opened! This six-month experience is for women ready to turn one powerful idea into something real—with community, coaching, and deep transformation along the way.

Because when you build failure tolerance, you stop being afraid of getting it wrong—and start building the life, business, and legacy that’s been waiting for you all along.


Mentioned in this episode:

  • The Moxie Mastermind — 6-month group program starting in January for women ready to bring their big ideas to life.
  • Retros are Everything — for a deeper dive into the reflection skill that powers iteration.
  • The Practice — for building your emotional capacity to feel and process failure.

How to connect with Marie:

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Well, hello everybody, and welcome to episode 149 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. Here I am today. I just got back from a wild weekend. I was recording all of my courses last week and then went straight into a weekend of my daughter's 13th birthday celebrations where we had all of her friends, like 35 people at the beach for a big beach day. And then I took 10 Sandy girls home to my house and they had a slumber party and I cooked for them with my husband. We cooked tacos, we cooked French toast in the morning. They were giggling and shrieking. It was the best. Ugh, I love it so much. And then a couple hours later, I hopped on a plane to go to Sacramento, where I led a two-day executive retreat for an executive team and a mission-driven organization. And it was amazing and wonderful and so fulfilling to work with change makers who are so dedicated to clear communication and good work in the world. And it energized me for the work that we are about to do. So you can listen to a few different episodes on this podcast to get more information about what we're talking today. But today we're going to do another episode that's really focused in on what we think of as failure. Here on the podcast with my students, we talk about failure with terms like failure tolerance, developing failure tolerance, developing the capacity to fail without freaking out. We call that fail like we mean it. We're going to fail like we mean it. We're going to fail like we are iterating on something that we care about. That's what we mean by failing like we mean it. Failure tolerance is how we have learned to unwind the weird thinking that the vast majority of us have internalized in our system that failure is bad. We've learned this over and over again from the time when we're little kids and the authority figures in our life make funny expressions when we do something that they don't like. And then we internalize that as we're bad if we fail. And then society really backs that up. We are so afraid of failure that we fail on purpose by avoiding the things we might fail at, by staying in action. And again, you can listen to fail like you mean it. That's the podcast episode if you want to get real deep into this. So here's what I talk about on that podcast. I'll give you a quick example. If we think there's a 50% chance of failing at something, we intentionally avoid doing that thing and thereby increase the chance of failure to 100%. That always blows my mind. I love this idea. We're just failing through not trying instead of failing through trying and not getting it right. Strictly because we are afraid of what people will think, andor we are afraid of the feelings that we'll have if we fail. That's it. That's why we're avoiding failure. And when we avoid failure by not doing anything, we're increasing our chance of failure to 100%. We're avoiding the feeling of shame or embarrassment or self-doubt or whatever we're going to feel when we don't hit our goal. But what's wild is that failure is 100% guaranteed for all of us. So we are avoiding something that is inevitable. We are all going to fail every single day. We're going to fail at multiple things. We know that it, we are not going to get anything perfect on our first try of anything ever that we ever ever do. Failure is not only guaranteed all day, every day, but it is definitely guaranteed when we try something for the first time. There's going to be some part of it that isn't great. We're not going to get it perfect. So isn't it a better practice to get good at feeling the feelings that come up when we fail? Isn't that better than just avoiding the things that we might fail at and increasing the likelihood of failure to 100%? What's really ironic about getting better at practicing being able to allow the feelings that come up when we fail is that the better we get at tolerating failure, the less failure bugs us. It's like when we do reps and we're lifting weights or whatever, then the weights don't feel that heavy anymore. The more we increase our capacity to fail and feel whatever feeling comes up when we do, the less those feelings come up at all. I know because this is, I have experienced it. We build the muscle of trying and then sometimes getting it right and most of the time getting it kind of right, but missing the mark in some ways, and just tweaking things until we like the result. We do that and we do it again and again, and we start to not think of it as failure, but as trying things, evaluating what went well and what didn't, and then trying again and again, tweaking things again and again until we like what we see. And all that is, folks, is iteration. It is like actually inevitable to iterate. We have just gotten it totally backwards. We think we that failure is bad, but failure is absolutely guaranteed, absolutely inevitable. And we don't even have to use the word failure. We're just iterating. We're trying and trying again until we get things right. So when we do that, when we get good at iterating, failure stops being a thing. And iteration is what replaces it. We just think of the idea of iteration, it's normal. And it starts being fun. That's what it's like for me. Tweaking things until they work is like putting a puzzle together. And puzzles are fun, I think, don't you? And when we fail again and again and tweak things and try again, when we develop that skill of iteration, as opposed to thinking everything we do that doesn't work is about our value or our character or like something's wrong with us if we fail, which is totally illogical. When we build that skill, everything becomes possible. It's amazing. Literally, we can have an infinite number of attempts at anything because we're okay. We can tolerate iteration. And if we have an infinite number of attempts, we're gonna get there eventually. So all the doors open up, everything becomes possible. And we get out of our own way, and we can pretty much do anything we really, really want to. So, like, what do you really, really want to do? That becomes possible. That scary thing that you're like, I can't do it because I'll fail. It's okay. All you have to do is develop the skill of failure tolerance. And what makes that process possible is the step where we stop and look at our attempt at something and think about what worked, what didn't work, and what we want to do differently next time. That is one of only two skills that we need to master in order to master iteration. That's the first skill to learn from our iterations, to learn from each attempt so we know what to tweak in our next try. There is a podcast episode called Retros Are Everything. And you can learn all about retros in that. I'm gonna go into them in a little bit here too. So that's the first skill is evaluating doing a retro on what worked and didn't work. And the second skill is what we talked about to feel whatever the feeling is that comes up when our attempt at something doesn't go the way we want it to. That's it. That is all those two skills. Open up everything. So go to the episode called the practice for the skill of tolerating the emotions that come up when you fail. And go to the episode called Retros Are Everything for that first skill of evaluating your attempts. But today I'm gonna do a real life retro on an attempt at something that I just did to illustrate kind of how this all works. And it also shows a step-by-step example of using some of the tools that I teach on this podcast to break down and approach something you're working on when it goes off track, when it takes too long, when it just starts to seem impossible. Like this, I just can't. Oh my gosh, I can't do it. So I'm gonna walk you through an example of this iterative approach to this thing I was recently doing, and we'll illustrate some of these concepts. So let's do it. All right. So I am re-recording all of my content for the Bloom Room, and for each one of the courses that I'm doing, I have multiple classes to edit. I had a whole series of 18 videos that I needed to edit and have ready for my videographer. And I've talked a little bit about this on the podcast because the first time my videographer was gonna come, I had migraines and I had to cancel. I had to cancel my podcast, and I also had to cancel and reschedule my videographer. So by the time the second round of the videographer filming me came up, I had a couple weeks left, and then I had a week left, and I had been working towards getting all of these outlines ready to go. I had a week left, and I had 12 videos left to refine. Now, this may seem totally doable to you, but I had a full slate of clients on my calendar. I was driving for a field trip for my daughter the Thursday and Friday of that weekend, and then taking her to a Chapel Roan concert for her birthday. So it was a very, very full week. I had very limited hours left. And what the design constraint was, the trick was, the problem that I was solving was I had anticipated an hour and a half to edit each class. And it had taken me more like four to five hours per class. When you multiply that times 18 classes, hot damn. That is a lot of hours. So when I looked at the 12 outlines that I still had yet to finalize, I had put a couple hours into each one already. So it wasn't five hours per, but it was about two hours per outline that I knew I had left to do. And I looked at the week ahead of me, it felt unbelievably daunting. It felt like I was saying originally, like this project has gone so far off track. I so misestimated what the time was going to be like in order to get to these two the beautiful place that I want them, that it felt impossible, felt kind of impossible to do it. And I found myself feeling that fail ahead of time, feeling like I maybe should just reschedule this. Maybe I should just increase the likelihood of my failure from 50% to 100%. It just felt like no flipping way am I going to be able to pull this off. And so I sat down and I wrote down all my thinking about it and I underlined the thoughts that were not helping me. And I did some regenerative thought models and I coached myself to think about this in a different way. And these are the things that I did. So in my retro, when I look at my filming project, these are the things that I will outline as what worked in this project. What worked is that when I looked at re-recording the videos, the first tool that I use that I teach is I measured the gain over the gap. I looked at how far I've already come. So I celebrated the three videos that I had 100% ready to go for Monday. And I felt how good it felt in my body to know that three of them were ready to go. Like even when I had one ready to go, it felt really, really great, like a weight had lifted. And I had experienced that three times already and knew I was going to experience that 12 more times before Monday. So I had 12 videos left to refine, which felt really like a lot. And what I did is I broke them down into milestones. So I looked at my calendar and instead of thinking of the 12 videos, which overwhelms the brain, I broke them down into doable steps, into one and a half hour chunks. And I sprinkled those one and a half hour chunks in everywhere that I could do that in my calendar. That made it feel like every single time I got through one of those one and a half hour chunks, I was gonna feel that same feeling of excitement. Or I was gonna need another half hour. So I was giving myself a little less time than I anticipated to try to push myself to be a little bit more productive and do B minus work if I could. But if I really needed another half hour, I could add it. And I broke it down into very doable chunks. That is two more of the skills that I teach on this podcast: breaking things down into chunks, doing B minus work, don't aim for perfection, and also putting things into my calendar by the result I was gonna create at the end of that time. So in each one and a half hour chunk, I wrote the name of the script that I wanted to have finished in that time. So I knew exactly what I was planning to do in that one and a half hour. So when I sit down at my computer or with my outline in front of me, I wasn't gonna be overwhelmed by the thing on my calendar saying work on scripts, because that my brain was just gonna be like, no way, flip out, no way. It's too big. But if all I have to do is to work on the script about beliefs and roles, and I have one and a half hours to do that, that's a bite-sized chunk for my brain and my nervous system. Okay, the next thing that I did is I asked for help. I asked for help from support systems to watch my kids to buy me like two more one out, one and a half hour chunks after school one day. To those were friends of mine. I just asked to watch my kids. I asked my husband to take them to school a couple days, even though he was having a busy work week. And I asked AI to be my grammar and editing check. So I didn't want AI to write anything for me because I don't like how it feels and sounds when I read anything that AI writes for me for the most part. But I did ask AI to catch grammar and editing mistakes. And I actually asked AI too to just check for like logical flow. So it showed me, ah, you make a leap of logic here. And that was really helpful. The next part is nostalgia for now, which is enjoying where you are. This is the part of the process. I always love to encourage my students to say, this is the part when, if you were looking back on this process, what about it would be kind of magical? What about it would you miss? And I thought about the energy of rewriting this, this content and how it's kind of exciting. And all these concepts are like better than I ever imagined, and they're all coming together. And every single single time I do an outline, it feels really good. So I enjoyed the editing process. And oh my God, did I enjoy the editing process? I had like colored pens and highlighters, and I was taking chunks of one, you know, a concept out of one outline and putting it over into another one and refining language and getting it so smooth and clear so that it will get the most people, the most clear, you know, value and outcomes that I could possibly give to people out of my material. And it was really wonderful. I totally enjoyed the process. I just practiced being present in each one of those one and a half hour chunks. Instead of thinking about anything else, I was just present with that material and how much did I love that material. And then the very last skill, the last of the two, actually, there are two more. The last thing that I teach on this podcast that I practiced that worked is I let it go. After planning my best plan and doing my most focused work and setting myself up with the support that I needed and everything we just talked about, I decided however far I get is how far I get, and that's how much material I'll have ready. And I'm okay with that. So I just let go. The very last skill is to remind myself if I'm stressing out about this, it's stressing out about a goal that I set, which is entirely arbitrary. I'm the one who decided to do this project. I'm the one that hired the videographer. So if I am hard on myself for not meeting these deadlines, I am just the deadlines, I I just made them up to start with. And that is not always the case, but it was really helpful for me to remind myself that it is the case in this situation, that I'm choosing my perspective entirely and I'm choosing to do this work entirely. And my whole purpose in doing this work is to help people. It's not about me. It's not about whether I hit a deadline or not. And so refocusing on my why, which is to help women and to help humans get out of their own way and overcome their belief systems that are limiting them, so that they contribute from their deep strengths and their unique strengths and their heart's longing in ways that light them up and turn them on and make them love their lives, but they also are contributing to the world in a way that heals the world, makes the world a better place. That's my whole purpose. So if that's what I'm up to, there is no point in getting upset about which outlines are done and which are not. Let's just get as many of them done as I can and then figure out what to do next. So those are all tools that I teach on this podcast that I just used myself. And it ended up where I got 10 of the videos totally written, not 12. I got to practice eight of them with a videographer. The lights never came that we had ordered a week before that were supposed to be like a two-day delivery. They never got there. So the videographer days ended up being just pre-production days, anyways. We had to reschedule our filming days because we didn't have the lights. And it was perfect. I got to really feel out all the content. I got to practice recording them all. He and I got to set up all of our places, all of our sets where we're going to film, got to know each other better, got to laugh, got to like test all the equipment and the mics. I don't know what we would have done without that pre-production day, to be honest. So it all ended up being perfect, but there were some very intentional skills I used along the way. So I hope that's helpful to you. When I got to the what didn't work about the project, really, it was just the time that I estimated for editing, which I couldn't know until I did it. So what I'll do differently next time is I will actually schedule way more time to edit my outlines, anticipate how long it takes because now I know I can't know until I try. And I will also anticipate how much I love to edit because that was really fun. So that's what I've got for you today. And I want to close out by also celebrating that a few people, a few fabulous women have enrolled in the Moxie mastermind before I've even officially started enrolling it. I'm so excited. They are some of the most amazing women that I have ever met. And this is a group of women who is starting at the end of January into my six-month mastermind at six months together, turning one idea each into a real thing, one big idea for something that is where their passion meets the world's need. So it's a group coaching program, which is my favorite type of coaching, way more than one-on-one. I love one-on-one. But what happens in one-on-one coaching is that me as the coach, I hold space for my clients that is non-judgmental. And I ask that they hold that type of space for themselves, but it's hard for them to do that because their own judgment of themselves comes up. But when we're in a group coaching program and we see sometimes we get coached ourselves, that's great. And then other times we see people get coached in front of us, we don't have all that self-judgment. And so we learn from their coaching in a way that sometimes is way more effective for us to get what we need to learn applied to ourselves. I hear it from my group coaching clients over and over and over and over that it's their very favorite modality. And I know for me, I don't hire one-on-one coaches. I go into coaching programs because it's way more effective. I get a lot more out of it. And I also get a group of supportive peers who love me and a bunch of material and a cohort. So this is an amazing group that is starting in January. We have an in-person retreat in April. It is an amazing sisterhood that helps each person get out of our own way by rewriting whatever beliefs we have, telling us we can't or we shouldn't do the thing we're dreaming of. So we're taking real ideas and making them real in a think tank of these brilliant, big-hearted, open, interesting, amazing women. Because my dream, my own dream, is that at the end of the next five or 10 years, I will have a roster of women who have been in the Moxie mastermind that made ideas real that made the world a better place. And those ideas that would have stayed stuck in their head, that me and the Moxie group of women helped them erase whatever things were in their way, put there by socialization or a patriarchal culture that made them think that they can't or they shouldn't. So we're starting with the first group in January. I will be leading these every six months, but January is going to be unbelievable and I can't wait. So if you know a woman who has an idea to make real, send her my way. And if you are that woman, come my way. We are about to make some big moves together in a sisterhood that will just change your life. So reach out if you're interested. That is what I have got for you this week, and I will see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time.