Bloom Your Mind

Ep 181: Failure Tolerance

• Marie McDonald

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We open this episode on a yacht in San Diego Bay — silky robes, pirate ships, debating whether to jump into very questionable Coronado waters — deep in conversation with a brilliant restaurateur from a small town in Italy. He asked my advice and posed a question: I know I need to collect failures. But I get too much positive feedback. Where am I going wrong?

My answer: I don't buy it.

From there, this episode becomes a masterclass in what it actually means to put yourself out there — and why if you're not failing, you might not be going far enough.

What you'll learn in this episode:

  • Why "I don't see evidence of failure" usually means one of two things — and neither of them is that everything's going great
  • How praising kids (and ourselves) for being good at something actually causes us to stop taking risks — straight from the research in Mindset
  • The real reason we don't recognize our own failures — and why your brain might be actively hiding them from you
  • My own recent failures: from missing my husband's best friend energy, to a chaotic first three weeks of summer, to courses delayed, a book half-written, health issues from 20 years of athletic yoga, and a friendship changed by necessary boundaries
  • Why every item on that failure list is there because I’m putting my full heart into my life — and what that means for yours
  • Why if you're not failing, you may be depriving the world of something only you can give it
  • The design thinking concept of failing forward — and how mastering the Gain instead of minding the Gap makes it easier and more fun
  • Why measuring progress against your ideal is a logical fallacy (your vision isn't real yet — it's a steering mechanism, not a measuring stick)
  • Why measuring from where you started kicks you into higher brain function, makes you more creative, and actually makes you statistically more likely to hit your goal
  • The two questions I leave you with to uncover how YOU can fail bigger, better, faster, MORE. 

Mentioned in this episode:

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Welcome And The Ripple Effect

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, beautiful people, and welcome to episode number 181 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. I love sometimes thinking about that number and thinking about how many weeks we've been here together. Some of you I know and some of you I don't, and I'm reminded of that. When people come up to me and they're like, I've been listening to your podcast for a long time and I have never met them. It's so much fun. I love it. I love these connections that we don't even know are out there. And I always talk to people about that as they're putting their ideas out into the world that you don't know the ripple effect that your creations can have. You never quite know who you touch, no matter what you're doing, how the ripple effect of your efforts and your connections and the way that you give to the world who you're connecting with and then who they're connecting with, right? And how um how that ripples out. I know I've said this before, but I've had multiple more people come to me and say that they're having book groups or podcast groups, like a weekly discussion group based on the episodes, which is so fun. I'd love to be a fly on the wall and hear all the things that these episodes bring up. So send me emails, Marie at the localbloom.com, send me emails if you want to share what's coming up for you anytime. I love to read them. It is hot here in San Diego. It's so muggy. And I just we did some things. I finally like caught up in my yard area. If anyone listening knows me, you know I have five million plants all outside. I mean, I know I've talked about them on the podcast before, but so many inside and then so many outside. And I recently drove up to Ramona where I grew up and picked up a big truckload of magic soil. It has like fish emulsion and rabbit poop in it and all of these wonderful, like living microbes that uh help grow anything. And I picked it up and I re-planted my garden in the front, which was overgrown for the first time ever. It had just like gotten out of control, and they gave so much love to the plants in the front and the back of my house, and it's looking lush and beautiful. And all of a sudden, yellow leaves are dropping off all over the place, and things are a little wilty, and I'm just like babying them. I go out in the morning as I try to get like if there are visitors here or people picking up my kids or my husband, I try to get them to do little garden walks with me. But I start my day with my coffee and I walk around and like check out all the plants and snip off dead leaves to help them have regenerative energy and uh not be putting energy anywhere it doesn't belong, just like all of you, just like we do here. And I like to check them all out and say hello. But they have been really struggling lately because of this heat wave. And so uh that's what's going on in my world. I'm looking at these plants all the time, loving them up in between surf sessions with my family. One more thing about the house, we put in an outdoor shower with green tile. I'm obsessed with green tile, it's like everywhere inside and outside of my house. Some of it is this handmade green tile from Morocco that I love. And fun fact that ever since the outdoor shower was installed, I have not bathed inside. I run out there even if I only have five minutes. I'm like, woo! And I run outside and take outdoor showers, and it makes me so happy. And then yesterday, today is my husband's 45th birthday, 45 years of this glorious human being named Max. Max the snack, and and uh yesterday was the first time that all four members of our family were surfing at the same time. Me very poorly. I did stand up twice. Um, but uh Max brilliantly and Lux brilliantly, and Luke and I are learning, so it was very fun. So wow, that was a long intro. Please enjoy all these tidbits about surfing and plants.

A Yacht Conversation About Failure

SPEAKER_00

Uh, but today we are talking about failing more because two days ago, before the surf day, we had a very beachy, watery San Diego weekend where we went to a punk concert on Friday night, which my husband loves, the Dead Milk Men. They sing that song punk rock girl, don't punk rock girl, don't, if anyone knows it. Very fun concert. We went on a double date to see that. And then on Saturday, I promise this is tying into the content. I was on a yacht in the San Diego Bay. So some friends invited us on this big yacht that they do once a year. It's so fun. Usually it's adults only. This time it was kids too. And we were on this yacht with the type of people you want to be stuck on a yacht with because you leave land and you can't get off that boat for like four hours. So, like, you want to be the people that you like. And they were that kind of people. They were fabulous, wonderful people. I just wanted conversations with all of them, you know, just good conversation after good conversation, mixed in with like, you know, so much fun time with my kids. Everyone was wearing silky, bright robes, floral robes, bright things. I was wearing black and white, but most people were wearing very bright things, billowing in the wind. People were pointing pirate ships out to their kids, the Star of India, you know, like military vessels. We were all debating whether we were gonna jump off the side of the boat into the waters of Coronado when we reached our destination or not, because the water was super nasty. There have been all of these contamination alerts lately. It's gross. Trashing the ocean is one of those very weird human habits that I will never understand. I know I am a big, big fan of whales. They are my animal, but uh, so it hurts my heart. But and I just love scuba diving and sea creatures, but I just don't get it. I don't get why we do that. So yeah, we didn't end up jumping in the ocean because it was too grody. We put our feet in, a couple of us. But it was a beautiful day, and I was, you know, trying to keep the sun from giving me a billion new freckles in a single afternoon while also staying out on the boat because it was, you know, on the upper levels, because it was so gorgeous, uh, taking in the brilliant, beautiful ocean twinkling at us. And I was talking to this brilliant restaurateur. He's originally from a little town in Italy, and he was describing a challenge he was having, and he was asking for my advice. He knows me, he knows people that that I coach. And he said, I came today and wanted your advice. He says, I know from conversations that I've had with very, very successful people that I need to be collecting failures if I want to grow. But he said, My problem is that I get too much positive feedback. At first, I laughed, and I was like, oh my God. I love how as human beings we are so good at creating problems. Like, first of all, there's no problem. And he laughed and he says, I know, I know, it's not a problem. But he said, I do wonder where I can fail more. I and I was like, No, I bet you're failing. He's like, Nope, I'm not failing. I said, Are you sure? And he said, Yeah. And I said, I don't buy it. So collecting failures and reflecting on effort, the effort that we're taking, the massive action that we take towards our goals. This is a practice I do all the time with the Moxie. And we do a literal once-a-month meeting in addition to our weekly meetings, where we do retros around the moxie as we look at what's working, what's not working, and how we're iterating, how we're collecting failures towards our goal. I'm just saying that this is like something I very much believe in, right? We recently started calling it the pink marble jar. You have to ask me more to find out more about that backstory. We have a lot of good inside jokes in the Moxie, but the pink marble jar of failures. And what I know from leading a company that was literally based all around this, teaching leaders to create educational environments that turned out change makers. We were like, our whole goal was to create a generation of change makers that would envision and create a better world, that would know how to envision and create a better world. They would know how to turn their ideas into real things. That's like what I spent 15 years doing, right? Working with superintendents and administrators and principals and um leaders in Silicon Valley to create this movement. So now that's what I do with women, women business leaders or any kind of leaders. That company was all about embracing failure because you have to embrace failure in order to create change, which is just what my restaurateur friend was saying on this beautiful yacht.

Why You Are Not Seeing Failures

SPEAKER_00

So what I said to my friend when I said I don't buy it, I was saying that if you're not seeing evidence of failure, one of two things is happening. Number one is that you're not actually putting yourself out there. You're not actually taking the type of massive action that it requires you to take to actually fail. The type of action that's like where you have to be a little afraid. You're not taking big enough risks if you're not seeing any evidence of failure. When you're really putting yourself out there, putting your creative gift into the world, being your most authentic self that the world can like take or leave, right? Creating value for the world around you by contributing from your authentic self. And that, I believe that evolution never ends. Like we are somewhere on the scale of being authentic in ourselves. And that's like an overused word. So authentic is almost like a not word. It almost like doesn't mean anything, but like you being you without like, you know, hazing yourself and filtering yourself and doing all the things you think you're supposed to do. That's what I mean by being your authentic self, is like actually just being you in the world and contributing creatively from there. Creative could look like spreadsheets. I don't care. I just mean like, who are you? What is your beautiful, once happening ever voice that you're putting into the world? And I believe that is the point of this life, is that each one of us finds our own authentic voice or our own unfiltered, like super us way of contributing to the world and figures out how to contribute at the highest level to create the most love, the most good, the most healing, less, less nasty oceans, right? Or whatever your deal is, whatever you care about the most, the most value, taking our pain and our trauma and our stories and converting them, alchemizing them into our gift to the world. That is what I have done. That is what I teach people to do. Own our stories and convert those into high value contributions to the world in the unique way that only you can, to lift up the people around you, to lift up people in the world with the only voice that you have that no one else can have. Who said it? Was it in Oscar Wilde where he said, I can only be me because everyone else has taken that, you know? But if you're not seeing evidence of failure, then you're not doing that enough. You're playing it safe somehow. And you might be like, Nope, nope, I'm not, right? That might be your initial reaction, but I don't buy it. You might say you're putting yourself out there, but if you look closer, I believe you will see that you're doing it in ways you already know you're gonna succeed. Right? Like you, you're just playing it safe in some ways. And Carol Dweck in the book Mindset, which I know so many of us have read, talks about this, about how, well, she talks about first and how we talk to kids. So I'm so aware of how I talk to my kids about this. If we tell a kid you're a good writer, you're a good artist, you're beautiful, you're you're a good athlete, you're so good at this, you're so good at basketball, you're a great dancer. What happens is they latch onto that praise through the title and they don't want to take the next elevated risk because they don't want to lose the title. So they play it safe and they actually stop elevating their skill. They do not progress, they stop the progression because they don't want to try something where they might fail. And if we're trying to achieve consciously or unconsciously, a title of being good at something, most of us won't admit that we're doing it because we don't actually know that we're doing that. We'll do that inside ourselves too. If we tell ourselves we're good at something, then we start being scared that we're gonna lose that title of being good at it, lose that reputation, that perception that we're good at something. And we will stop taking risks because we don't want to be not good, right? We don't want to be, we don't want to lose the the value that we believe makes us worth being a human being. So these are all kinds of fallacies that I'm talking about. So we can be on to ourselves. We can be like, oh, I am not actually putting myself out that myself out there. I'm not putting myself out there in a way where I can face plant, where I'm just putting, I'm being vulnerable. I'm owning the stuff I feel a little shame about, or I'm taking a risk where someone might, you know, nobody might show up. I might want 40 people to come and zero people might come. That's a that's a risking of failure. I might start a business and lose money. I might tell people I'm going for it and have to later tell them it didn't work out, right? Those are the types of things we're talking about. How are you actually putting yourself out there? Now, the second thing that could be happening, that's the first one. You you might be playing it safe. You might not actually be putting yourself in harm's way. And when I say that, I mean it. I want you to put yourself in harm's way, not in front of a car. Okay. I'm just saying harm in terms of like risk being embarrassed, risk failure, risk your reputation, risk the cringe, do it, do it, do it. This is life. The other thing that could be happening is that you're not recognizing failure because your brain doesn't want to see it. That's why I told him I was like, either you're not putting yourself out there or you're not actually admitting to yourself that you are failing because you don't want to see it. And when we do that, we can't learn from it because failure is only valuable if we're learning from it. So we have to trust ourselves enough that compassionate observation. I have an episode called The Compassionate Observer or something like that. And it goes way into this that we have to be gentle with ourselves. We have to trust ourselves to love ourselves and not judge ourselves enough that we actually are willing to show ourselves what's going

My Recent Fails And What They Taught

SPEAKER_00

on. So let me tell you about all the ways that I have failed in the last few months. Um not all the ways, just a few, just a handful of them. Okay. One of them, my husband and I got a c in a couple of arguments, and he told me I miss my best friend because we're always talking about all the stuff we have to do. Because we've had a bunch of stuff to do right now with the kids and the house and the finances and all the things. And that's a total fail to me. Because he's my person and I adore him. And he is my best friend. We always say best friends that we want to, you know, get it on with. That's what we want for our relationship. That's our norm, is we're best friends that want to get it on with each other all the time. And when we're not feeling like that, because we're all business, that's me failing. And so it allowed me, hearing that, allowed me to shift and we re-prioritize never skipping our Sunday meeting where we talk through all the operations of our life, all the business of our life in one hour where we're both consenting to that hour. So it's not like one of us is like popping in the, hey, did this happen? Did this happen? When the other one does not have capacity for that stress, you know? Like at the end of the day, when we haven't consented, we will ask one another what's going on with something. And it's likely to create stress or conflict between us because one of us might already be stressed or tired or whatever, have something going on. So it allowed me to prioritize that meeting, reprioritize them, which we usually do, but we skipped a couple. And also to just what that allows us to do is when we're talking about all of it on Sundays, then in the day-to-day, we can just be besties. We see each other and we just snuggle and we crack up and we crack jokes with each other all the time. That's the point for us is to laugh together and love together and adventure together and enjoy, enjoy these moments of life. We're not getting them back, you know? And so it allowed me to reprioritize that and also allowed me to start talking to myself in my own mind, using sounds like a crazy person. I do talk to myself in my own mind. I uh frame my perspective instead of like whatever thing I'm like, oh, I want to ask Max about this. I say to myself in my mind, besties first, buddies first, best friends first, over and over again. So that was a fail, but I learned from it and it's iterating. And now we're back on track. We're cracking up and having a great time again. Number two, I started off the summer thinking I had balanced my schedule and I teach time whispering. I'm really, really good at schedules, at planning. It's kind of freaky. I'm good at this stuff. But my first three weeks of summer were a total shit show. I had said yes to too much. I too, well, not too many things, but I had said yes to my kids that they didn't have to be in camp all the time because I believe in unscheduled time and Lord of the Flies and kids being bored and not being overscheduled and not overactivited. And I want kids to be in their imagination and play. And I want my daughter to be like, you know, doing her fashion exploration and book writing. She's writing a book with a book writing coach right now. And I want them to be able to sleep 13 hours and get up at one sometimes or 11 or whatever. But I said yes to that and did not get agreement with them enough ahead of time. So I would be coaching and I would see them through the glass of my office door while I was trying to run the Moxie and the Bloom room. And they would be like pressed up, my son would be like pressed up against the glass and like handing me hilarious notes. And hey, me and my groups, the Moxie and the Bloom Room, we had some good laughs about those notes, the shared notes. I when I shared with them the notes my kids had passed me. But in the end, I failed at that. I didn't use my time skills that I teach well enough to set myself up for success. Seeing that, let me shift things and get some good conversations going with my kids that allowed me to ask them to take more responsibility and to trade off. I had prioritized them in this summer and they needed to back me up. So now they're waking up and unloading the dishwasher and they're taking care of their rooms and they're making a plan for the day. And my daughter's walking my son to his friend's house. And, you know, we have these like beautiful ways of doing it and beautiful systems, but I had to fail to learn it. In my own business, I have two entire courses that I am so excited to offer. I've spent dozens, dozens, and dozens of hours building these for all of you. I mean, maybe a hundred hours or more. I don't know. So many hours. And they're gonna offer so much value. I've spent money hiring videographers. All of this editing has happened on them. Definitely hundreds of hours have gone into these courses. They're gonna offer so much value, and I've gotten the most amazing feedback from everyone that's watched them. They're the foundational skills that I teach in one of the courses, the skills around conscious mind, subconscious mind, belief systems, regenerative energy loops. It's like really good stuff. It's got worksheets and a whole email journey. The other course is all the skills I learned from running the innovation company for 15 years, combined with my training, working with cognitive disciplines and hypnosis and tons of books I've read. And I plan the execution of both of them this summer and just decided to not do it because I want to surf with my kids. And so I'm sitting on a bank of awesome that is ready to come to you, but I am not putting it forward. I failed at getting it out there to you when I thought I was going to because I decided not to. And that is kind of a theme of my summer is I had some things I was gonna do this summer and I just stopped. I just was like, nope, that's later. Despite all the money I've spent, despite all of the people that need this, I'm gonna surf with my son. I'm gonna write with my daughter, I'm gonna giggle longer, I'm gonna go on more garden walks. So that's a fail. Like my trajectory of those courses is a fail. I spent a lot of money on them and they're just sitting there, but I am collecting that failure. That's all right with me. I'm putting myself out there. Do you hear that? What I mean by putting yourself out there, saying yes to my kids and thinking I'll figure it out, like trying to be the best partner to my husband, building these courses. I they're all me trying to be the best me I can be, and sometimes just crashing and burning and face planting and chipping my tooth. I could share a million others. I mean, I'm dealing with some crazy health issues because of how hard I went for 20 years in really athletic yoga. That feels like a fail at not planning for not being 25 forever. I didn't handle a moment with my kid the way I wanted to. My projections for my business are off right now because of how I'm prioritizing my family. I have a relationship with a friend that feels like a failure because I set some new boundaries to set to keep myself safe and I miss her. So I kind of feel like eh, like it feels a little faily. I haven't read as many books this summer. I decided to not finish writing my book, which I really was going to do. I rearranged my priorities. These are all fails, but they're all me putting myself out there, setting boundaries, which is hard, even if it means costing feeling good with someone I love. Not writing my book that I told myself I was gonna write. Unless I get some random like funder that comes to me, I'm gonna have to take longer so that I can still have that time with my kids that I need and bring in the income that I need to bring in to support my family. You know, even though I know that this book, getting it out to you, is gonna be incredible. I'm also prioritizing these courses. That project is of the book sounds so fun to me to finish. And I know that the world needs these courses more because they're ready to go and the courses are really solid and people are asking for them. So all of these that I just listed, all these failures, are because I'm putting my full heart and love into my life, trying to be the fullest version of me I can give the world. And that means falling on my face a lot. But my point is if you're not putting yourself out there, you're not failing. And if you're not trying to be the you that you want to be, you're depriving the world of the thing that only you can give it. So in a minute, I will share two questions to wrap up our episode. But for now, I want to wrap with one more concept.

Measure The Gain Not The Gap

SPEAKER_00

One thing that makes it easier and more fun to fail forward as we call in the world of design thinking, that's what we call it in the world of design thinking, is to make sure you're mastering the gain and not the gap. You want to measure by the gain and not the gap. You want to master your mind to focus on the gain and not the gap. Our brain wants to mind the gap, but that gets us into all kinds of trouble, y'all. So there is an episode, again, called Look How Far You've Come. But a quick recap here. When we go with our nature, our brain's natural tendency, we're gonna measure the gap. There is a book called The Gap and the Gain, and I will put it in the show notes. What is the name of that author? I see it on my bookshelf, but I can't see that far. And the there's not high contrast on the on the label, so I can't read it for you right now, but I'll put it in the show notes. The gap, what the gap is, is the distance between where we are and our ideal. So we got a goal, and the gap is the distance between where we are right now and our goal. And we measure that as a way to track progress, but that is a logical fallacy because we can't measure against something that isn't real. By definition, our goal is our vision is not real yet. It's a thing that exists in the future, and its value is to steer our efforts, to inspire and motivate us, to create definition to inform what we say yes and no to to help define the parameters of that. We're saying yes to anything that gets us further towards the priority of our two things we're working on. You can listen to the blueprint, the last episode, where I talked a lot about this, and no to everything else. Anything that sucks time away from those two things. I talked in the last episode about how my two for the past year have been the Moxie and my family, the Moxie being like bloom room two and my clients. And it also primes our brain, our subconscious systems to be creators in the world instead of living in reaction to what's happening in front of us. So we've got our opportunity bias, our subconscious bias, all kinds of bias that kick in to support our goal, especially when we're using hypnosis and visualization to get us towards our goal, especially when we're using time whispering to manage our calendars, to put effort towards our goal and our blueprint to get us there. We can say no to everything else and our subconscious supports us in doing it. But we ironically are also statistically less likely to reach our goal when we measure our progress against the goal itself. Wild, right? When we measure our progress instead, what are we supposed to measure it against? Well, we're supposed to measure it against where we started. That's called the gain. When we do that, we're measuring against something real because we actually have been there, right? That was a moment in time. Where we started existed and where we are right now exists. So that's the only thing we can measure because that's what's real. The other, the goal is a North Star. It's a compass, it's directional, it's not measurement, it's not used for measurement. So when we measure against where we started, we're kicked into a higher brain function that includes creativity and innovation, and we're more likely to success solve, repeat successful behaviors, and we're much more likely to achieve our goal. That's the irony, right? If we look back and say, oh, dang, celebration, look at all the things I did, look at how far I've come. In the end, we are way more likely to reach where we are going. Also, it just feels way better. I will also say that focusing on the gain instead of the gap creates so many good things in relationships when we look at how far we've come with someone, how far that person has come instead of where we wish they were gonna be, where we wish they were. It applies to everything. So I'm just gonna stop because I already have a whole episode on it. But we talk about this in the Moxie and we sometimes talk about it in the bloom room too.

Two Questions And A Challenge

SPEAKER_00

So, how could you put yourself out there more to give the incredible gift of who you are to the world? How can you fail more, baby? Collect some pink marbles. How could you put yourself out there to give the incredible gift of who you are to the world? My first question. And then my second question for you this week is How can you get yourself into actual failure situations? Give less Fs. Put yourself out there where you might actually fall on your face metaphorically. And go for it so that more of your incredible, creative, authentic genius can reach all of us. And if you're doing this in a book group or podcast group or whatever, those are your two questions. Number one, how can you put yourself out there to give more of the incredible gift of who you are to the world? How can you fail more? How can you put yourself out there? And how can you get yourself in actual failure situations? Situations where you might fail. And then I want you to look and see where are you failing now that you can learn from? Where are you failing that you're just not looking at? Remember, we only failure is not inherently valuable. It's only valuable for learning from it. That's the value of failure. Failure isn't valuable for failure's sake, it's valuable because we learn from it and we can't know what to do until we know what not to do. And there's a lot of things to not do, you know. So often we have to rack up a lot of what not to do and before we find what to do. And that's the fun of it all. And if you miss that, you miss the whole point. If you miss the part where you're racking up the pink marbles, where you're racking up the failure, you're missing the point of all of it. The point of all of this is to be you. And in order to be you, you gotta put yourself out there in bigger and bolder and more creatively expressed ways. And that means some are gonna work and some are gonna not. But we wanna see what you are creating. We are right here waiting for it. And that's what I've got for you this

Email Me And Join Moxie

SPEAKER_00

week. Don't forget to email me, Marie at the localbloom.com, if you want to share what comes up from your reflections on these questions. And join us in the moxiedothebloom.com. Work with me. Moxie applications are live. We're having applications roll in. We've got like quite a few people that are enrolled for this next round of Moxie, and it is so fun, so exciting. If you are a woman that is leading in any area of your life, please join us. Start in September. Retreat is a couple months later, and we may be going to Valle de Guadalupe this time, or we'll be right here in San Diego in another beautiful house for three days together, three, four days together. Join us in the Moxie. Send us your emails. We love you very much, and that's what we've got for you this week. And I will see you next week. 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.