Man in the Arena with Craig Spear

How Failure Fuels Your Path to Wellness

• Craig Spear

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Have you ever wondered if failure is actually the secret ingredient to success? Join me, Craig Spear, on this enlightening episode of "Man in the Arena," where we transform your perception of failure from a daunting obstacle to a powerful tool for achieving your health and wellness dreams. 

Drawing from my own personal experiences across various domains like sports, relationships, business, and fitness, I'll show you how failures have been pivotal in leading to better outcomes. We’ll tackle why people fear failure—whether it’s judgment, perfectionism, the unknown, or self-esteem—and how confronting these fears can turn failure into a stepping stone for resilience and growth.

Keep taking action, keep showing up, and keep improving. Your journey to optimal health continues here.

Did you find this episode helpful insightful or motivating? If so, let's connect! You can find me on....

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to man in the Arena. This podcast is for men over 40 who want to master their health and weight loss goals once and for all, with innovative strategies, practical tools and insightful interviews. My goal is to help you overcome your limiting beliefs and achieve your optimal health. It's time to look good, feel good and do better. Hello and welcome to man in the Arena. Thank you so much for stopping by. If this is your first time here, I really appreciate you tuning in, and if you're a repeat listener, I also appreciate you for repeatedly showing up, listening and doing this work to improve your health and your wellness.

Speaker 1:

As I said, my name is Craig Spear. I'm a health and performance coach for men over 40. And today I'm going to talk about failure. More specifically, I'm going to talk about why we avoid failure, how to reframe failure so it's a good thing and then practical tips on how to deal with failure, specifically with your health and performance goals.

Speaker 1:

But before I dive into that, I think it's really important to acknowledge my own history with failure. I've failed in almost every aspect of life. I've failed with respect to sports relationships, business, finances, health and fitness, my career you name it. I've failed so many times, but the reality is I don't look at these as failures, because they've all led to better outcomes in the long run, and better outcomes than I could have ever imagined at the time that I was experiencing that failure. Now, that didn't make it easier to deal with them at that time, but there was still a lot of pain, there was still a lot of suffering, but I've never let my failures define me and keep me down, so I've always managed to recover and get past them and then ultimately succeed. And, more than anything today, that's what I want you to take away from this podcast. Yes, failures hurt, they sting, they can be really painful and embarrassing, but they're part of the process, they're a necessary ingredient in your success. So if you're failing, that means you're doing it right, and if you're not failing, you're probably not even trying. Okay. So with that, let's jump in.

Speaker 1:

Why do people avoid failure? Well, there's a lot of reasons why, but I want to highlight four of them and give you some examples with respect to each one of those reasons. The first one is fear of judgment and shame. So many people avoid failure because they fear judgment from others and the associated shame that comes with that. So they worry how others are going to perceive their failures. An example of this, when it comes to our health and wellness, is you might avoid changing certain health habits, like eating or exercising or sleeping better, because you fear being seen as incompetent if you ultimately fail at changing those habits.

Speaker 1:

Okay, the next one is perfectionism. Now, perfectionism is often this all or nothing mindset, right that anything less than perfect is unacceptable, and this often leads to us avoiding situations where we might not succeed flawlessly. So here's an example as an entrepreneur, you might delay hiring a coach that's going to help you learn how to perform better, how to eat better, how to sleep better, until the time is absolutely perfect. I hear this quite a bit oh, the timing's not right. But what happens when you have this belief that the timing isn't right or it's not the perfect situation? You're missing out on all the valuable opportunities for learning, especially when the timing isn't perfect.

Speaker 1:

The third reason why we avoid failure is the fear of the unknown. Now, failure often involves venturing into uncharted territory, so the uncertainty and unpredictability of outcomes can be really intimidating, and this causes us to stick with what's familiar and it causes us to avoid risks. This is probably what I see most often in my coaching is the fear of the unknown. What I see most often in my coaching is the fear of the unknown. So I see guys who don't change their habits, like staying up late or sleeping in, because they fear what it's going to feel like when they do face the uncertainty of going to bed early or getting up early. The last reason why we avoid failure is the impact that it has on our self-esteem. We really tie in these failures into meaning something about who we are and what we're worth. So it's experiencing a failure can lead to this negative self-assessment, and people avoid failure to protect their self-esteem and maintain this positive image. Protect their self-esteem and maintain this positive image, right. So what I want you to do is just reflect on these a little bit and ask yourself what fear, what failure am I avoiding, and why? Okay, specifically with your own health and wellness.

Speaker 1:

Now, on the flip side of that coin, I want to start to look at failure as a positive, as a good thing. As long as you have this base of self-love, then you can learn a lot from your failures. If you're going to use your failures to just tear yourself down, though, that's where you have to be very, very careful. Now, why is failure a good thing? First and foremost, I believe that failure builds the strength we need to become more proficient at the task. We're learning. So think of a baby who's learning to walk right Every time they fall. They are failing to walk, but they need to fall because when they fall, this means they have to use their leg muscles and their core and their arms to pull themselves back up. So they're literally doing hundreds of reps of squats and this builds their leg muscles and their core and their arms to pull themselves back up. So they're literally doing hundreds of reps of squats and this builds their leg muscles. And when they build their leg muscles, this gives them the strength they need to be able to walk and balance.

Speaker 1:

Okay, take another example weighing in every day. So one of the things I have my clients practice is getting a scale, putting it in a place where they can weigh in every day, weigh in with the same variables, so usually without any clothes on, after going to the bathroom and not eating same time of day. Now, each time you weigh in and you see the number on the scale and let's say it stays the same or it even goes up right. This allows you to build the necessary resilience, the necessary muscles, the necessary tolerance emotional tolerance you need to have in order to gain more confidence to handle difficult situations. Think about this A lot of times guys are eating overeating because they can't handle the emotions that come with difficult situations. But if you get to practice that daily and you develop the perseverance and resiliency needed to overcome these failures, you're going to get much stronger in the long run.

Speaker 1:

So failure is a positive thing. When we reframe it in the right way, we get to learn and grow from it. Failure is a powerful teacher, so we gain new insights and then we get to adjust our approach if we are in fact failing and not progressing the way that we want to. Failure also provides innovation and creativity right. So think of you know the common example of of thomas edison and how he failed a thousand times before he finally created the light bulb right. Every time he failed he had to innovate and create something new. So if you're changing your health habits and you want to perform better, every time that you fail in that attempt, in those attempts, you get an opportunity to be more innovative, be more creative and see different ways of doing things. The other thing that's great about failure is it gives us this ability to acknowledge our limitations, so we gain more self-awareness, we gain humility because we see where we're weak in certain areas, and then we get to build our strengths as a result. The last thing that's great about failure is it helps us to define success. It helps us to redefine success, and what I mean by that is we ultimately get to focus more on the process and the journey, rather than just the outcomes that we expect, and I think that's really important. When you're looking at attaining certain goals, it's not who you become sorry, it's who you become in the process, rather than attaining that actual goal.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so here's an exercise that I want you to consider doing. I highly encourage you doing this right. There's a professor at Stanford University named Tina Selig, and something that she encourages her students to do and people that she works with to do is what's called a failure resume, and this is where, essentially, you're just listing your failures, your mistakes, and then what you learn from them. Okay, so what I want you to do is regularly update your failure resume, reflecting on the lessons you've learned and how each failure has contributed to your own personal and professional growth. And why is this so important? Why is this so powerful? Well, what it does is it normalizes failure, so it reduces the fear that you might have of it, and then highlights the role it plays in helping you achieve your long-term success. So failure resume a really powerful exercise, something I highly recommend you do to help you build more tolerance around the failures you might have.

Speaker 1:

Okay, let's dive into practical tips for embracing failure with respect to your own health and wellness goals. Now, first and foremost, I want you to reframe your setbacks as learning opportunities. And notice I said setbacks instead of failures, because that's what they are. Failures are not absolute failures until you absolutely give up and quit Each time you fail and you're not seeing progress. It's just an opportunity for you to learn, so I want you to assess the circumstances and then learn from them.

Speaker 1:

Next thing I want you to do is start to set more incremental goals. So a lot of times, we have a big goal that we're trying to achieve, specifically with our health and weight loss, but what's more helpful is if we break down that goal into smaller, more achievable victories, and when you do that, you're able to assess your failures much better, rather than you not being able to achieve this really big, large goal, you can say, okay, I didn't achieve this small goal that I had in front of me, but I know it's attainable. I just have to adjust and do things differently. Next thing I want you to do is build a better support system. I've talked a lot about this in other podcasts, but it's really important for you to find people who are going to support you in your life. Find accountability partners, find support groups, join the arena, which is my online community. Work with a coach, work with a trainer, work with someone who's going to help you reframe those setbacks that happen as you pursue your health and weight loss goals.

Speaker 1:

The next thing I want you to do is to practice more self-compassion, and this is something, again, I've talked a lot about on my podcast. On this podcast, it's really important to identify when you are having critical, judgmental thoughts about the actions you are taking and the progress that you're making. Instead, you want to have more kindness, more patience, more self-compassion when you do inevitably fall short. The last thing I want you to focus on when it comes to practical tips for embracing failure is to try to take the drama out of what's happening right.

Speaker 1:

A lot of times, our brain makes our failures mean something more than they actually are. Okay, see if you can just make them objective. So reflect and then adjust your plan. Take the drama out of it. Reflect on what you're doing and then adjust the plan. And lastly, guys, let me leave you with this the fastest way to get over failure is to make another attempt. We learned this when we were five years old, learning to ride a bike for the first time. When you fall down, get back up and go again.

Speaker 1:

All right, guys, that's all I have for you today, talking about failure. Remember failure is not bad, and certainly not as bad as never trying. I want you to normalize failure, reframe it right. I encourage you to reflect on your own experiences with failure and how you can reframe those. Use that failure resume exercise to catalog your failures and look at how each one of those led to a really positive outcome in your life. Thank you again for tuning in, guys. I really appreciate it. Next week we're going to dive into consistency. It's a big episode I've been building towards and I look forward to having you there. Thanks again, and keep doing the work, keep showing up and keep getting better. Now is the time to take action and change your life. Head on over to thespearmethodcom and discover how I can help you get started on your path to better health and weight loss.