I was in the shower, getting ready for a podcast interview.
The show was called But First She Failed. So I knew exactly what was coming. The host was going to ask me about a time I had failed, and I wanted a good answer ready.
I stood there under the hot water and went looking for one.
Nothing came.
So I went further back. My twenties in New York City. The wholesale travel company I managed. The parenting talks. The speeches I gave in Russia and Croatia and all over the United States.
Still nothing.
For about four seconds I felt rather pleased with myself.
Then it landed.
I couldn’t think of a failure because for so much of my life I hadn’t really put myself out there. I had played it safe.
What playing it safe actually looks like
“Playing it safe” sounds like sitting on a couch, and that was never my life.
I led workshops. I worked with people all over the world. I stood in front of three hundred people in Moscow and taught parenting with a translator at my side.
But that work is my dharma. It comes easily to me.
And when I looked back honestly at everything else, at every job and every project I ever took on, they all had one thing in common. Somewhere inside me, before I began, I already knew I could do it.
There might be a learning curve. There was never a real chance of falling on my face.
And the things I wasn’t sure about?
I never said no to those. I just never quite got around to them.
That’s the part I’d like you to sit with for a moment. Playing it safe almost never announces itself as fear. More often it shows up as a simple fact about who you are.
My friend Deborah made my kids’ Halloween costumes every year because “I wasn’t good at sewing.” As far as I could tell, that was just a description of me, the same as being right-handed or hating cilantro. I was someone who didn’t sew. Deborah was someone who did. That was the end of it.
It took me years to notice how many descriptions like that one I was carrying around. And that most of them quietly kept me standing on ground I already knew would hold me.
Why?
Beliefs. Mine in particular.
The five sentences that ran my life
By the time I was standing in that shower, I had already eliminated a group of beliefs that had shaped decades of my choices:
- “I’m not good enough.”
- “Mistakes and failures are bad.”
- “If I make a mistake or fail, I’ll be rejected.”
- “I’m not smart.”
- “What makes me good enough is having other people think well of me.”
Read that list slowly, then ask yourself something. If a woman genuinely held those five beliefs, what would her life actually look like?
My answer.
She’d be careful. She would take on the things she already did well, she’d steer quietly around everything else, and from the outside she would look like a capable and accomplished person who had simply made sensible choices.
She would also never find out what she was capable of.
Where mine came from
My father adored me. I was his angel face.
But when I did something wrong he would make a sound, “Enhhh,” like the buzzer on a game show, and say, “You don’t use your head.”
He had no idea what he was doing. Years later, when we finally talked about it, he told me he would have ripped his tongue out if he had known how it landed on me.
A child doesn’t know any of that, though. A child hears the buzzer and draws a conclusion. Mine was “Mistakes and failures are bad” “If I make a mistake or fail, I’ll be rejected” and “I’m not smart.”
And once you believe mistakes are bad, you can end up building a life that never requires you to make one.
Where to look in your own life
You may be reading this thinking it doesn’t apply, because you can name plenty of failures. That’s wonderful. It may mean you’ve been living out on the edge where the interesting things happen.
Or it may mean something quite different.
Some of the people I work with can list their failures without any trouble at all. They remember them well. And that can be its own kind of difficulty, because some of those failures left a mark, and now there are things they won’t go near anymore. They went out on a limb a few times. It hurt badly, and they have not gone back out.
If that’s closer to your life than my story is, you may well have a similar set of beliefs underneath. They may simply have produced a different behavior in you than they produced in me.
So wherever you find yourself, if something here is making you shift in your seat a little, four questions are worth sitting with.
What have you wanted for years and never actually attempted? Not the thing you tried that didn’t work out. The thing that has stayed permanently at the “one of these days” stage.
When you imagine starting it, what’s the first sentence that shows up in your mind? Don’t reach for a sophisticated answer. Take the blunt one. “I’d look ridiculous.” “I’m too old.” “I’d probably be terrible at it.” That sentence is a thread worth pulling on.
Is there something you used to do that you’ve quietly stopped doing? Not the interests you simply outgrew. Something you once cared about and were willing to be seen doing. Think back to how the last attempt felt, and ask yourself honestly whether that feeling is what made the decision for you.
Has anything you’ve taken on ever frightened you before you started it? If you scan back through your work and your life and everything was something you already knew you could handle, that may say less about your judgment than it appears to. Patterns like that have causes.
Please don’t be hard on yourself about any of this. These beliefs were formed when you were small, by people who loved you and had no idea how you were interpreting events. They did their job. They kept you from getting hurt.
Now like most of us, you have some limiting beliefs. Fortunately, you can get rid of them.
If you’d like to see for yourself how this works, we have a free program that walks you through eliminating a belief step by step, on video. Many people start with “I’m not good enough” or “Mistakes and failures are bad.” You can find it here:
Say the words of the belief you decide to work with out loud first and notice how they feel. Then go through the process and say them again. Something that felt completely true will feel untrue, or just plain empty.
What became possible
Morty died on October 14, 2015.
And then somebody had to run the Lefkoe Institute.
I had never run a company. It was not anything I had ever aspired to, or trained for, or pictured myself doing. I’d spent my career doing the work I loved while Morty handled the business.
I said yes anyway.
Confidence had very little to do with it. I said yes because the beliefs that would have stopped me in the past were gone. There was no voice telling me I wasn’t smart enough, no voice warning me that failing would cost me everyone’s good opinion. There was a decision in front of me and a company that needed someone to make it.
So I asked for help. I called friends, and I found people who knew things I didn’t and let them teach me. I was no longer afraid to fail, and that is what made the rest of it possible.
The Institute has done well for eleven years now.
I’m proud of that. I’m also allowed to be proud of it without checking whether anyone else approves, which is its own kind of freedom, and none of it would have happened if I were still the woman who couldn’t think of a single failure.
That’s what I’d like you to take from this. Underneath the careful life you may have built, there is a version of you who never needed to be careful in the first place.
She’s still there. She has been the whole time.
And if you’d like to talk about what you want and what seems to be standing in the way of it, I offer a free strategy session.
We’ll look at your goals, what’s getting in the way of them, and whether working together makes sense as a next step. You can apply here:
Either way, I hope you’ll ask yourself the question I asked myself in the shower that morning. It may be the most useful one I’ve ever stumbled into.
With love,
Shelly
