How to Be Happy and Successful

Ep. 11: Blame The Process (Success)

• David Murphy • Season 1 • Episode 11

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 42:24

Learn how to focus on fixing what went wrong or what's not working rather than spend your time blaming your character.

Support the show

SPEAKER_00:

Hi, my name is David Murphy, and welcome to How to Be Happy and Successful, the podcast for and from the Mildly Incompetent. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the next episode on the success side of the site. Blame the process. You know that wasn't the original title for the episode. The original title was self-compassion. You know, and I have a self-compassion episode over on the happiness side. And I was just going to name this sort of self-compassion for success. And there are a number of ideas or skills we can develop that will help both happiness and success, such as honesty. Honesty in your life will make you a happier person and make you a more successful person. Or sleep. It's going to seem too soft, right? Over on the happiness side, there's things like gratitude and self-compassion and being in the moment. That all seems that's good for people who want that kind of stuff. But if you want success, you know, setting goals and sticking with things, that sounds good. You're not looking to hear words like self-compassion. But blame the process. Well, that's actually kind of a known phrase from the world of management and leadership. It's a phrase used by companies who try to teach other companies how to perform better and improve their systems. And you know, it's a great idea. It's very useful in the world of business and leadership. But I want to be up front with you. This is like self-compassion for success. And the essential idea is the same. In the self-compassion episode, I talked about how you have these inner voices. You don't have a single inner voice, you have many inner voices, and a lot of them screw with you and say negative things and love to go on and on about negative things that you may have done or that you may have experienced, how you look, whatever. They try to grab the microphone as much as they possibly can. Well, you have voices that are maybe the same ones or very similar in your head that are evaluating your performance and they're just waiting for the moment something doesn't go right. You drop the ball and screw up somehow, or just some result isn't as good as it as you were hoping for. Whatever it is, if it looks like a failure, these voices are there to tell you how much you suck. And of course, this is the expected outcome. This is what's happened every time you've tried to do something. And by the way, how could you be so stupid as to do that? Etc. etc. etc. These voices, they're there to make you feel bad. But the point of this episode is not just how to make you feel bad, not just how they screw up your happiness, but how they screw up your success. How they impede your process of improvement. Just screw up your potential, your ability to move forward and find the problem and get better at things. Those voices, they want to convince you they're making you better. But they're not making you better at all. And that's what we're talking about here today. Now, if you're new to this idea of blaming the process instead of blaming yourself, you really have to get out of your head the idea that you're just being soft on yourself. That's what those voices will try to tell you when you start to change things. That you're just being a softie and you're giving up by choosing not to excoriate yourself for mistakes you've made or setbacks you've experienced. Not so. I first heard this idea, this phrase from Coach Kay, the very famous and successful basketball coach from Duke University. I heard it on his masterclass. And that is not a paid product endorsement. Masterclass gives me nothing for these episodes. But it's a phrase well known among, again, these people who teach leadership and systems improvements. I'm a nurse but use this idea a lot in hospitals. You know, what you don't want to do is if something bad happens, and that could be bad as a minor harm or could be causing a death of somebody, you actually don't want to point to someone and say, you did that, you know, get rid of that person, because it's likely there's something in the system that went wrong that should have prevented it from happening. And you've got to go try to find out what that is. So this really is a technique used by successful people. And one of the most important aspects of being and becoming a successful person is not expecting success right from the get-go. This is a critical attitude for you to have at the start of any learning process. And as I've said before, I intend to have goals and to try to make progress for myself until I die. So if you have a similar attitude, you should be going through a learning process your whole life. So you should always have the attitude, I'm not supposed to be getting things right all the time. It is one of the most frustrating things to teachers of any kind of a skill, from martial arts to music to a new job skill, that students sometimes come in, and of course, they're no good at first, and then they just go on, like, oh God, um, that was terrible. I'm sorry. Uh, let me try that again. Oh, bad again. No, I don't want to move forward. I I want to try to get this right, but I just suck at it so much. There are students like that, that they can't accept the fact that of course they're bad. That's how it is. Why would you think you could walk in and be great at something right off the bat? Do they think other people were like that? That other people walked into the martial arts school and started performing like a black belt from their first lesson? And if they realized other people weren't like that, do you think those people were failures from the start? Of course not. People don't apply that idea to other people, but to themselves, they love to focus on their failings and say, this just proves what I am, proves that I suck. And beyond thinking about when you are just starting a skill, is it realistic that at any time of your life you will get to a point where you never make a mistake in something again? If you go to the best violinist in one of the best oracle shows in the world, do you think that person never makes a mistake, never plays below their absolute best? Of course, that's not true. That is a childish expectation for the world and for life. Just it's such a burden. You need to get that out of your way to be successful. It's almost impossible to exaggerate how freeing it is, how useful it is to get those negative voices out of the conversation when you're trying to figure out what went wrong and how to get better. It's like, you know, if if you can work on something and work on yourself getting better at something without those voices, like it's like walking up a flight of stairs. Well, some effort involved, but you're ready to go. If you've got all those voices telling you every time you make any kind of mistake that you're no good, etc., it's like walking up a flight of stairs with like a hundred-pound person on your back who's also like covering your eyes at the same time. It just makes it almost impossible to move forward. And I'm not exaggerating. These voices actually inhibit your ability to make yourself improve. They take up all of your attention when your attention should be on what went wrong there, what can I make better? If you have 10 minutes or one hour to try to figure out what went wrong somewhere and make it better, and you spend eight minutes of that time or 45 minutes of that time, instead thinking about how much you've disappointed yourself again, or some other issue about you, instead of what's going wrong right now in this process, you are wasting time. And the thing is, you likely don't even realize it. If you make a mistake in some process and it didn't turn out how you wanted, as long as you aren't thinking about, you know, dinner tomorrow night, if you're thinking about whatever went wrong at all, you probably think you're actually doing useful work. But that's only true if you're actually thinking about the process, the actions. And yes, you are one of the things doing the process. Maybe you're the only one doing the process. But you don't think about your personality and character. You think about what are the steps you're doing that are going well, that are working, and the steps that are not working. That leads us to the actual job here. The actual task is to remove yourself from your evaluation of whatever just happened. You know, so something didn't go right, you look to see what happened, and you're not involving your character, your personality. In a way, you want to look at it as though somebody else is doing it, but even then, forget there's a person who's doing it. Imagine a robot or a machine is doing the actions that you did so that you can evaluate the actions, not whatever's going on inside this person or what kind of a person did these actions. This way of looking at things is so foreign to most people. We in I include myself in this, the the natural habit is to look at our actions and see us looming large there and think about what this means in regard to us. Does it confirm our image of ourselves? It just has nothing to do with it. In any kind of action that you might do, say at work, a lot of times different people will make the same mistake, right? When they're new at it, they don't know what they're doing, the same mistake keeps popping up. Well, are those people all the same? No, they're very different people. If you go thinking, well, what a lot, let's analyze the problematic personalities of these people to find out what went wrong, it's just ridiculous. And yet that's the game we play with ourselves when we look at ourselves and see a failure. If I go back to like a Coach K basketball analogy, if he's looking, let's say, at a minute of playing time where there's a defensive play and they go to the other side of the court and then it's an offensive play, and maybe they both don't go very well, and he looks at these players, he's watching them on a video, and he's thinking about this person passed that way, this person failed to guard a player that way, this person took a shot that wasn't a very good shot. It does not make any difference when he's looking at those plays to see what went wrong. Oh, did that player who passed the ball well or poorly, does that player in general pass the ball well or poorly? That player who took that shot, do they shoot you know 35% normally, do they shoot 78% normally? Like none of that history matters in the situation. What matters is judging the play. That's the same for you. It just doesn't matter what kind of a person you are. It doesn't even matter if you're evaluating whatever steps happened when something went wrong, it doesn't matter how many times you've made the same mistake again. That is worth knowing to know how fixed a behavior and a habit is in you. So if you're trying to see why you were half an hour late for work and you are half an hour late for work 25% of the time, okay. First off, congratulations on still having a job. Don't expect it to last. But more to the point, right now, you should know that to know that this is not just a one-time event, that you obviously have habits that are ingrained that are causing a real problem and are gonna cause a problem in your life. But it doesn't help you actually look at a single day and say, what went wrong in that day? What did I do, Ron, to make me late for work? Did I get up too late? And did that happen because I went to bed too late? If I didn't get up too late, did I not have myself prepared for work? So I just spend 45 minutes getting ready, which I could have done last night. Or did I take the wrong route to work? Did I underestimate how much traffic there would be on the way to work? You know, you get the idea. You look at what happened without throwing blame or evaluation of you as a person in there, and then you think, well, what can I do better about that? You know, when it comes to being late for work, pretty much always getting up earlier and getting moving earlier will solve that problem. And if that means you go to bed earlier, well, that's actually good for you. And I don't say that as someone who thinks that's always easy. I'm a nurse who works till 11:30 at night. I go to bed at 1 or 1.30 in the morning because that's how it is. And sometimes I have to get up early, anyways. It's a challenge. But many people could go to bed an hour earlier if they just turn off Netflix, Amazon Prime, whatever it is. If it's not about what time you get up, just look to find the problem as an outsider would look to find the problem. Someone who's hired to come solve this problem who doesn't have any emotion caught up in it. So again, you have to remove yourself from your analysis. And that's hard to do, but you got to catch yourself doing it. Every time you look at whatever happened this morning in your conversation that went badly, you look and you don't say, Well, that's me because of the kind of person I am. That's how I talk to people, even though I wish I didn't. Even though you're the one who did the action that you're trying to evaluate, you're not there to condemn your character or even evaluate your character. You're not there to review your history of your failings. You're there to look at the actions that that person took in that situation and see what was it that made things go wrong? Maybe in a conversation that didn't go well. It's because you jumped in with feedback that wasn't requested. And yes, you can say, that's what I did because that's what a jerk I am. Forget it. Don't say that about yourself. Say, yes, a gentleman feedback that wasn't asked for. Next time I'll just hold back on that. It's hard at first if what you'd love to do is get feedback that's not asked for. I talked about that in the Treat People Well episode about you really got to restrain yourself from unasked for advice. Anyways, it's hard at first, but it gets easier with practice, like everything. Just learn to hold back. Or at least hold back until someone's done talking. Maybe you just keep interrupting. That's what went wrong. Just look at what went wrong as though you're listening to a recording of somebody else as best you can, because your memory is not a perfect recording device. Think about it and think next time I'll do better. And next time you might not do better because it's hard to fix our communication. But you keep analyzing the process, seeing a mistake you think you're making, and then working on doing it better the next time. That is what blaming the process is about. The other kind of evaluation, the kind where you really are digging into, you know, what kind of a person are you, and frankly, probably not a very good one, it's so ridiculous that you would see how crazy it is, except that it's probably what's been going on in your head for decades. If you could see it from the outside, you would realize how crazy it is. And we do see that when other people do it. If you have ever worked with someone where every time, you know, as a group, you're doing something, something goes wrong, someone goes, Oh, I knew that would happen. This always happens when I do this. God, I blew it because I just am like that. I'm so sorry, everybody. Why am I so bad at this? If you've ever had someone like that in a work environment or on a team or in your family, well, you just want to murder those people in those moments, and you just know it's just so not helpful. This is tremendously useless. It's worse than useless. It holds us back from getting somewhere and it drives me crazy. You could see that in other people. And if you watch it in a movie or a television show, someone like that, they're the butt of the joke. But that's in your head. And your job, if you can laugh at it if you want to, if it can make you laugh, terrific. But then get it out of the way and just let go and say, let's restart, let's start the process again and figure out what we did wrong. I'll give you an analogy. Maybe it's more like an example from real life. And this isn't my example. I heard it on a TED X talk where a woman said that we should be practicing languages and trying to learn a language like people play video games. You know, when people they're trying to learn a language, they're often so embarrassed about making mistakes. They almost don't want to talk out loud, right? You're in a class, you don't want to be the person who talks because you don't know what you're saying very well. When you try to talk to native speakers of that language, it feels so embarrassing. And the woman giving the talk said, watch someone learn how to play a video game. You know, kind of video game where you can get shot down and killed easily. They get killed all the time. It's a constant series of failures. But they don't take it personally. Like people don't get wrapped up with their self-esteem, you know, dropping every time that they get killed. They can get excited when it goes well and frustrated when it goes badly, but it's not the same thing. And that's why they just keep trying, and that's why they keep making progress. And she said, you know, try doing language like that. It's not about you feeling bad about yourself. You just keep trying. And you screw up, you get better. And then, and frankly, video game players are really good at displaying the process idea because they don't think, oh, I'm just such a bad video game player, and look at all the times I've died. They think, oh, what went wrong there? Okay, somebody is hiding behind that wall. I've got to move this way. They're great at blaming the process. You'll probably like that if you play video games. For some reason. And in that context, we do it naturally. But other times we're terrible at it. And I'll give you a personal example. I play chess sometimes on my chess.com app on my phone. There's another unpaid promotion. Chess is a very frustrating game. You know, you win until you get to sort of your level, and then you lose as much as you win. And every time you lose is because you make some kind of error or errors that add up. And you should hear my inner voices when I lose a game, which is very often when I play, sometimes a bunch of times in a row. My inner voices are very unkind. And they don't talk about the fact that I moved the night this way, I should move to the center of the board. They talk about what an idiot I am. How can I make that mistake again? When I've made it so many times before, and after all the times I've played, I just can't seem to get any better, et cetera, et cetera. And those voices, they don't make me better at chess. They actually get in the way of me improving because number one, they make me feel like I just can't improve because I just, you know, I've demonstrated how much I just won't get better because I suck so much. They either motivate me to just stop playing because I feel crappy about myself and my chess performances and my chess ability, or need to dive back into a new game without even looking at what went wrong in that game, really. Dive back in and try to, you know, overcome that failure I just had. Again, often without even seeing what that failure was. I'm too frustrated, too emotional in my head to go back and look at the last game, which you can review move by move to see what went wrong. I'm too full of myself, too emotionally caught up with myself to blame the process and analyze the process. Neither reaction is useful, but those are the kind of reactions that are prompted by these negative inner voices. What you need is some sane voice to come along and say, whoa, what is happening? Take your ego out of the whole situation and just look at what is actually happening when things go wrong. See if you could do it better, if it comes up again. I've said that this phrase, blame the process, this idea is taken from people that help you know manage systems and improve systems. Or I got it from Coach Kay, you know, it's useful for coaches that are trying to improve a team. You know, you are trying to be your own leader, your own manager. Frankly, in everything that I do on this side, right, I'm encouraging you how to sort of oversee yourself and improve your processes and whatever it is, and how you look at the world, you know, by practicing gratitude, on how you try to improve your life by setting goals, etc. Now, the best kinds of coaches and teachers and managers and leaders are motivational. You cannot improve anything if you don't believe in yourself. That's just how it is. The idea that we actually get going because people put us down and make us feel bad about ourselves, really false. The only time that ever works in you know movies or stories or in real life is if we already have some kind of belief in ourselves. So when somebody puts us down, that belief in ourselves sort of comes to the fore. We sort of rise up to overcome the insult that we've received. And that is a nice story in the rare occasions that happens in real life, and it's fun to watch in movies. But nearly all the time when someone puts us down, it agrees with whatever criticism we already have in our own head. And the moment we believe in our stupidity and our weakness and our lack of ability, the less and less we're willing to try to work on our progress. So you need to be a coach for yourself that demonstrates some belief in yourself. And as I said on the self-compassion episode, I'm not asking you to say only wonderful things to yourself, only to compliment yourself and praise yourself. That's not what I'm saying. In that episode, I say you should be kind and fair to yourself as you would be to somebody else. Here, we're talking about blaming the process, trying to fix something that went wrong. Yeah, be kind and fair. You know, basically look at the problem under the assumption that you're not a bad person and that you have the ability to fix the problem. Improvement requires motivation, it requires self-belief. And you can see why, again, these voices that just have been with us, you know, not quite forever, but almost forever, they're just so unhelpful because they are the opposite of motivators. They're not giving tough love, they're just giving abuse. There's a well-known quote from Nelson Mandela where he says, I never lose, I either win or I learn. It's a great quote. It represents someone who believes in themselves, who says, like, I can fail something, but that doesn't mean that I lose or that I'm a loser. If you think that you're either gonna win or you're gonna learn, it means you have self-belief. Now, I don't expect you to transform yourself into Nelson Mandela or into anybody who suddenly can believe in themselves all the time. It would be nice, and it's actually more possible than you think just to give yourself confidence. Just say, just have confidence. We wish we could do that for children or teenagers or young adults that we want to give advice to. We say, look, just believe in yourself more. It's you deserve it, and it's gonna make your life better and easier if you just have some confidence, and it's not as impossible as it sounds. But I don't expect you to just grant yourself confidence in such a way that you no longer have negative voices. But you can start to do this work of saying to yourself every time the voices come up and tell you how much you suck, or just tell you you should feel some burden of guilt or embarrassment for screwing up or for having a setback. The voice kept saying, No, no, no, I don't suck. Just just forget about all that. Forget about me. Whatever I am as a person, I can do this better. That's what video game players say to themselves. They don't say consciously, but they don't say it doesn't matter what kind of a person I am, I can get better at this video game. Let me do it again. It's kind of like who cares if I suck, I can get better. That's gotta be you and everything you do in life. It doesn't matter what kind of person I am, which comes from my long history. What matters is I can do this better, let me do it again. Let me try to figure out what I didn't do so well the first time or the fifteenth time, and let me do it again and do it better. Your job is to succeed or learn, or learn until you succeed. So if your job is not to obsess about yourself in the middle of whatever went wrong, what is your job? You have to look at your performance like an outsider would. All right, you've got to do the same thing here. You're trying to fix something that went wrong. You've got to be like a scientist, and ideally a scientist, it's not all caught up emotionally in what's happening. It's supposed to be data. You've got to look at your own life, your own choices, your own actions. When you're trying to repair things, improve things, you've got to look at it without your emotion and your self-blame getting involved. So you have to look at what you're trying to fix, but you've also got to keep your inner ear tuned to when you gets injected into it in a way that's just talking about how much you sucked at something or dropped the ball again. It's a skill, like all skills, you can get better with practice if you practice well. You also might need some help evaluating what went wrong. Somebody who's not gonna get all caught up in your ego's need to, you know, castigate itself. And also somebody just knows what they're doing, right? So if you are not very good at something, you have repeated problems with something, yeah, get help from someone who knows how to do that, someone who knows how to play chess, someone who can help you look at your resume or look at a if you failed a test, someone who can help you figure out why you failed that test. And you want to get help from somebody, if you need the help, if you want to get help from somebody who knows what they're doing and will act like a professional in that they won't get all caught up emotionally in what we're trying to figure out here. So I'm actually not talking a lot in this episode about how you should evaluate your process as in the the actual work of going through whatever you messed up and and figuring it out. Because this idea of blaming the process rather than blaming your inner character can be applied to just about everything in your life, every skill that you do or that you want to do, how you evaluate what went wrong, you know, it's gonna vary widely. So, unlike, you know, in set goals, I talked for a while about why it is so important to set goals or so useful, and then I actually go into how I think you should do it, you know, the nuts and bolts. Here, I'm not really gonna do nuts and bolts. I just want you to get into your head this idea that when you look at the process, instead of looking at yourself as a failure, as the most important thing that needs evaluation, when you look at the process, that's when you can make real progress. I can make a t-shirt. It's the process that makes the progress. That's my that should be my mantra, not that non-catchy thing that I've been using all this time. And look, understand that no matter how much you work on internalizing this idea of blaming the process and how much you successfully internalize the idea, you're not gonna get rid of those voices entirely. They're gonna be there. And I talk about this in the self-compassion episode. Your job is to diminish how often those voices can grab the microphone. But they're always gonna be there. They're gonna, they're gonna get out and get that microphone sometimes. You're gonna hear them blaming you, and it's it's really easy when you go back and try to evaluate things that went wrong in a conversation, in a work project, whatever, it's always gonna be pretty easy for you to think, ah, just why did I do that, instead of something useful like, well, what did I do that I can improve? And that kind of language, the kind of language used on yourself can sound so ridiculously positive to some people, because it's so contrary to what they're used to saying to themselves when something goes wrong. I talk about that problem in the self-compassion episode, or when I talk about being here now, or even using gratitude lists, you know, just those ideas and those words just put people off sometimes. And sometimes this kind of language of stop yelling at yourself, just see what you can improve. That just sounds it either sounds too soft or it sounds nice, but impossible. But it's not impossible to learn how to speak well to yourself. It takes practice, like just about everything in life. Just like I have to keep writing gratitude lists in order to sort of renew and increase my appreciation for the life I have to make me happier and help my perspective on the world. I've got to keep my ear tuned for those voices that want to blame me and judge me when I don't do things well. That's the game of being human. And you know, one of the funniest things about it is that we are so quick to judge and criticize ourselves when we're trying to do something positive. We're trying to get ourselves in better shape by either eating better or exercising or both. We are trying to learn how to meditate. So we sit down and meditate, and it's really easy to get on yourself about how bad you are at meditating. A lot of people quit very early on because they're not good at it, or rather they think they're not good at it. I think there's almost something particular about trying to do a positive behavior that makes it so easy for the negative voices to come out. This is crazy. Just that you are working on a positive behavior means that you are already deserving of praise. That you aren't terrific at that behavior right off the bat, or even your hundredth time, okay. That doesn't mean you deserve negativity. It doesn't mean you deserve to feel worse than you did when you started, which is so often the case. Of course you don't deserve that. You deserve to feel better than you did when you started, better with yourself. You know, we we go on a diet so that we can eat healthier food and lose some weight. This is a positive step in our life. We're trying to improve our health and maybe demonstrate better eating habits to our children if we have children. Great. So we do our diet for a while, and then what happens? We we break our diet. We spend a day eating all kinds of junk food, maybe spend five days eating junk food or eating the kind of food we used to eat before the diet. So, how do you feel about yourself? Do you feel the same as you did before the diet? No, you feel worse about yourself. You feel worse than you would have if you had never started. That doesn't make any sense. You spent some amount of time, a week, three weeks, three days, something, doing something positive, pat yourself on the back. Okay, it's not going well right now, get back to it. Look at what went wrong, say, well, I probably shouldn't have let those bags of chips into the house. Or after I went to that party where I, of course, I'm going to eat stuff that is not on my diet there. The next day I should have just gotten back to the diet instead of hating myself and continuing to eat my old stuff. The point is, making yourself feel worse than you did even when you started trying to do this good thing for yourself, not only is it not nice, it doesn't feel good, it doesn't make any sense. You're trying to do something positive. Are you bad at it? Maybe you are. I don't know. Maybe you're terrible at whatever this thing is you're trying to do. You're still working on it, so you're a good person. So get that concern out of your way and figure out what's going wrong. And if you need to, get help figuring out what's going wrong. Okay, I think it's about time to wrap it up, which makes this not as long an episode as the ones I've been doing over the last couple of months. And I consider that a win to be able to do an episode less than an hour. Thank goodness. This is not another hour and a half episode. That's how I feel about it, anyways. And to be honest, I think it probably could be even shorter if I were a little more handy with the editing, as I'm more willing to cut things out. I feel like this episode might be even a little more redundant than most of them, right? Repeat myself. But you know, as I said, I don't know, maybe the very first episode, part of teaching is repeating yourself. It's very unusual if someone's gonna hear something one time and they're gonna get it. So if you're teaching anybody, a child, a student, you have to repeat yourself, and the question is just how much? And you know, if you heard me before, I prefer to repeat myself a little too much, probably. And that's how it is. Look, to summarize or to repeat myself again, as I said in the self-compassion episode, I'm not trying to get you to just be super soft on yourself or just constantly praise yourself and say wonderful things and just say merry motivational, inspiring phrases to yourself every chance you get. That's not what I'm doing here. It's not what I recommend that you do for yourself. In that episode, I use the phrase be kind and fair a lot. You want to be kind to yourself and fair to yourself. You should treat other people like that, you should treat yourself like that. That is also how you can help yourself succeed. Be kind, be nice to yourself, and be fair to yourself, which means if you deserve criticism, you know, give yourself some criticism. As in if in looking at the process you realize, you know, I just I didn't even try hard there, or I let that person down. The reason that person didn't come back to support me is that I lied to them about something. Okay, you need to call that straight and not pretend it didn't happen. So be kind and fair. That's what a good teacher is, that's what a good boss is, that's what a good leader is. You should be that for yourself if you want to succeed. All right, let's do our mantra that we always do. The one that's not as clever as uh the process makes the progress or whatever I said a minute ago. So the mantra is you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. You know how it works, you matter right now. You don't need to go achieve something over the next five years before you finally matter. You start off with value. Because you matter, you getting somewhere, you achieving what you want to achieve matters, and you being happier as you do it matters. So this work of blaming the process instead of blaming yourself when things go wrong, because things will always be challenging. If you're living a life that's not challenging at all, and so things never go wrong, that's a very limited life. And if you were living that life, I'm guessing you would not be listening to this podcast. So things go wrong. This work of blaming the process instead of blaming yourself, it matters for you being happier and more successful. And you can do this work. You can. Like the other things. Things I suggest it's generally not very easy. Changing our behaviors is difficult. Changing our internal behaviors more so than the external ones. This is an internal behavior that we have to adjust, but you can do it. And it's gonna take a long time for it to really get ingrained. You can learn things right off the bat, you can get better at it, and then you'll probably take a step back because you've stopped working on it as hard because you think you've got it. You just gotta keep saying when you're trying to get somewhere with something, okay, it's not about me, it's about whatever just happened. And I can make that go better the next time, or maybe you know, three times from now. Okay, that is it. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next time. All right, this has been the How to Be Happy and Successful Podcast. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. So if you're interested in reading an article that goes with this uh podcast episode, you can go to the website. Website is www.happy-and-successful.com. So it's happyandsuccessful.com, but there's hyphens in between the words. You can read articles there. You can also sign up for the mailing list there. So when I put out new content, you will get an email saying, hey, there's new content. Go listen or go read. I also offer coaching. So if you'd like some help being happy or being successful or both, if you think my ideas are good, reach out to me through the website. If you like the episode, please go write a nice review about it wherever you listen to it. And if you didn't like it, well, you just keep that to yourself. And if you really like the episode and the podcast in general, feel free to go to the Patreon page and become a supporter. That'd be awesome. If you have any questions or comments or complaints, go to the website and uh send me an email. I will do my best to respond, though. Frankly, I barely have time to put this thing together, so I won't promise, but I will try. Okay, I think that's it. Until next time.