WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE YOU'RE FAILING AT LIFE
Carrie Gour
How do you keep from feeling like you are completely failing at life….?
No really. I’m asking.
I write, so I’m used to feeling at least prepared to fail more or less all the time there. This is the reality of any creative act: when we sit down to “make,” the potential for failure is basically the departure point.
But what about in the rest of life where I, at least, am not as prepared to suck? When I am oppressed by feelings of failure in business/work, love, money, how do I get out from under the weight of not being where I think I should be?
About to turn 47 years old, I am how they say, “challenged” - financially, successfully, romantically... While other women close to me run enormously successful businesses, have sufficient money for family holidays and new shoes and celebrate 10-plus years of love (in one case 25 years!), this is the noise in my head: “What else can I do to make a few bucks? Why don’t I know how to make money with my business? What am I doing wrong? At this rate I am going to be fat and grey – everywhere – by the time I have a date again. Ohmigod. Is sex really like riding a bike, because faaaack…Sex.”
Let’s just say, they are not helpful thoughts.
So I’m asking the question. And then one answer comes from a strange place. Strange for me, anyway:
Yeah. That guy. Tony is gifted, often brilliant and clearly making the world a better place in a whole bunch of ways, but I also find him… a lot. Listening to him is like trying to surf a tidal wave: I think I can do it, that I’ve got the ability to “get” it. Meeting the wall of energy sparks small panic and as I catch the front end of the wave, I have two seconds of elation and then… get completely wiped out by its sheer force and volume left with a lot of “what the hell was that?”
Which is all to say he’s not really my thing.
Except on this day, he was.
I watched an interview with him by Marie Forleo – someone who is very much my thing. For conscious entrepreneurs, she is the sparkly bomb. I love her, which is why I was open to hearing an answer at all.
When we read a book or hear a lecture, we take in what we need and leave the rest. In a sea of insight, we only remember what speaks to our immediate needs. So it is that I heard Tony say this:
Whenever you recognize you have an expectation, try having an appreciation instead.
Holy shit.
I mean, the whole business about expectation breeding misery is not new to me. I’m down with Buddha’s “Desire is the root of all suffering” and all that. But the suggestion to back-fill expectation with appreciation is what’s excellent.
You can’t remove something – even a psychological something like expectation – without filling the empty space left behind with something else. Like the loose edges of a sinkhole, what’s been there before will slide back in if you don’t fill it first with something else.
If “comparison is the thief of joy,” then “expectation” is it’s fun-wrecking twin. Super Villians working together to undermine and kill the Hero Confidence.
So it goes that I compare my business, my finances and my romantic life not only to others, but also to some imaginary place I think I should be at. Compounded with the expectation I have of myself to be smarter, better, further ahead by now, the mix is soul crushing.
I am one of those who focus on the hills yet to climb rather than celebrating the treacherous terrain already crossed. It’s like once I do a thing, it’s done; what I have yet to do defines me. Where is the appreciation in that?
No place. That’s where.
Expectation to appreciation is a simple shift in perception. Nothing overtly changes, but everything changes at once.
Last week my kids had horse camp, an hour out of the city. My expectation was that I would bring my computer with me, work in the small town library while the kids did their thing and stay on top of my commitments. Then life: Two meetings arose in the city, the result of which was that every day last week I spent between 2.5 and 5 hours in my car. Let’s just say it was a low-productivity week, it put me behind, and I was grumpy about it.
A tough single parenting week. However, when I could appreciate that 5 hours in my vehicle every every day for a week was better than living with their dad every day for the rest of my life (who could theoretically share the shuttle service), my expectations about my week reoriented themselves. In that moment, I was actually failing less and succeeding more.
We can’t know better or more – until we do.
I am an impatient character. I want to race to the end where I understand fully how to design, market and run a successful business; where I know how to create money and where I am a partner in a fully engaged, adventurous and loving relationship. But of course, if I could do any of those things today, I would be doing them. That’s the point. I’m en route. Appreciate the journey and all that… It’s unreasonable to expect to arrive at a destination without actually travelling there.
Old saws; old truths I learn over and over and over again in new ways.
It’s also good to remind myself not to believe everything I think. As I’ve written before, my mind is an asshole and I have lots of experience of it lying to me in the past. So, when it lectures me about all the ways I’m failing at life? Today I say what I would say to a 3-dimensional person: “Yeah. That’s not helping. Tell me something good, wouldja, ‘cause I’m feeling a little hopeless. And if you can’t do that, shut the fuck up."
What I expect is kindness - from everyone but me to myself, apparently. So what I appreciate, is learning to set a boundary, especially with my asshole mind. And perhaps rather than comparing myself to everyone else and an imaginary ideal in my mind, I can compare myself to... myself. Currently, compared to where I was this time 2 years ago - it's what success looks like!
