failure

It’s the Journey

emilydownward

""Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it." ~ Eckhart Tolle

Our culture is very goal-oriented. It’s difficult to avoid this mindset, and although I remind myself to enjoy the journey, remind myself it’s not about the destination, I still fall into the usual, accepted way of measuring myself by my accomplishments.

This past weekend, I was participating in my 7th sprint triathlon. Last year was the first year I did 2 in one year; I usually do one annually. I know how to train for them by now, and while I’m not the fastest by a long shot, I give myself a personal goal of trying to best my previous year’s time. Some years, I just beat my time by a few minutes. I am proud to finish and proud to know I got a little better. Growing up, I was never an athlete, and I get a kick out of knowing and calling myself a triathlete now. They also remind me that I can do things I think I can’t.

Sunday morning, the day of the race…I’m feeling good, well-prepared, ready to go. The swim went well, and I found a steady rhythm. I completed the swim in my best time yet, and I headed out on the 14-mile bike course. This course is close to where I live, and I’ve been training on it at least weekly. As the miles pass by, I’m happy with my time and feeling good. I pass mile 8 and then Bam! I hit something and my back tire is flat. I pull over and one of the volunteers who is helping direct traffic helps me patch and reinflate the inner tube. At this point, I’ve lost at least 15 minutes. I’m off again, but within a few yards the tire is flat again. I try one more time to reinflate it, but it doesn’t work. I finally realize I’m going to have to accept that I can’t finish the race and start to walk my bike back.

My thoughts were swirling. The word “forfeit” tasted bitter in my mouth. It sounded like quitting. I don’t want to be a quitter! But of course, there was nothing I could do. I didn’t fail; my equipment failed. I did chastise myself for not having another inner tube or not being able to fix it better. (I learned later that whatever I hit had torn through the rubber tire, too. There was no way I could have fixed it at that point.) And of course, I thought, “Why is this happening to me?”

As I walked along – slowly, as bike shoes aren’t meant for walking – I watched all the other cyclists pass me. Soon, it seemed I was the only one left on the course, so I walked in silence. I noticed the beautiful corn field beside me and noticed and was grateful for the cloud cover above. I was trying to focus on the positive as much as possible, and I was also grateful that I wasn’t physically hurt. I wish I could tell you I was completely peaceful and serene, but I still had some processing to do. I cried a bit when the police officer came and picked me up to drive me back, and I got choked up admitting to the race director that I had to forfeit.

Even when we are completely prepared for something, when we’ve done all we can do, there’s still so much that is out of our control. I realized the other day (many days before the triathlon) that life gives you a series of lessons to teach you you’re really not in control. And then, it’s as if life asks you, how are you going to respond? What are you going to do now? That’s where our control comes in, in our response.

Goals, Achievement and Failure

emilydownward
triathlon finish
Finishing my 6th triathlon, and beating my personal best time. Achieving your goals feels great, but what about when you don’t achieve them?

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”
~ Zig Ziglar

Do you set goals for yourself? Do you write them down or just know them in your mind or in your heart? Studies have shown it’s actually beneficial to write them down, and while I do that for my professional goals, I definitely have some that are just so intrinsically bound to who I believe I am that they are always within me.

It’s my birthday week, and it’s a big one. A decade milestone. I have mixed feelings about this, but it’s coming, whether I like it or not. So in true coach-y form, I’ve been delving into my feelings and the thoughts behind them.

On the one hand, I am happy to celebrate. First of all, I think it’s always fun to have a day to celebrate YOU just for being you. I always make it a point of telling the people I love and care about how much they mean to me on their birthdays. I like the idea of a celebration just because. Not because of any accomplishment or achievement, just for being alive. And while I’m not THAT old yet, I have outlived some of my friends. Thinking of their too-short lives makes me grateful for each of my years.

BUT…then there’s the other thoughts. The not-so-excited-to-be-FORTY thoughts. As a coach who trained in a class of amazing coaches, I’ve been self-coaching and been a practice client for my colleagues on many of these thoughts. These thoughts are dirty pain — as opposed to clean pain like grief, dirty pain is the thoughts about it that you have like “it’s my fault he left” or “I will never find another job/partner/friend like him again.” Dirty pain thoughts are nasty, and definitely painful, but they can be dismantled.

The biggest resistance I have about turning FORTY (it’s big…it deserves all caps) is that I haven’t achieved some of my personal goals that I thought I would have by now. I could explain this in two ways: 1) it’s out of my control, there are circumstances and others involved and there’s nothing I can do about it, or…2) I have made choices, for good reasons, that have led me to this point, and even though it’s not where I want to be, I honor and value the choices I have made. The first explanation puts me in the role of the victim or the martyr, and that doesn’t feel good to me. The second explanation puts me back in the driver’s seat of my own life, and I like that more. While I have yet to reach my desired destination, I do feel good about the journey.

If you have goals for yourself, and you don’t meet them (for whatever reasons), I invite you to explore what you’re telling yourself about not achieving the goal. You get to craft the story in your head, so make it a good one! Use goals as motivators to keep striving towards, but don’t use the goals as sticks to beat yourself up with.

Value

emilydownward

My minister is doing a series of sermons on the Beatitudes, and one statement he made last week really stood out for me:

“Success doesn’t make you more valuable. Failure won’t make you less valuable.”

Wow. That hit me dead-on. I’ve always been a bit of an over-achiever, a perfectionist, pushing myself to achieve MORE.

But his assessment rings true for me because I believe, as C.S. Lewis so succinctly put it, “You are a soul. You have a body.”

So these two parts of me are a bit dissonant. On the one hand, I know that as a soul, I have value just as any other soul does. No more, no less. But on the other side, (supported strongly by our culture), I feel I must DO something to be valuable, and that DOING should be successful.

In Finding Your Own North Star, Martha Beck talks about how all major life transitions go through a cyclical course, what she calls the Cycle of Change. The third of four squares is called The Hero’s Saga, and it’s characterized by a series of attempts and failures. After all, as humans, we learn through trial and error. When I heard Martha speak on it, she talked about how this stage is similar to playing golf. You keep hitting towards the hole, hopefully getting closer and closer each time. Eventually, you succeed, but it usually takes a fair bit of missing first. The mantra for this part of the cycle is “This is a lot harder than I thought, and that’s okay.” (Of course, part of you doesn’t agree with the “that’s okay” bit — it feels entirely too long and frustrating, but the “that’s okay” is to remind you it’s a normal part of the cycle.)

It has been challenging for me to welcome failure, even though I know it’s good for me (on some level). Perhaps I still measure my value by how much I’m succeeding, versus how I am being.

What do you think? I’d love to hear if this rings true for you as well.