Leveraging fear of failure 

Fear of failure, often viewed as a stumbling block, can be a powerful motivator when leveraged effectively. It serves as a reminder that learning is a journey peppered with setbacks, which are simply stepping stones on the path to success. Embracing failure as an inevitable part of this journey allows us to remain resilient, adaptive, and committed to our personal growth and accomplishment.

The resources mentioned in this episode are:

• • Join my online membership, The Club, for access to educational and empowering content to help you grow and develop in all areas of your life.
  • Check out Julia Child’s cookbook and start experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen.
  • Explore Vera Wang’s collection of wedding dresses and get inspired to pursue a career in wedding planning or fashion design.
  • Enroll in a digital course on platforms like Udemy or Khan Academy to learn a new skill or deepen your knowledge in a particular subject.
  • Consider joining a local cooking or hobby class to learn something new and meet like-minded individuals.
  • Dive into personal development by reading books or listening to podcasts that inspire and motivate you to reach your full potential.
  • Challenge yourself to step outside of your comfort zone and embrace failure as a learning opportunity.
  • Start a book club with friends and commit to reading and discussing a new book each month to expand your knowledge and engage in thought-provoking conversations.
  • Attend events or workshops in your area that align with your interests and passions to network and learn from industry experts.
  • Surround yourself with people who encourage growth and development, whether it’s joining a mastermind group or seeking out mentors who can support and guide

Timestamped summary of this episode:

00:00:03 – Welcome to the Samantha Leith podcast. With me, Samantha Leith. I have a passion for exploring anything and everything that can help us to be extraordinary. Each week I’m going to dive into a topic and explore it extensively. Because if there’s something that makes for a better life, I want to learn about it and more importantly, share it.

00:00:23 – And hey, you may just get the odd song thrown in. There’ll be deep conversations, fun and travolta. Helpful tools for you to add to your life straight away. Random musings about anything from coffee to sex and information that may just blow your mind. This is a podcast for dreamers, believers, action takers and achievers.

00:00:43 – It’s personal development, but not as you know it.

00:00:50 – Hello everybody. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Samantha Leith Podcast, episode 34, where I want to talk about It was really hard for me to come up with a title for this one because what I want to talk about is the fact that no matter what age you are, you might not yet actually know how to do the thing that you are going to be greatest at. Now what’s made me kind of think of this at the moment well, I’m turning 50 next year and I’ve done whole lot of thinking about what I want to get done in the next year, where I am in life, what I’ve already done, what I still want to do, what possibilities. There are all that kind of stuff that comes up often when we have milestone birthdays or we are hit with something really impactful in life like the death of a beloved one or moving or new relationships, ending relationships, those kind of things. Those pivotal moments where you do lots of reflection and I wonder if you could see me right now, the finger in the corner of your mouth going, I wonder like that thinking pose.

00:01:59 – So I want to talk about this because I think it’s really exciting. We often think we’ve gone to school and we’ve learned our ABCs and then we decide what we’re going to do at university and that’s what we’re going to do with our life and that’s what we’re going to be best at. And we have these ideas all the way through life of what is going to be our thing. And I don’t just mean career wise. So for example, when you’re a baby, you have no idea how to walk or how to talk or how to feed yourself or sit up or any of those things.

00:02:37 – And when you take those first steps and start walking at that point in your life, that is the greatest thing you’ve ever done. That’s it. That is so freaking exciting. It’s awesome. When you start to talk, that becomes one of the greatest things you’ve ever done and so on and so forth.

00:02:55 – We keep kind of going through life having these moments and learning these new skills and developing our talents and maybe we’ve educated ourselves on something and at that point, maybe that’s the greatest thing you’re ever going to do. No, maybe it’s not that one. Maybe this one’s the greatest thing that you’re ever going to do. And I think that is so exciting. Like so exciting.

00:03:22 – And I’ve had moments in my life where I haven’t embraced this and I haven’t really thought about the incredible power of a growth mindset and continual education and what that can actually do for us. And I’ve had those moments where I felt really stuck. And then I’d learn something or I’d read something or I’d try something and I’d get unstuck and it just opens up. This not only a new neural pathway in our brain when we do that kind of thing, like there’s actually science behind us doing these things and how it impacts our know. I’ve talked about Carol Dweck and the Growth Mindset book that she talks a lot about this stuff and it’s so exciting.

00:04:12 – She defines a growth mindset as the belief that one’s abilities and talents can be developed through hard work, good strategies and inputs from others. And there’s been so many studies like, you know, go have a look on the Google about how many studies there are about the power of having a growth mindset and continual education. And it’s our willingness to keep doing this that changes our lives. Like really changes our lives. And my daughter is graduated from school last week and I was like, so cool.

00:04:51- I was like such a cool cat. Like, I’m not going to be emotional. It’s all going to be fantastic. It’s just so exciting. Yeah, so happy for her.

00:04:59 – I spent the week on an absolute emotional roller coaster of excitement about the possibilities for her life and sadness that this chapter was over and being just happy for her and her development and the great experience she’s had. At school and then being really fearful of, well, now we don’t have the structured kind of get up at breakfast together, do all the things that we do that have made our relationship amazing. What does that mean for us? And actually that’s kind of one of the reasons this topic also was important to me because I was like, I think I’ve been a really great mum. And yes, there have been challenges and things like that, but I was like, I’ve really nailed that.

00:05:49 – I think that’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever done in my life is being her mum. I was like, oh, what’s my next great thing? And yes, I do amazing work with my clients and I’m really happy with my speaking and my coaching and my entrepreneurial endeavors and so many other things. But I was like, what’s going to be my next great thing or my next extraordinary thing? Probably I should say that given that it’s the word I really, really love.

00:06:16 – And I’m like I’m excited. There’s so much possibility out there for me and for you. You may never have even contemplated what is going to be your greatest thing. You might not. Might not have.

00:06:38 – I’m pretty sure there’s so many stories about this. Okay, Julia Child writing her first cookbook at 50. And if you haven’t watched the movie or the series about Julia Child, go do it. I’ve got her cookbooks as well. Amazing.

00:06:59 – Colonel Sanders or 60, 70, something like that. Should have Googled that before I did this. J. K. Rowling.

00:07:06 – We’re at Harry Potter in her forty s, I believe.

00:07:10 – Who’s the wedding designer? Vera Wang. I don’t think Vera Wang for memory. So funny that I didn’t actually research these. Whoopsie Vera Wang?

00:07:22 – I think she was in her 40s or 50s when she started designing wedding dresses. There is just so much that can possibly happen. Look at Martha Stewart. Her career has had a complete resurgence and done incredible things so much later in life after she hit a few speed humps. There are people that study to become doctors in their 40s.

00:07:47 – There’s an Australian Olympian who was a I think she was a high jumper and got a few children, and she went back to uni in her late thirty s, I believe. To become a doctor. There’s so many things that we could do. So what is your great thing going to be? What is your extraordinary thing going to be?

00:08:09 – This untapped potential that’s within you is there. It is there, ready and waiting for you to allow it. The opportunity to actually come through and shine. Okay, my great thing that when I get to the end of my days and I go, oh my God, gosh. The greatest thing I ever did apart from being a mother, because that’s always going to be number one.

00:08:36 – I reckon it might be interior design, probably not, but I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s going to be because I’m always open to opportunities and possibilities. Now I know the things that make me really happy, which is the entertaining entertainment and empowerment. So it’s education empowerment, rather. So I know that in whatever I do in my life, it’s going to incorporate those three things.

00:09:03 – Will I do more events? I hope so. I’m really looking at expanding into that at the moment. Will my online membership, the club, grow or will it change? I don’t know.

00:09:15 – Anything’s possible. And we can get so stuck. So even in an employment situation, the employees that are encouraged to learn and to continually develop and grow will often stay with that employer for a lot longer because they feel seen and heard and they feel encouraged to grow. And there is something about our souls and our hearts that when we have this encouragement to grow, makes us feel really good. And if you don’t have someone else, like an external source encouraging you to do that, you need to find how to have that encouragement for yourself to actually do that.

00:09:55 – Now, you can do it in so many ways. You can listen to a podcast like this. You could pick, oh, my golly, golly, gosh. I can’t remember who the interview was with, but it was on a podcast where this gentleman that I was listening to said he picks another topic. I think it was like every six months or so, and he just, like, really nails down into that topic.

00:10:19 – So it might be a language or it might be sustainability. And every day he’ll read something on it, he’ll listen to something on it. And it’s not necessarily about him changing direction in his business or in his life, but it’s about learning something new, expanding the skill sets and the education that he already has. And maybe there’s a nugget in there for him to take into his business and life. Now, I’m not going to say pick another topic every six months or I wish I could remember what he said, but I am going to encourage you to pick something that you find interesting and delve into that.

00:10:56 – Buy a magazine on something you find interesting. Are you interested in sailing? Buy a magazine, flick through it. Watch some sailing videos, go out on a boat. Did you have a conversation with something and someone and they said a word and you were like, oh, I’ve got no idea what they just said, and I’m too embarrassed to say, Excuse me, what did you mean?

00:11:17 – But I found the conversation really interesting afterwards, so maybe I want to go back and learn more about that. And I am one of those people that sometimes I’m quite happy to say so could you explain that for me? And other times I’m like, oh, I don’t want to tell the way I don’t know. And that’s okay, we’re human, we’re human people. We can do that.

00:11:35 – But maybe that’s a little light of an idea of something you want to educate yourself on or become more involved in now. There’s so many ways you can do it. So, as I mentioned, there’s podcasts, there’s books, there’s so many course places that you can go to learn things like Udemy or I’m not actually 100% sure how to say that. Isn’t that funny? Khan Academy.

00:11:59 – Like, gosh, if you want to learn more about mathematics. Not my cup of tea. Masterclass your local taste. Having a conversation with someone the other day, remembering when I did a French cooking course, and we all went along to this French cooking course once a week and took a lot of wine and we learned how to make this French dish. And then we’d sit down and eat the meal and talk to people and drink the wine and enjoy it.

00:12:20 – There’s a couple of dishes I still make, and that was like, 30 years ago. Just aged myself there, haven’t I? You could pick a digital course, come into the club and get more involved in the world of personal development. Pick something and just dedicate 1020 minutes a day to learn about it and to explore it. Maybe you like Fear Wang and think, oh, I’ve always liked weding dresses.

00:12:48 – Let’s have a bit of a play. Maybe you want to be a wedding planner. I’ll JLo didn’t we all want to be a wedding planner after watching that movie? I know. I did have that cool belt with all the knickknacks.

00:13:00 – I think being a wedding planner would actually be hell, but that’s not the point. It might be your great thing. Okay. And one of the things that Austin stops us from exploring what’s going to be our extraordinary thing I really need to say that tone tie is the fear of failure. And I talk about failure a lot because I get fearful all the time.

00:13:23 – So I’m learning this as I go. I’m working on it every single day to embrace the fact that failure is just another learning. It’s a stepping stone to success. It’s ways of doing something that doesn’t work. You go, okay, if I keep doing it, maybe I’ll figure out the way it worked, just like Thomas Edison did with a light bulb.

00:13:46 – And this exploration of things and being able to jump into it and not worry about the fear, or if you worry about the fear, being able to navigate it and deal with it, that creates so much character within us and so much confidence. It really does build on that confidence muscle. Okay, there’s a quote. I found Ginny Romdy, and she was a former IBM CEO, I believe, and it was, growth and comfort do not coexist. Oh, can feel that in my bones, because we think comfort is the best thing for us.

00:14:29 – Oh, you know, status quo. I will just feel so peaches and cream. No. When we’re in that state, it’s like a bunch of flowers that’s been sitting in a vase and we haven’t watered it. Like, it withers away and dies.

00:14:45 – We have to be uncomfortable to grow. We have to challenge ourselves. We have to learn to love learning and growth and development and possibility. All of those things are the part of the pieces that give us the clarity to be truly extraordinary. Okay.

00:15:05 – Another way of doing it is maybe you’re like, I don’t want to sit and study. That seems a bit, like, boring. How about you reach out to a couple of friends and go, I’m really interested in pushing my brain a little bit more and learning a few more things. Would you be interested in joining me? Do you want to grab a book a month, and we get into a particular topic and we discuss it and maybe something comes up for us?

00:15:31 – Maybe we want to go in a different direction. Maybe we just want to have fun, and we get to have dinner and chat about a book at the same time. That’s a great way of doing it. You go on a meet up and find people within an area that you want to explore and go catch up with them. Okay, you’re on Facebook and you see all those ads about Masterclasses coming up, and click here to find out more about this, et cetera.

00:15:57 – Do a couple. I know often we don’t want to do this because like, oh, we’re going to be sold to at the end now. Yes, you will be sold to at the end, and that is not a bad thing. If you’re learning something within that Master class and you want to learn more, being sold something is actually they’re doing you a favor by doing that. So don’t feel bad about it.

00:16:17 – And if you don’t want to buy anything, don’t buy anything, but take what you can out of that Masterclass or that free ebook or a free seven day course. On my website, there’s a couple of free seven day courses. There’s the confidence one and there’s the reset. Now that reset I’m going to do myself soon. Because it’s such a good thing to do every so often.

00:16:39 – Go to a local event, go to an online event. There’s so many things, okay?

00:16:48 – Learning is not something you have to do in school. Growing is not something that just happens to trees. But there is a Chinese proverb that says something along the lines of best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Second best time to plant a tree is now. Something like that.

00:17:08 – Please don’t correct me if I got it wrong, but you get the idea. You do get the idea. So I want you to do one thing for me today, and it’s not necessarily not going to tell you right now to just go and start something new, learn something today, and change your life for the better. Okay? You could do all of those things, but I just want you to when you’re journaling today is list three to five things that you’ve always wanted to learn a bit more about or that you’ve wanted to do or understand or experience.

00:17:44 – Okay? And then I just want you to pick one of them, and I don’t want you to go down a rabbit hole of that’s it. I’ve just got to concentrate on this for the next ten days or ten weeks or whatever number you pick. Because if, like me, with ADHD, you’ll get really hyper focused and then other wheels will fall off in the rest of your life. But I want you to find the space to take one of those things and take one action every single day on it.

00:18:16 – So it might be listening to a podcast or reading a book or going to an event or watching webinar or something like that and just allow yourself that 20 to 30 minutes, maybe up to an hour. If you have got the time to actually dip your toes into that, okay? And just think if you’re worried about doing it, just think back to when you were a baby and you did the greatest thing that at that point you had ever done. You fell over lots. You had no idea what you were doing.

00:18:55 – Your parents were walking around you so you could see it. You could kind of like, go, oh, I want to do that. I’m sure our brains go, why am I so short and they’re so tall? I need to learn how to do that. Want to level the playing field.

00:19:09 – I don’t know what goes on in our brains, seriously when we’re babies and we are learning to do that, but I do know what’s going on in our brains now, and we get fearful, and we think we’re done like, oh, you know, I’m 45. My life is set in stone. It’s not. As I said in the decision making podcast a couple of weeks ago, you make a decision to change your life in a second, but you can’t do that if you don’t have the knowledge and the skills and the clarity and the growth mindset and all those amazing things that make that possible. Okay?

00:19:43 – So just start with baby steps. I want to know what three things three to five things that you’ve always wanted to learn how to do or to be or to have anything like that. What is it that you want to explore? I would really love and appreciate you taking a screenshot of this podcast or not even doing that, just doing a post on social. Tag me in it and let me know what those three to five things are so I can clap you on, cheer you on, encourage you, because I think it’s really, really exciting.

00:20:17 – I know myself. I’m dipping my toes into a few new things this year. I did French at school. I used to play the piano lots. Don’t do either of those things anymore.

00:20:25 – And I’d like to pick up a little bit where I left off. I want to cook some more interesting things. There’s so many things I want to do at the moment, and I encourage you to do the same, because who knows? One of those things that you learn a little more about right now could be the greatest thing you ever, ever do, okay? And remember, not about how much time we’ve got left in this world.

00:20:55 – It’s about what we do with it. So do something that floats your boat. I want to always encourage people to do that, and one of the best ways to do that is to have that growth mindset and to keep building on who you are. So until next week, my friends, have an extraordinary week because you are extraordinary. You are.

00:21:16 – Maybe we just got to highlight it a little bit more to the world and to yourself. So have a great one. Let me know what those three to five things are and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Samantha Leith podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the world of personal development and what possible for you, then I’d love to invite you to join the club.

00:21:43 – It’s my monthly membership, designed to guide and support you with the tools and the coaching you need to be extraordinary. Head on over to Samanthaleith.com theclub for more information. I’d love to see you on the inside.