84. How to Fail Smarter: The Secret Skill of Bouncing Back
Episode 84
Failing at things hurts. But the better we’re able to extract meaning from our failures, the faster we’ll be able to bounce back from them. In this (slightly vulnerable) episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I share my personal experiences with failing as well as the strategies I currently use to now view those “failures” as some of the best things to ever happen to me.
What You'll Learn:
Why failure hurts so much and how to make it hurt less
How to determine if something is really a failure or something else
What to do immediately after you fail
3 ways to bounce back from failure and turn it into something valuable
🔗 Resources + Episodes Mentioned:
SchoolHabits University (Parents, go here)
SchoolHabits University (Students, go here)
Episode 37: How to Accept Feedback Without Being Defensive
Episode 39: How to Ask for Help When Being Resourceful Isn’t Enough
Never stop learning.
▶ ✏️Get my FREE parent training: How to Help Your Student Handle School Like a Pro — Without Study Frustration, Assignment Overwhelm, or All the Drama (If you’re the parent of a high school or college student, this training is for you.)
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them 😉
84 How to Fail Smarter: The Secret Skill of Bouncing Back
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[00:00:00] Well, hello and welcome to episode 84 of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. I'm Katie, and today we're talking about something that we have all experienced. And that is failure. This episode was actually inspired by a question I got during a q and a inside SchoolHabits University. Um, inside my course I offer q and as for students for a year, and a student asked me, this was an awesome question, how do you deal with failure?
Like they were specifically asking me, not like the general you, but like Katie, how do you specifically deal with failure? And to be honest, I paused. I did not have a quick answer. Now the question stumped me, not because I haven't failed. I most definitely have failed, and I'm gonna share some of those experiences with you throughout the course of this episode.
But I think it's because I have trained myself so well, for better or for worse, to reframe setbacks, that I rarely experience them as failures anymore. I am a wildly [00:01:00] competitive person, and failure naturally does not feel good to me at all, as I'm sure all of you listening will agree.
And so maybe it's just the very strong discomfort I feel when I sit with the idea of failure that has ignited that mindset shift I use today to just reframe everything that's a failure as like a learning experience, but who knows?
But now I can look at what worked, what didn't work, and what I need to change next time so that I don't make that same mistake again. That is my instinct now, but it most definitely was not always that way. So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through how I personally think about failure, how I teach it to my students in ways that they can move forward from that experience, and how to recognize the difference between real genuine failure that's trying to tell you something, and then also what is just a misstep, which is also trying to tell us something. You are gonna walk away from this episode with actionable strategies as [00:02:00] well as some perspective tweaks that can improve your recovery from whatever it is that you're going through that feels like failure. Now there's an expression that I like to use a lot when I'm coaching my students, but also when I'm coaching myself, and that is that beginnings hide themselves in ends.
I didn't make that up. I heard it years ago, but I love it. Beginnings hide themselves in ends, and I think that that kind of thinking is at the core of what we're gonna be talking about today.
So if you're a student who has failed in some way at school, either literally failed tests, or you're looking back at your academic journey and you're just not where you'd thought you'd be, and you're viewing that as a failure, or perhaps you're feeling like a failure by someone else's terms, then this episode is for you.
If you're a working professional and you've either failed at a work project or you don't take the risks that you know you should be taking because you're so afraid of failure and what that [00:03:00] might mean, I'm air quoing it if you don't see this on YouTube, or maybe you too are looking back at your career history and you're not where you thought you'd be, and you are viewing yourself as a failure, then this episode is for you.
We are all exactly where we're supposed to be, but sometimes the journey looks different than we had planned. So stick around and I think that you're gonna get something useful from our episode today. And as you know, by now, you can find all the links to everything I mention in the show notes at Learnand worksmarter.com/podcast/84, because this is episode 84.
All right, let's begin.
[00:04:00] So I wanna start by talking about the definition of failure and how each of us personally defines failure can have a significant impact on whether we can learn from that failure or not. Now, most people define failure in black and white terms, like, I failed the test, my project didn't work, the launch flopped.
But that binary lens isn't helpful. It's also not accurate. Think about it. Failure is often a label that we apply after something doesn't meet our expectations. Yes. Even if you literally failed an exam because you didn't get a passing grade of let's say 65, yes, technically you failed the exam, but it's not the number that's gonna do you in.
It's the meaning that we assign to it and the idea that we feel crushed because we didn't meet the expectation we had for ourselves or maybe that our professor had for us. That's what does us in.
When we categorically define something as a failure, instead of something [00:05:00] that we can learn from or pivot from, we immediately shut down any possibility of a rebound, uh, a comeback, or even an alternative solution. Whether it truly is a sort of grade threshold kind of failure, or maybe just a sales pitch that didn't go over well, labeling something as a failure can be paralyzing or what I'm hoping to teach you today it can be a pivot point.
Now, at the risk of sounding a little woo woo, I'm going to emphatically make the point here that most failures are actually situations that we just haven't fully understood or taken advantage of yet.
And I know that if anyone listening right now is in the midst of a failure at school or at work, hearing that might make you roll your eyes. I know that there have been plenty of times in my life when I have been in the middle of something that I was catastrophically defining as a failure, and if someone came up to me and said, Hey, Katie, like beginnings hide themselves and ends, I would've come back with every "Yeah but" in the book. So if that's what you're feeling right now, [00:06:00] totally fine. I just want you to sit with that feeling and hear me out.
You know, it's often when we pause that we're able to see a different perspective of the situation, and that's also when we're able to redefine those failures as non-binary or maybe even not as failures at all.
Let me give you an example. One of the clearest times that I felt the emotional weight of a failure, despite actually doing nothing wrong, was when I was in college when I submitted a Spanish paper that I was really, really proud of. I double majored in college, um, Spanish and English, and so to be frank, I took school really, really seriously, which can't be his surprise to any of you, and one of my personal goals during college was to become fluent in Spanish, and we had this one paper... now I wanna remind you that this is back in 2002 or 2003, when there was no Google Translate, there was no, you know, chat GPT or anything of the sort. So if there was something that I didn't know about, a particular Spanish tense, I had to consult my favorite [00:07:00] Spanish grammar book, which I still have, and look up the conjugations.
Also, this paper was to analyze a piece of Spanish literature, and keep in mind that I was also an English major, so analyzing literature was something that I literally did in my sleep. So take this combination of knowing very well how to analyze literature and working super, super hard on getting my Spanish grammar right, and what happens?
I'm accused of cheating. My professor did not believe that I could have written something that good on my own because I was not a native Spanish speaker, like the majority of people in my course. I was devastated. I had never in my life been accused of anything like that. Of course, I didn't cheat. Okay.
But I hadn't, I hadn't even gotten help. He was like, at the end he was like, well, maybe you even went to the writing center. I'm like, check the logs. I, I could run the writing center, professor. But anyway, his reaction and his accusation made me question myself. And for a [00:08:00] moment I thought like, did I, did I accidentally do something wrong?
Like just by doing well? What about my reputation? Is he gonna think badly of me? Is he, you know, even though I was able to a hundred percent prove the work was mine by recreating that same level of excellence for every single paper for the rest of the semester. Obviously he came around and with his tail between his legs.
But that moment wasn't a failure, but it felt like one to me. And it taught me that sometimes we internalize failure because someone else can't see the, our progress for what it really is.
Now, another example I can share is a story from when I taught high school. I was a special education teacher and I had a student on my caseload with a diagnosed specific learning disability, that's what it's called, specific learning disability.
And hers was in math. And despite, you know, modifications to the curriculum and assessments, poor girl, she just couldn't. And after about a semester of trying, you know, every new approach with her, she was able to get her math grade up out of the [00:09:00] failing zone by one point for the first time all year.
She worked so darn hard for that 66 average, and I was so excited to share her victory with her parents at parent teacher conferences. But lo and behold, her dad was so disappointed in his daughter, and he made sure we all knew it. He couldn't see that that 66 was actually incredible, and it represented all of the hard work that his daughter had put into that class and into herself.
All he could see was the failure, a poor student. So the takeaway from these stories is that it is important to examine the situation we're in and ask ourselves, is this a true failure based on my own expectations or based on someone else's? Because the answer to that question matters a lot because it dictates the next step.
So speaking of the next step. It's time we actually talk about what that might be. Of course, sometimes we [00:10:00] do fail by the classic definition of the word, but that is not the end of the road. There is an expression we can use here, which is failing forward. And as cheesy as you think that might be, it is the mindset that we need to take if we are ever gonna turn our failures into something.
Now, failing forward doesn't mean brushing off setbacks. It's not toxic positivity. It means mining our failures for what they're trying to teach us, and then adjusting accordingly. So how do we fail forward? By staying curious, by asking ourselves like, what happened here? What can I tweak? Where did I go off the rails?
And we don't ask ourselves these questions from a place of angst or shame, but from a place of genuine curiosity like what went wrong? What did I think was going well, that actually was going the wrong direction, it was the wrong strategy. Is this situation repairable if I go back and try to fix it?
Or should I just, you know, let it go and go in a whole new direction? If [00:11:00] we don't ask ourselves these questions when we've failed at something, we won't be able to see all the solutions and alternatives that are available to us. That, and of course then we risk making the same mistakes over and over because we never did the autopsy on our mistakes in the first place.
Now I'm gonna share another personal example where I experienced a failure by, I mean, I guess by my own terms, I don't see it that way now, but at the time I was definitely bummed. Um, after two very successful live launches of SchoolHabits University, I was, you know, eager and excited to go to an evergreen model. Live launching is when, like I say, okay, like the cart is open, you can get in for these 10 days and Evergreen is like, you can enroll at any point. Alright? Live launching was very effective, but it drained me and I have a delicate nervous system so that I knew that I couldn't, that was not a sustainable approach.
So I set up a page on my [00:12:00] website at schoolhabitsuniversity.com and I added a button that said, enroll now. And I thought that was it, but sales dropped significantly.
Now I could have quit right there. I could have taken the course down. I mean, I never would've obviously, you know, or it could have just settled for the low enrollment that was trickling in. And if I didn't know how to examine and reframe my failures, then I would've done just that. But instead I brought my set up to a business coach who told me point blank, this is not gonna work.
You cannot set it and forget it. And that hurt. She was so right and hurt my ego. I was like, what do you mean? But she was so right. So I just completely reworked everything I bought, I actually bought a course about a real, what's called evergreen strategy. I built a proper, um, sales system. It's, you know, in, in marketing and sales it's called a funnel. I built that and I rebuilt the experience from the ground up. If you get any emails from [00:13:00] me, like you're in my funnel. Now, the system currently works beautifully. Students are finding the course, and they're getting the results that they deserve to have because I didn't give up when the first version failed.
So when things go wrong, it's not about being resilient in the fluffy woo woo sense. It's about decoding what happened and then adjusting course from there.
So let's dig in a little bit deeper here. What are some practical strategies that we can use in the immediate moments after a failure?
Well, in the first few minutes or even hours or, you know, for some of us days after we failed something, we may feel a lot of things, and it's best to give ourselves some time to sit with those feelings until they soften a bit.
Otherwise, we'll be operating from a place of defense and shame instead of from a place of curiosity and self-awareness. So after your feelings have softened, here are some ideas with examples to illustrate their application. Strategy [00:14:00] number one, we already talked a little bit about this, but you gotta do a quick postmortem. What was the goal? What actually happened? What can be repeated or retired? So, for example, let's say that you had a sales goal of $20,000 for the month, but you came in short at $15,000.
What actually happened? Did you make fewer phone calls? Was your lead generation game off? Were there factors beyond your control? If so, letting the situation go was probably a good option there. If it's nothing you can control. If you're a student and you studied all night for an exam that didn't go well, what happened?
If you don't examine your efforts that went into the failure in, in fact, even leading up to the failure, how would you ever see the reality that studying for an exam the night before does not ever work on a neurological level? We can't go from short-term memorization to long-term knowledge acquisition overnight just 'cause we want to [00:15:00] just because we have poor time management.
Okay, but now that you've identified that your cram session is the reason for your bad task grade, now you know to do something different next time. But imagine if you didn't pause to examine the situation and you got the bad grade and you thought like, oh, like the test was super hard and I didn't do anything wrong, and the professor's unfair.
Well, then you'd make the same mistake next time. You'd be in the exact same situation over and over and over again. That's failing backward, not forward. We've got to look at our failures and say what worked? What didn't? What should I do again and what should I not do again?
All right. Strategy number two, turn lessons into systems. Now, this doesn't work for every single failure. It depends on what type of thing you failed at, but let's just go with me here. Turning lessons into systems. These could be SOPs, workflows, templates, even routines. So for example, let's say that [00:16:00] you make a slide presentation at work.
And you got really strong feedback on it that you're taking as criticism as a failure. Okay, well can you take that feedback and use it to make a slide template to use in your next presentation? Like up the ante on that slide template.
If you did poorly on that test that you crammed for the night before, can you create a new study routine based on cognitive science that uses spaced repetition and active recall study strategies. If you regularly struggle with certain tasks at the office, can you make yourself some SOPs, some standard operating procedures so you stop guessing and failing?
I teach all about SOPs in episode 52, but the key idea here is to take the lesson that you learn from the failure, and if it's possible, to turn it into a system or something that you can routinize.
All right? and then strategy number three, ask for help. If you can't figure out the reason [00:17:00] for your failure by yourself and it's not a situation where you were, you know, given direct feedback, then ask. Ask someone who knows you and is familiar with the projects that you failed at to share their insights into what maybe went wrong.
There's an expression that says we can't read the label if we're inside the bottle. Right? So it can be helpful to ask someone. Standing on the outside of the bottle to read the label for us, right? I do teach you concrete strategies for asking for help in episode 39, and then in episode 37, I do a deep dive into how to accept feedback without getting defensive.
Those links will be in the show notes at Learn and work smarter.com/podcast/ 84.
All right. Finally, strategy number four is to figure out the next step. Because if you think about it, after we fail at something, we do have a few choices depending on the situation. It's when we catastrophize and think that there are no solutions, 'cause like everything is falling apart, [00:18:00] that we really are unable to come up with any solutions at all.
Our brains are unable to problem solve and see that yes, there are levers within our reach that we can pull to change the situation. Okay, so here are our options.
We can literally just try again. Sometimes we have the right strategy and the right approach, but we just need more reps, so to speak. So maybe your next step is just to get back on the field and play again.
Let's say that you've never played the piano in your life. Well, of course you're gonna fail if you were asked to perform, but in that case, it's to be expected because you haven't done enough reps. Now another option is to completely pivot, so go in a new direction, scratch what you were doing before and do something totally new.
If you tried out for the soccer team and didn't make it, okay, cool. Well, would now be a good time to try tennis? If you failed at staying on top of your running routine, would maybe it be better if you switched to walking?
If you fail to be consistent using your [00:19:00] fancy pants task management system, project management software would be better to switch to something simpler like a paper planner.
This isn't quitting, this isn't giving up. It's an intentional change. Of course, that might take you to your destination faster. Or the third option is just to tweak what you were doing. Maybe you don't need to throw in the towel and pivot entirely. Maybe it's not a matter of getting in more reps of the same strategy.
Maybe the solution is to look at what you did and just make one small tweak at a time until it works. But I'll tell you what's not a strategy: doing nothing. The story I shared about the first time I turned School Habits University into an evergreen course, and then realizing that that wasn't working and then pivoting my marketing strategy to something different, that's an example of doing a post-mortem of asking for feedback. And then implementing that feedback in the form of a tweak or a pivot, and now I can honestly look back at that [00:20:00] situation and not view it as a failure at all. 'Cause. Now I'm like, oh, that's so cool that that happened because now look at all the cool marketing tech things that I know.
Right. That's what I was talking about at the top of this episode when I told you that I really do have trouble viewing anything as a true failure because something really cool, really neat always, always comes from it if you let it.
Now, I've shared a lot of stories and strategies that almost make it seem like nothing is a failure if you just think about it differently, but that's not exactly true, and that's not my message here.
I think that's unrealistic. Um, sometimes we really do need to use the word failure, but only when we're ready to extract the value from that situation. It is okay to use the word failure as a neutral term to describe a pattern, um, or a moment, but not as a judgment of ourselves. It can be helpful to say that failed, [00:21:00] but only if we follow it up with now what?
Right. So I just wanna clarify that. I'm not suggesting that we, you know, sugarcoat everything that is truly a personal academic or career setback and pretend that it didn't happen. That approach doesn't serve us either. You know, years ago. I was the vice president of a test prep company. I started building my own thing on the side, not in competition at all.
School habits was just something that I believed in at my core, but one day I was let go abruptly. No warning, no severance. And while I cannot share the details, I'll just say that I was devastated. It felt like the floor dropped out from underneath me, the floor that I built. But looking back. That moment was the beginning of school habits.
That painful experience gave me the clarity, the freedom, and frankly, the freaking fire to go all [00:22:00] in. I hit that ground running so fast and so hard, and I have never once looked back. Like I thank my blessings for that day. At the time it looked and it felt like a failure, but it was actually the start of everything amazing that came next.
Alright, let's do a soft recap of what we have covered today. Failure is rarely ever what it seems. It's often a signal, sometimes it's just a misunderstanding. Other times it is a lesson wrapped in frustration, which we have to let kind of cool, but it is never the end of your story ever, ever.
We almost always have the option to try again to get in more reps, so to speak, or maybe just tweak our approach a little bit, or even start from scratch and go in a completely different direction.
But these are all options available to us only if we take the time after a failure to examine what happened after our emotions have cooled. [00:23:00] So if there's something in your life or work or school that you have been calling a failure, pause and ask what actually happened. What have I learned, and what do I want to do next? All right, my friends. I hope this episode provided some new ways of thinking. Maybe some of the examples I shared resonated. If you have enjoyed this episode, please make sure you let me know through a simple gesture like liking the video that you're watching on YouTube or sharing the episode with someone.
If you are listening through a podcast app, that means the world to me. You can find all of the links and everything I mentioned here, including a transcript, at LearnandWorksmarter.com/podcast/84 and remember, never stop learning.
