I got an email a few years ago inviting me to appear on a podcast.
The name of the show was “But First She Failed.” The premise was simple: every guest came on to talk about a time they had failed.
I was flattered. I sat down to prepare, and then I got into the shower and realized I had a problem.
I couldn’t think of a single time I had truly failed.
Not because I was somehow beyond failure. It was because I had always, quietly, stayed in the lane where I already knew I was good. Anything unfamiliar, anything where I might fall short or look foolish, I somehow never got around to doing.
At the time I thought I was just being careful. Practical. Smart.
Something else was happening in the moments before I decided not to try.
My mind was running a movie.
A three-second movie
It happens so quickly you almost miss it.
You think about writing the article, sending the email, making the call. And before you’ve even finished the thought, your brain is already playing out what comes next. You imagine an audience that doesn’t care. A silence that means you were wrong to try.
The movie lasts maybe three seconds.
But the feeling it leaves behind can last for months.
Why?
Because the meaning you give to that imagined scenario feels true. Your nervous system responds as if the thing has already happened. And so you don’t do the thing. You tell yourself you’ll do it when you’re more prepared, when the timing is better, when you feel more ready.
The timing never feels right, and the readiness never comes. Because what’s actually in the way isn’t the task.
It’s the meaning the task is generating.
Phil had been avoiding a webinar for six months
Phil was a student in the Occurring Course. He had been invited to give a webinar for his mentor’s email list — his mentor was well-known, the audience large and engaged. Six months later, Phil still hadn’t scheduled it.
In the course, he worked through the meaning-finding process and found a mental movie he had been running without realizing it. In his imagination he could already see the audience with faces going blank, people quietly logging off.
From that scene, the meanings cascaded: They’ll think my ideas are stupid. They’ll think I’m stupid.
He hadn’t said any of this out loud before. But it had been running quietly in the background every single time the webinar crossed his mind.
The Occurring Process asks: Is that the only way to interpret what would happen? Or is it one meaning out of many?
He started to find alternatives. Maybe the audience would find it genuinely useful. His mentor wouldn’t have invited him if he expected it to go badly. And some people tuning out is completely normal in any webinar.
As he considered each alternative, something loosened.
Phil scheduled the webinar before he had even chosen a topic. He told us he wanted to “strike while the iron was hot” before the feeling faded.
Jessica was afraid of what the answer might be
Jessica was building a business. She needed to post in an online forum to find people to interview, and it had been on her list for weeks with nothing done.
When she finally looked at what was stopping her, she found a cluster of meanings she had never examined.
She was certain she would fail at conducting the interviews. She felt guilty for not having posted already. And underneath it all, she was already sure the business itself would fail.
Notice something about those thoughts. Not one of them had happened yet. They were about a future her mind was already treating as settled, and she was responding emotionally to something that existed only in her imagination.
When she dissolved those meanings, she made the post the same day.
What Morty discovered
What Morty spent his life teaching, and what I’ve watched change lives for over thirty years, is this:
Our feelings don’t come from the events in our lives.
They come from the meaning we give those events.
And this is just as true for events that haven’t happened yet. The webinar Phil kept imagining going badly. The forum post Jessica was already picturing as a failure.
When you give a meaning to an imagined scenario, your nervous system can’t tell the difference between the movie and reality. The feelings are real, the avoidance is real, and the thing you most want to do never gets done.
The Occurring Process teaches you to notice the meaning in the moment and ask: Is this the only way to see this? What else could this mean?
The answer to that question, when you genuinely explore it, changes everything. Phil found that out in a single session. Jessica made her post the same day she did the work.
When you dissolve the meaning that’s generating the fear, the path forward opens on its own.
Back to the podcast
I told the host about my problem. She laughed and said it was exactly the kind of answer she was looking for.
What I understand now is that playing it safe isn’t neutral. Every time I didn’t put myself out there, I was running a mental movie too. I just wasn’t aware of it. The movie always ended the same way: I’d fail, and what that failure meant about me was fixed and permanent.
Once I understood the ending was just a meaning, and not a fact, I could find a different one.
So can you.
Though I should say: looking back, over the years of running the Institute, there actually were things someone else might have called failures. Products we tried to sell that didn’t sell. Courses we tried to fill that didn’t fill. Financial goals we set and fell far short of.
It just never occurred to me to think of them that way.
I think I know part of why. When my kids were growing up, every time something didn’t work out for them, I had a habit. “Ding, ding, ding — learning experience.” I said it so many times that by the time they were in late elementary school, they’d give me the look. “OK, Mom. We got it.”
But somewhere along the way, I started giving my own setbacks the same meaning too. Not failures. Just things that told me something I needed to know.
I had changed my occurrings through nearly a decade of helping my kids see that mistakes are opportunities for growth.
If you want to go deeper with the Occurring Process, the work that helps you dissolve the meanings you give to events in real time, I’d love to have you join us in the next session of The Occurring Course.
Spots open in August, and the waiting list is where it starts.
Join the waiting list here: https://mortylefkoe.com/loc/loc-goodies.html
It won’t take you a decade to change how you feel either. 🙂The course is just 9 weeks long.
