A LOT with Audra

Ep09
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audra_1_02-13-2025_103721: [00:00:00] Hey, welcome to A Lot With Audra. Thank you for being here. I'm excited to talk about today's episode because this show up message has been really resonating with our listeners. I recently heard from a listener who went to purchase the book Seen that we talked about in the episode about how we can show up for our kids in simple ways.

Y'all, I cannot tell you how cool it was to get that message to think that people are listening and that [00:01:00] I am potentially making a positive impact on someone else's life is just the biggest gift. So as always, I want to start out by saying thank you for being here. I'm really, really grateful that you're listening.

And if you are, and you want to reach out, something has resonated with you. I would love if you would subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, send me a message. You can find all of my details in our show notes. Make sure to share the podcast with your friends, anyone that you think would resonate. Thank you so much for just being so encouraging and helping me continue to do this work.

Today we're going to talk about a different spin on showing up and that's how to show up after you fail. And I love, I'm laughing because I have just experienced my first, I'm going to do air quotes, big failure of the year. Now I have learned [00:02:00] through entrepreneurship that perfection doesn't exist. I have learned that done is better than perfect.

I have learned that the speed that we go at matters. Sometimes you just have to get something done. And in that comes a lot of failure, right? I was given the gift of seeing entrepreneurship as an experiment. And when you are doing experiments, there are hypotheses, right? No one necessarily sets an experiment up to fail.

Like, they decide to do something because they have a hunch. They have a hypothesis that they're going to get a certain result. And often experiments don't work out that way. And that's life that's entrepreneurship and, and just being an entrepreneur that has really honed in this lesson for me, that it's all an experiment.

No one has a playbook. We all are doing our [00:03:00] best and we're trying to learn and gain wisdom from our life experiences, from others, from universities from professionals, from experts, but even the experts don't have, you know, this magical playbook on how to do life, how to be perfect, how to never make a mistake.

So I think this topic is relevant and I want to talk about it because I feel like I fail a lot and I am not particularly scared of failing. I will say it still sucks. I still get that little Feeling in my gut, like, ugh, I'm gonna throw up, or ugh, I wish I would have just played it safe, or ugh, I can't wait to get through this, you know?

Failing still sucks, but I think it's really, really important, more than ever, that we show up after we fail. It's way more important to show up for ourselves after failure, [00:04:00] you know, than it is after success, I guess. So my first failure of the year, I'll give you a little bit of context, but that's not really what matters.

I failed on a project that is non-paid work for a non-profit organization. That's really general, and I'm trying to be really general because truly the, the specifics don't matter. But I wanted to share them with you to give you a little context and I executed something that I thought went well, you know, I was like, all right, this is great.

And a couple of days later, I start hearing feedback that others didn't feel the same. And so I'm going to be honest, like I was a little bit surprised, but I could quickly see the other perspectives. And I think that's important that we're always in that mindset of we're seeking to [00:05:00] learn. So I hear this feedback, hear that other people have different perspectives than I do on this project I was in charge of.

And of course, I feel, I start to feel those feelings of like, I'm angry, I'm confused. I'm kind of in that victim mindset, like looking for someone or something else to blame because I'm like, you know, I did my best here. You know, this is unpaid work. Like I start to kind of get in that victim zone.

And when I'm in that zone, I do have a few people I can talk to. My husband ended up being the person for this one. Someone on my team did as well. And I have a couple of people that I can sort of just vent it out to. But one thing that I think is important about showing up for ourselves as we fail is recognizing like, yeah, we're going to feel those [00:06:00] feelings.

It feels super crappy to fail for me being a verbal processor. It does help me to not stuff those inside, but to like share those really raw feelings with the emotions that come behind them. I have a couple of safe people I can do that to. But it's also super important to me to cap it. I am not the person who is going to vent about something for days and days and days on end.

Now, I will say that's growth for me. And being a person with ADHD, we can get super stuck on perceived injustice, or we can go down these negative rabbit holes and be on the same negative victim mindset topic for days and weeks and months on end. And so that has been extreme growth for me to, to maybe have a failure and be in that victim mindset and have those Feelings of anger around that and find [00:07:00] my safe people to verbal process it with, and then move on.

Like, I love to give that a cap and I will say, I don't get to that place very much, but you know, when you fail, you're, you're just angry. At least me, I'm angry at myself. There's definitely a little bit of embarrassment in there, but I'm going to talk you through a couple more tools that will make sure that that failure doesn't correlate to something as deep as like shame.

And these are tools, I will say, this is what I use when I need to show up for myself or need to show up for my business or need to show up for my family after I failed, show up for my marriage after I failed. These are tools that I use so I'm just sharing my, my personal experience. Okay.

So that's the first thing. That's the first tool I guess I would say is when I fail, I let myself verbally process it to a few safe people. I let myself feel my feelings, but I give it a time limit. Because then what I do next is I try and seek to understand those [00:08:00] perspectives of, you know, how I could have done better or what I can learn from this situation.

Because I am a person, after I've processed it, I want to jump pretty quickly to action. I probably still have some learning in there where, you know, taking a pause in between a bigger pause might be more helpful, but I'm a person who wants to take action. So if I have failed and feel like I've gathered some learnings from that failure, I want to see how can I implement these?

Or if it's not something that's implementable, how can I journal or coach myself about how I'm going to handle something different the next time? So that's the second tool I guess I would share with you is. After you've had that safe space to verbally process and you've capped it at a healthy for you time limit, seek to understand, find your learnings, and if applicable, take some action.

So for me, in [00:09:00] this, it was having a conversation with someone else who was involved in the project and sharing My learnings based on my perspective, the different perspectives I heard, and kind of like a bigger systematic, like, hey, I think system wise we could do X, Y, Z to avoid this in the future and maybe increase the culture, make it just even better.

Like, let's take this learning and let's make what we're doing even better. Okay, so then the third thing I would share with you is just. It's okay to have different perspectives. So, you know, I tend to get wrapped up. If someone thinks I have failed or something I've been involved in is a failure, I tend to get really wrapped up in that.

I read something just the other day and this was an actual, I wish I would have written this down, but it was an actual [00:10:00] scientific thing. You can tell I'm, I'm, you know, really a science nerd here, but I'm not, but I, I do love it. I appreciate it. But where it takes like 10 positive thoughts to counterbalance one negative thought, that's what it was.

It was negative bias. And actually my book is right here. I can pull from it. It's the Seen book once again. Okay. It says, researchers suggest that we generate at least three positive comments or feelings for each negative expression. The optimum range is actually five comments and thoughts to each negative one.

When we repeat affirmative thoughts, we help build hope in ourselves and our kids. So it talks about how negative words and thoughts have more impact on us than positive ones and they're quicker to surface and harder to disconfirm. So, in other words, it says negative words get into our bloodstream faster and stick longer.

So, I don't know about you, but I am a person, if I [00:11:00] think something's gone well, and I'm going about my life, and then I hear that there are other perspectives on the matter, I mean, I kind of drop everything, and I'm like, wait, wait, wait, I want to hear more, and I tend to just, like, believe that negative comment, and not all failure, is negative comments, but that's how I was perceiving this in particular.

And I think our minds can just really, really go there. Right? So the third thing I want to share is just being able to stand in your perspective and maybe collect information. And this is something that I'm working on instead of jumping to conclusions from like, okay, I thought it went well. Oh, someone else thought it didn't go well.

It must have not gone well. Just holding some more space for those different perspectives of okay, I can still believe that this went well, and someone else can still believe that it could have been better. And I can hear that perspective, and I can gather learnings from that perspective. [00:12:00] But I also don't have to quote unquote, like, stamp this as a failure.

Right? Like, I feel like so often, if someone else has a perspective that is different than mine, I tend to go with theirs. And what I'm learning is to just, again, probably pause and allow for the space, both things to maybe be true. So much of this world is about perspectives. Some things are rarely black and white.

You've heard that story. My teammate, Kendra, is a former HR professional, and she talks about how there's, Person 1's story, Person 2's story, and then the story that actually happened. So it's just good for me to remember, and I don't know if you need that too. Just because someone else thinks something didn't go well, just because someone else thinks something that you were involved in was a failure, It doesn't mean you actually [00:13:00] have to buy into that and label it as such.

You can have your own perspective and you can still learn from theirs. Okay. So then the last thing I think I want to share with you that helps me get past my many, many frequent failures is I have learned the hard way to detach the choices I make and the actions I take from who I am and the inherent worth I have as a human.

And man, this learning came at a beautiful time and a hard time. It was when I was working in another market and things were not going well. On paper, things were going well, but inside the company, they weren't going well from my perspective and from others perspectives that I did, you know, [00:14:00] hear. And I'll just share.

It was when I moved to, to Honolulu and I've talked about this before and being a woman who is really passionate about my career and loves to wake up excited for what I do. Being in a work situation that I didn't feel was going well and others didn't feel was going well, it sucked and it made me question my worth.

And there's this really beautiful Lauren Diego song and it's kind of her singing out to God and saying, you, you tell me. Like you take all my failures, God, you take all my victories, you remind me what I am worth. And gosh, I wish I'm remembering that song right now. We'll look it up and put it in the show notes.

But I played that song going into work every single morning because I just needed to continue to show up in the midst of what felt like a [00:15:00] failure. And I needed to know and remember and be reminded constantly. that just because I wasn't thriving in the situation I was in did not mean anything about my worth as a human.

And I think it's so easy to get these things mixed up and intertwined. I think it's so easy to believe that our failures define us, define who we are, define who we were created to be. And listen, if you're a parent, you know, this is not true. And thankfully I was in a season where I was, I had become a parent already.

I had a two year old at this time. I was pregnant with my second son. And so I think that was sort of what helped me open my mind to thinking that, okay, Just because this feels like a failure, it doesn't mean I'm a failure, [00:16:00] because I would never tell my kids just because you made a bad choice at school, or just because you didn't get this grade on this test, or just because you didn't get chosen for XYZ means you're a failure.

Oh my gosh, we like proactively, Preach and teach to them like you are good. God created you good. There is nothing that is not good about who you are. Now, do you make bad and sad choices sometimes? Of course you do because you're a human. Mommy still makes bad and sad choices sometimes too, but you also make really happy and good choices.

So that's how I talk about it with my kids and being a parent when I was going through the season where my failure felt like a blow to my worth. It really helped me, plus that beautiful, beautiful song, listening to it every morning, going into work. It helped me detangle those two. [00:17:00] And I'm so glad it did because when I started to get back on that hill of success and feel excited about my work and get praised for my work, it helped me to remember just because I am quote unquote successful at what I do.

That does not also define my worth. Right? If our failures don't define who we are and the work that we have as humans, neither do our successes. And I feel like that is two different pendulums that are so important to know because why it helps you show up when you fail, because you're going to fail.

Like me, I fail all the time and I have to get myself back up and look people in the eye and look myself in the mirror and show up for the work that I want to do in the world, whether that be through my business, whether that be through my parenting, my marriage, on myself, I have to show up and I'm going to fail.

So it's almost like I'm [00:18:00] preparing myself, you know, knowing that there is going to be failure in my future because there's been so much failure in my past, so much failure in my present. It's gonna happen. I need to build a muscle that helps me show up in the midst of that. Okay. I hope this was helpful for you today.

This is a topic that I really love. Showing up is so important for ourselves, for our kids, especially when we fail, because we're gonna fail. So this is a skill that we absolutely need to build as we are defining what success means to us. Success can not mean being perfect, never failing. Oof. That is just not

a definition that any of us will ever live up to. So again, I hope this was helpful. Please, if it was, reach out to me. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Share this episode. Please subscribe. And if this episode was particularly meaningful to you, I would really appreciate if you left a review. Thank you [00:19:00] again.

So glad you're here. I hope you have a great Monday. Go out there and fail your little butt off and show up anyways.