How I turn fear of failure into evidence of success

Can I be real with you for a second?

My entire life has been built around the pattern of “I don’t think I can succeed at this. Maybe other people can, but I can’t.”

Does this sound familiar at all?

This pattern showed up everywhere in my life

This pattern was present in the following areas of my life:

1. “I will never recover from my eating disorder.”

2. “The binge eating will never stop.”

3. “I will always deal with severe anxiety and seasonal depression.”

4. “I will never make friends in this new city.”

5. “I will never succeed at building my business.”

6. “I will never be in a healthy, happy relationship.”

I could go on and on and on.

I had trained my brain to fail

Every time I felt a desire to change something in my life that was painful, it was like my brain kept looking for evidence as to why I would fail to achieve it.

Wowza.

Did I just blow your mind?

I ask, because I remember being mind-blown myself when someone said the following words to me:

“Rini, why are you always looking for reasons to prove that you will fail? How about instead, you start looking for reasons as to why you will succeed?”

These words really sparked change in me, which is why I wanted to pass this little mindset shift on to you today.

What I ask of you

Next time you have failure-thoughts that have the words “always” and “never” in it, I want you to stop your thoughts in their tracks. You can literally say “STOP” out loud. Then, ask yourself:

How can I instead look for evidence as to why I will succeed?

Here is how I went about this question when I was just starting out on my eating disorder recovery journey:

I started counting my wins of the day. The small, tiny little wins, such as:

This morning, I got out of bed and felt good in my skin. I didn’t feel this great all day, but I did feel like it for a little bit and that’s awesome. Good job, Rini.

I got 3 things on my to-do list / intention-list (whatever you want to call it) done. I didn’t get everything done, but I did get enough done.

I took a nice, long shower today and said something nice to my body for a change. I wasn’t nice to my body all day long, but this one moment felt true and genuine.

I had one meal today that I truly enjoyed, without tracking calories and without feeling guilty afterwards. I did feel guilty around the other meals I had, but this one meal felt truly liberating. I am going to focus on that.

As for the things that didn’t go very well today, what is the lesson I can learn for tomorrow?

Do you see how I really started shifting my mindset into success-evidence vs. failure-evidence?

I didn’t set unrealistic expectations. I didn’t expect myself to be healed and perfectly happy on Day 2 of my journey. All I did was start looking for things that are going well. No matter how small and insignificant they seemed, I focused on them.

And guess what, over time my brain went to these wins by default, instead of going to the ‘failures’ by default. 

The biggest takeaway from this practice was this:

There’s no such thing as failures, because all it is, is lessons that help me move forward with more purpose.

I hope this was helpful for you today. Please know that you are not alone in your journey.

We all go through seasons of struggle and what I am hoping I can do with these E-Mails is encourage you to look at the bright side of things and to believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel. And I know that we sometimes need somebody else to show us the way towards that light.