YOUR TRUE POTENTIAL
Give Up Giving Up. Ha!

Let’s talk about cake and horses so we can talk about failure and success and what to do with all of it.

At the end of a recent social event, the host begged me to accept some leftover cake. A neighbor of mine likes dessert, so I decided to bring it to her.

Be Nice to Yourself so You Go Forward

Clearly, my intentions were good. Now, this blog entry may meander a tad, so the main message for you up front is: Be easy on yourself in order to stay in the race and never give up. We all know that giving up is the only way you can truly, permanently, fail, but sometimes it seems alluring because we make temporary failure so awful for ourselves.

As part of my Self-Intelligence™ model, I work a lot with the subconscious. Thanks to advanced brain-imaging technology, scientists now agree that what we do and where we go with our lives is largely up to our subconscious minds. Think of your subconscious as a glorious, half-wild, half-tamed horse that your conscious self is doing its best to ride.

If you’re mean to the horse by flagellating yourself for failure, the creature will stop in its tracks. (This is a scientifically proven phenomenon; my book Self-Intelligence includes a chapter on it.) Then to get that horse moving again, you’ll have to do a lot of pleading and cajoling, which taxes your energy.

Forget About Getting Total Control

Because your conscious self never has complete control over the beast, that animal is going to wander off course on a regular basis. Sometimes it will discover faster routes to success than you consciously knew about. Other times it’ll try to sneak back to the barn of your comfort zone. Either way, anytime you’re mean to yourself, you’ll slow your progress. So practice self-compassion when you’ve gone the wrong way, and keep in mind some meandering may pay off. This blog will meander, so hang tight.

Getting back to that cake, one reason to forgive ourselves for failures is that we pretty much always have good intentions. Plus, on the way to long-term success, it’s necessary to endure short-term failures. You can’t have one without the other, sorry. But here’s the best reason to be sweet to yourself: that spirited horse will get back on track much faster and you’ll become best friends and winners together, like Seabiscuit and his jockey Red.

Here’s Proof I Had the Best Intentions

The cake was a corner piece with thick frosting that nearly overflowed the paper plate. It was plain white cake with plain white frosting, which would be the last cake on earth I’d choose to eat if I were going to eat cake. To me, it looked like a big boring pile of sugar.

I avoid sugar because of an inherited disease, psoriatic arthritis, which led to my needing both my hips replaced at an early age. I’m doing great with regular exercise and a healthy diet, so sugar, a proven inflammatory, is verboten.

Alas, my neighbor wasn’t home. For ten minutes I walked around my condominium complex carrying the cake. I felt like a foster mother just trying to find a good family for the orphan. Then I went home and put it on the kitchen counter, figuring to check in later on my neighbor.

3 Success Stories: 2 Things in Common

On the topic of food, here’s a meander: Recently I learned that three personal acquaintances, all of whom had struggled with their weight for years, have finally succeeded each-and-every-one in dramatically slimming down. Each ultimately took their own dietary approach (one vegan, one paleo and one just eating smaller portions). But they all had two things in common: 1) They failed many times along the way. 2) They never gave up.

My condo’s designed such that I frequently pass within eyesight of my kitchen counter. The frosting began giving me a friendly wink each time. On maybe the fifth pass, I paused to taste a teeny dab. Don’t go all smug on me, but I know you can guess what happened next: I ate all of it, cake and frosting, and even dragged my thumb across the plate so as not to miss any.

This was the first time I’d eaten what was basically pure sugar in years. My brain exploded. Truly, that’s what it felt like. I sugar-highed until my body’s insulin response then hit me in the head, at which point I gently laid me down until normal-ish function returned. And then, I did my failure dance.

When & How to Do the Failure Dance

See, I had major screwed up. My sugar high had ended, but I was in for days of totally unnecessary hip and back pain. Oh so what—time to dance! I teach this to clients because it really works. Do it before self-recrimination can set in. Here’s how:

Put your hands in the air, look up to the ceiling or sky, sway and spin and sing, “I failed! Whoo-hoo! I failed! Yippeee! I failed! Hey hey hey!”

Ad-lib until you make yourself positively giddy with ridiculousness. Then perhaps pause for breath. Then immediately get back on track with your life.

Irreverence Boosts Productivity

Another meander here, to address why so often in my writing, coaching and training, I include laughter-inducing exercises. The reason’s serious. It’s because the research on productivity—including such key components as willpower, intrinsic motivation and problem-solving—shows that most of us are so uptight, so afraid of committing mistakes, that it’s as if we’re painfully tiptoeing around our goals, rather than galloping toward them full-out like thoroughbreds born to run.

It’s not that I don’t take psychological suffering and personal hardship seriously. But often, the best way to thwart those bullies is to stop being so reverent toward them, and indeed, to be shamelessly irreverent, laughing as you speed past and mooning them as you go.

Smooch Your Subconscious

I should not have agreed to babysit that cake, and definitely should never have allowed it to hang out in my kitchen. Mistake made, lesson learned, hips recovered, ‘nuff said. My subconscious still loves me. This very second, I’m braiding red roses into its flowing mane.

If you’re headed toward your next big success (you are, right?), and you’re willing to do what it takes to get there (again—yes?), you’ve got to be prepared for when you make mistakes. Plan ahead to be easy on yourself (can I bet on you?). Whenever you’re tempted to self-flagellate, instead I dare ya to do the failure dance. Do it shamelessly all-out until you’re positively giddy (GIDDY!) with joy at your own spectacular imperfection. Forgive yourself in order to proceed full-speed ahead: Giddy up!