Speaker 1: Hello there, it's Amantha.
Speaker 2: I'm currently on a break, so I've handpicked a bunch
Speaker 2: of my favorite episodes from the last year to share
Speaker 2: with you.
Speaker 1: Okay, on with today's best of.
Speaker 2: Episode, what's your relationship like with failure? I mean, I
Speaker 2: know lots of people talk about being good with it
Speaker 2: and seeing it as an opportunity to learn.
Speaker 1: From you know, etc. Etc.
Speaker 2: But really, if we're being honest, failure kind of sucks
Speaker 2: and most people are not that great at dealing with it.
Speaker 2: So today's show is a bit more personal than the
Speaker 2: average How I Work episode, and I want to share
Speaker 2: some of my failures with you. But there's a reason
Speaker 2: why I want to do this, and I also have
Speaker 2: a personal challenge for you. My name is doctor Ramantha Imba.
Speaker 2: I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science
Speaker 2: consultancy invent Him.
Speaker 1: And this is How I Work, a show about how
Speaker 1: to help you do your best work.
Speaker 2: A few years ago, my team at invent Him completed
Speaker 2: a strength Finder assessment. I expected my report to tell
Speaker 2: me that my top strength was something like time optimization,
Speaker 2: as a similar test had revealed many years ago, or
Speaker 2: creativity or some other skill that I utilize every day,
Speaker 2: but no. Apparently, my number one strength was competitiveness.
Speaker 1: Although this would come as.
Speaker 2: No surprise to anyone that's played Settlers of Katan against me.
Speaker 2: My first memories of being competitive are from primary school.
Speaker 2: But in addition to being competitive, I was also a perfectionist.
Speaker 2: If an essay came back with an aid, I would
Speaker 2: feel disappointed that the plus was missing, and if I
Speaker 2: wasn't the first to finish a maths quiz, I would
Speaker 2: question my numerical ability, and if I didn't top the
Speaker 2: class in all academic assignments, I would feel like a failure.
Speaker 2: In primary school, Bonnie Smart was my arch nemesis, and
Speaker 2: she lived up.
Speaker 1: To her name.
Speaker 2: I felt like we were the only two people who
Speaker 2: existed in our class, and whenever she beat me, I
Speaker 2: felt devastated. And while the mix of perfectionism and competitiveness
Speaker 2: can be a winning combination for career progression, not to
Speaker 2: mention getting good grades at school, it's not great for
Speaker 2: dealing with failure and setbacks. Growing up, I prided myself
Speaker 2: on winning and being successful. Failure was not part of
Speaker 2: my self identity. I was used to succeeding at anything
Speaker 2: that I put my mind to which of course means
Speaker 2: that when failure does arrive, it hits you hard. My
Speaker 2: natural inclination was to hide my failures. My failures embarrassed
Speaker 2: me because I thought they meant I was a lesser person,
Speaker 2: Like if people knew about my failures, surely their positive
Speaker 2: impressions of me would be destroyed.
Speaker 1: Through the work that I do.
Speaker 2: It behavioral science, consultancy, invent him, I see so many
Speaker 2: people struggle with failure, wanting to hide it, punish it,
Speaker 2: deny it, and no good can come of this. The
Speaker 2: best way to learn is to fail. And when we
Speaker 2: start to talk about our failures openly rather than repress them,
Speaker 2: we actually increase our resilience. So Harvard's psychology professor Daniel
Speaker 2: Wegner coined the term ironic mental processes. Through a series
Speaker 2: of experiments, he found that when people try to suppress
Speaker 2: certain thoughts and emotion, they actually resurface more intensely than before. So,
Speaker 2: for example, psychology professor Jennifer Borten and her colleagues found
Speaker 2: that when we ignore doubts about ourselves, self esteem declines
Speaker 2: and anxiety rises. So Wegner argued that we need to
Speaker 2: stop suppressing negative thoughts and emotions and instead express them,
Speaker 2: and ironically doing so should increase resilience and self belief,
Speaker 2: which is where a failure resume comes into place. So
Speaker 2: I wrote my very first failure resume part of an
Speaker 2: experiment in twenty twenty, but now as we head towards
Speaker 2: the finish line of twenty twenty one, I've revisited it
Speaker 2: and I'm sharing a new version with trepidation once more.
Speaker 2: So I challenged myself to be more raw, more open,
Speaker 2: and pick some even more devastating and recent failures. So
Speaker 2: here are some big ones from the last few years,
Speaker 2: and I'd love to see yours if your game. Failure
Speaker 2: Number one linking my achievements to my self worth nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty four when I was about seven years old to
Speaker 2: the present. Now, you don't have to be a psychologist
Speaker 2: to recognize that I had a serious case of achievement
Speaker 2: derived self worth. This is not a prophe psychological term,
Speaker 2: but it sounds like it could be. Whenever I would
Speaker 2: accomplish something new, I felt and still feel, the strong
Speaker 2: urge to tell other people and lots of other.
Speaker 1: People about what I've just done.
Speaker 2: And I tell them not to brand but because I
Speaker 2: believe it will make them like me more. And as
Speaker 2: someone who cares too much about what other people think,
Speaker 2: I really want people to like me as much as possible,
Speaker 2: and obviously saying this out loud, I can see how
Speaker 2: flawed this reasoning is, but I still do it. So
Speaker 2: here's what I learned from failure number one. A couple
Speaker 2: of years ago, I read a Seth godinblog that said
Speaker 2: confidence is a choice, not a symptom, and it dawned
Speaker 2: on me that I didn't need to achieve certain things
Speaker 2: to feel confident and worthwhile, especially in my life.
Speaker 1: And while I'm.
Speaker 2: Making progress on this failure, it's been slow. It's hard
Speaker 2: to change something that's been hard wired for decades. But
Speaker 2: here is some evidence of change. I went for a
Speaker 2: walk with a close friend a couple of weeks ago
Speaker 2: and he asked me how I was doing. I said, relieve,
Speaker 2: because I just submitted the first draft of my book
Speaker 2: to my publisher, all seventy two thousand words.
Speaker 1: His response was, what book?
Speaker 2: So I had completely failed, not consciously to mention that
Speaker 2: I'd been offered a book deal with Penguin.
Speaker 1: Six months prior.
Speaker 2: Heay wit. Although sharing this win feels like I might
Speaker 2: have missed the point of this learning. Okay, failure number
Speaker 2: two not having the courage to leave my marriage sooner
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen. On August twenty five, twenty nineteen, I left
Speaker 2: my partner of thirteen years. No big event had precipitated
Speaker 2: the decision. There were no affairs, no abuse, nothing especially newsworthy.
Speaker 2: It was just a gradual realization that were not particularly
Speaker 2: compatible as human beings. The most devastating part of this
Speaker 2: decision has becoming a single mother and now only seeing
Speaker 2: my daughter half of that time.
Speaker 1: So while to my friends.
Speaker 2: And family the decision seemed sudden, it was a decision
Speaker 2: that was used in the making, but fear kept me
Speaker 2: in a suboptimal relationship for years past its dudate, and
Speaker 2: two years on, I can say with certainty that I'm
Speaker 2: far happier on this side of the fence. So what
Speaker 2: I learned is that being scared to do something that
Speaker 2: feels really big is not a good enough reason to
Speaker 2: not do it. The scariest and hardest decisions can often
Speaker 2: be the most rewarding. And while I stayed for longer
Speaker 2: than I should have because of my daughter role, modeling
Speaker 2: a substandard relationship to your child or children is not
Speaker 2: helpful role modeling, all right. Failure number three wearing a
Speaker 2: mask to work twenty nineteen to twenty twenty one. So,
Speaker 2: following on from the aforementioned failure, perhaps if you've been
Speaker 2: through a similar situation, you'll know that the first couple
Speaker 2: of years out of a marriage can be pretty rough,
Speaker 2: and you know with everything that there is to navigate
Speaker 2: and separate. My default setting is to be open with
Speaker 2: my team, but during this time I felt the need
Speaker 2: to hide my stress from my workmates and keep it
Speaker 2: to myself. I didn't want to be a burden or
Speaker 2: bring the mood down. In some instances, this credit a
Speaker 2: necessary distance between me and my teammates, and there were
Speaker 2: many days where it was beyond exhausting to maintain an
Speaker 2: I'm totally okay, I fasad when I really wasn't. So
Speaker 2: what I learned from this looking back, I question the
Speaker 2: cost of not being truly real about what I was
Speaker 2: experiencing outside of work. I felt really protective of my
Speaker 2: team and I didn't want to dump my stress on them.
Speaker 1: But going to the other extreme, where I tried to.
Speaker 2: Make light of what were some really heavy things I
Speaker 2: was going through, probably wasn't super healthy either, so I'd
Speaker 2: like to think that in the future I would and
Speaker 2: could drop the mask and just show up one hundred
Speaker 2: percent as me, And by doing so, I suspect that
Speaker 2: my own mental health and my relationships with my team
Speaker 2: would be all the better for it. And I should
Speaker 2: add that seeking support from a brilliant clinical psychologist was
Speaker 2: critical for me in making it through this time. I
Speaker 2: saw him weekly during the hardest times, and I still
Speaker 2: see him once a fortnight. Okay, the next failure I
Speaker 2: want to share concealing my miscarriage from my Inventium team
Speaker 2: Back in twenty thirteen, so, when I was eighteen years old,
Speaker 2: I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome or PEACOS for short.
Speaker 2: PEACOS is one of the leading courses of infertility, so
Speaker 2: I never assumed that I'd be able to have children,
Speaker 2: even though I was sure that I wanted to have
Speaker 2: one during this lifetime. So when I fell pregnant very
Speaker 2: easily in early twenty thirteen, I was beside myself with joy,
Speaker 2: and in the nine weeks that my body spent growing
Speaker 2: a little person, I spent hundreds of hours imagining the
Speaker 2: life that this yet to be born human would have.
Speaker 2: When we went for a scan at nine weeks, the
Speaker 2: obstetrician told us that the feeders had stopped growing several
Speaker 2: weeks ago. Two days later, I went in for a
Speaker 2: DNC to have this little person removed.
Speaker 1: From my body.
Speaker 2: The grief hit me like a landslide, but because no
Speaker 2: one at work knew I was even pregnant, I went
Speaker 2: straight back into the office as if nothing had happened.
Speaker 2: What I learned from this is that hiding something as
Speaker 2: life shattering as a miscarriage helps no one. I've since
Speaker 2: talked openly about it with my team on various occasions,
Speaker 2: and hope that doing so normal as is the experience,
Speaker 2: so that we no longer have to feel shame about
Speaker 2: miscarriages and hired our grief to people who we spend
Speaker 2: so much time with. The last failure that I want
Speaker 2: to share is putting unrealistic expectations on myself in my
Speaker 2: role as a mum twenty fourteen to present. In February
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen, my daughter Frankie came into the world.
Speaker 1: My life and priorities shifted.
Speaker 2: Enormously as most of my energy pre Frankie had been
Speaker 2: poured into my work. A couple of years into this
Speaker 2: new role, I became more aware of the expectations I
Speaker 2: placed on myself as a mother. Because I was a
Speaker 2: working mum, I felt an edder to overcompensate. Whenever I
Speaker 2: was with Frankie. The unwritten rule I had was to
Speaker 2: be one hundred percent present and interacting with her one
Speaker 2: hundred percent of the time. It was exhausting, and I
Speaker 2: was constantly falling short of this expectation and beating myself
Speaker 2: up about it. If I took my daughter to a
Speaker 2: cafe for breakfast and I spent a couple of minutes
Speaker 2: having a quick read of the weekend paper, I would
Speaker 2: immediately tell myself off and redirect my full attention back
Speaker 2: to Frankie. I identified with being an overachiever in my
Speaker 2: working life, and naturally, this expectation had transferred itself to motherhood.
Speaker 2: I always felt like I could be doing a better job,
Speaker 2: paying more attention, coming up with more stimulating activities, and
Speaker 2: baking better cakes. No just kidding, I don't really bake.
Speaker 1: And when I did.
Speaker 2: Direct my attention somewhere other than Frankie, such as inter
Speaker 2: reading the weekend paper, I would feel guilty for the
Speaker 2: pleasure that this gave me, because surely the most pleasurable
Speaker 2: activity when you are a parent is spending quality time
Speaker 2: with your children all the time. It took me another
Speaker 2: few years, in a conversation with my therapist to realize.
Speaker 1: That this behavior was not normal.
Speaker 2: In Schema therapy, I score high on unrelenting standards. This
Speaker 2: is to find as the underlying belief that one must
Speaker 2: strive to meet very high internalized standards of behavior and performance,
Speaker 2: usually to avoid criticism. Easy to diagnose, harder to change.
Speaker 2: So here's what I learned. I know that I can
Speaker 2: have ridiculously high standards for my work, but I was
Speaker 2: completely unaware that these standards were also imposing themselves on
Speaker 2: my role as a mum. So over the years, and
Speaker 2: at least on some days, I've slowly started to relax
Speaker 2: the expectations I have of myself as a mother. I
Speaker 2: now sometimes allow myself to just do my own thing,
Speaker 2: well Frankie does hers and as I talk to you
Speaker 2: about this, So, I worry that this may make me
Speaker 2: sound like a bad mother. I worry that maybe I'll
Speaker 2: be judged by other mothers who are one hundred percent
Speaker 2: present for their children, one hundred percent of the time
Speaker 2: because they exist, don't they And I find it really
Speaker 2: hard to balance my overwhelming need to be the best
Speaker 2: mum in the world with also being kind to myself,
Speaker 2: which doesn't come naturally.
Speaker 1: It is a constant battle, but one.
Speaker 2: In which I think I'm making progress slowly, and in
Speaker 2: spite of all this, surprise, surprise, Frankie is still thriving.
Speaker 2: So that's my failure resume. And here is my challenge
Speaker 2: for you. Set aside, say thirty minutes this week to
Speaker 2: write your failure resume, think hard over the last few
Speaker 2: years would have been your biggest failures it worked maybe
Speaker 2: in your non work life as well. And then I
Speaker 2: challenge you to share it with a few people close
Speaker 2: to you. Maybe you might even want to share it
Speaker 2: via your socials like I'll be doing with mine, which
Speaker 2: is scary, I know. And if you do decide to
Speaker 2: share it, make sure you tag me in the post
Speaker 2: because I'd love to read it and I hope you
Speaker 2: find this process helpful. You can find me on the socials,
Speaker 2: on LinkedIn Atamantha Imba and on Instagram Atamantha I and
Speaker 2: on Twitter at Amantha How I Work is produced by
Speaker 2: Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank
Speaker 2: you Martin Nimber who does the audio mix and makes
Speaker 2: everything sound better than it would have otherwise.
Speaker 1: I'll see you next time.