The Nuggets of Gold That Pave Your Golden Path to a Joyful Life

A couple of weeks ago, in my wrap up of the March Daily practice, I talked about treating the things you try as experiment, rather than just assuming you failed if things don’t work out exactly as you planned. After having similar conversations with all of my current coaching clients (plus a few friends, old clients, potential clients, and random people in the street), I decided to dedicate a whole article to the subject.

You see, nothing we do is ever wasted. It’s all feedback, experience, it’s ALL GOOD. Always. I first realised this after a decade of beating myself up about not settling on a career. I mean, I was in my 20’s, I should just choose a speciality for the next 40 years, right??? Er, no. I now realise how naive and unhelpful that particular attitude was. Anyway, I job hopped. I was lucky, the company I worked for loved me and wanted to keep me, so I department-hopped for them for a decade. All the time wondering when I was going to find my ‘place’, when I was going to find ‘the job’ that would stop my restlessness and allow me to settle into a career, when I would stop ‘wasting time’ hopping from one department to another.

When I started my own business, I realised that my grounding in the ‘back office’ stuff – accounts, credit control, IT, invoicing, query resolution etc was invaluable. What great experience. I meet people now who have no idea how to chase money, how to invoice, how to do their accounts, how to install software on their computer, how to use excel…and I am so grateful that I have all of that knowledge and experience instilled into me when I was ‘wasting time’ for a decade searching for my ‘forever career’. I’m also grateful that I couldn’t ‘settle’ to one job…it led me to what I do now.

It’s just a shame I spent so much time beating myself up for getting it wrong, and listening to the people who told me that I needed to settle down and stop hopping about the business. Ironically, I think the Chairman of the business knew – in our first interview, when he asked me what I wanted to do with my life (I was 23, how the hell did I know?!), he said that a company secretary needed to know how every department in the company worked. I thought he was nuts. Turns out, he was right – it’s just that I’m the owner of my company, not a company secretary. Had I realised how right he was, I could have used that time much more productively. It would have been very helpful to me to have spent time in marketing and sales too! Still, I’ve learned that stuff along the way. With plenty of trial and error.

For the first few years of my business I had a similar problem, I wondered what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t do what the ‘experts’ told me to do to sell and market my business. Since then I’ve realised that I was asking the wrong questions of the wrong people and discovered MY way of selling and marketing. I spent so much time ‘failing’ that only my stubborn (as a herd of mules) nature stopped me from just giving up. I now know that the problem wasn’t the failure, it was the way I saw the failure – as me being deficient in some way, instead of just ‘new’, or ‘learning’, or ‘doing something in a way that didn’t work for me’.

It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve come to realise that EVERY experience is valuable. If you allow yourself to wring every drop of knowledge and learning from it. If you allow yourself to find the nuggets of gold, instead of throwing the lot away and giving it up as a bad job. I see clients do it too, and it breaks my heart that they can’t see how brilliantly they did. What amazing tenacity / courage / creativity / intelligence / inspiration / talent / wisdom they have shown. What fabulous opportunities are now opening in front of them because of that ‘failure’. How much easier it’s going to be for them next time, because they dared to try this time. How every attempt, and failure, brings them closer to success.

The default position for most of us is to immediately go to a critical place. To see that we were bad/lazy/unsuccesful/useless. To see where WE got it wrong. I get it. I get that we have high (and often unrealistic) expectations of ourselves. I get that we want to get it right first time. But most people don’t – they fail. Over and over. Most successful people fail A LOT…but they don’t see it as failure, they see it as learning. I’d like to reboot every one of us to go to a default place of curiosity, of gentle questioning, of assuming that we are brilliant and wonderful and intelligent and creative and usually right…so from that place of assuming you’re brilliant, what happened? From the place of assuming that YOU didn’t do anything wrong, what happened?

Of course, there is the possiblity that you did do wrong…but it just doesn’t help you to come at it from that perspective first. Your brain is a marvellous machine that will find exactly what you ask it to find. So if you ask “how was I wrong/bad/stupid”, it will find that answer for you. If instead you investigate without judgement or blame, but with a gentle desire to understand what worked and what didn’t, it is far more effective. This way you discover the nuggets of gold hidden in the ‘failure’ or unpleasant experience. That nugget of gold might be that you did something wrong, but that’s allowed – you are human. And once you know you did something wrong, you get a chance to do it right next time.

And of course, by doing this, we allow for the possibility that WE were NOT wrong. Maybe instead you find that the advice you are following isn’t working for you. Maybe you find that a particular technique isn’t for you. Maybe you find that having facebook and e-mail open while you work encourages you to ‘wander off’ from your work! Maybe you find that you have learned LOADS about what’s not right for you, bringing you ever closer to what IS right. Maybe you find that you have polished a skill, gained a friend, found a new direction you weren’t expecting. Maybe you find that when you ignore your intuition, your intuition is always proved right. None of these discoveries make you a failure or a bad person. They make you human, normal.

And if you simply refuse to go to the place of criticism and blame, they will make you an ever-evolving, ever-learning, ever-growing, ever-joyful human. A human who realises that everyone makes mistakes, and it’s really no big deal. In fact, even a decade of making mistakes can be the foundation of something that is wonderful beyond your imagination. Don’t take your mistakes too seriously, don’t give failure fangs and claws, see it instead as another way to find the nuggets of gold that will pave your path of gold to the most joyful life you can imagine.

– Something to Play With –

Think of your most recent ‘failure’. Ask yourself “what worked” (there’s always something, even if it’s “I discovered this MIT business simply does not work for me” – that’s one of mine!). Ask yourself what needed tweaking to make the experience more successful/pleasant/fun. Try again (or change what you’re doing) armed with this information. Want to share your thoughts on this article? Leave a comment below.

Love

Donna.x