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How to Break Your Addiction to Failure

3 steps to align with success

By Sarah K BrandisPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

I’m going to go out on a limb here. I'm going to suggest that if you have found yourself repeating patterns that end in failure, then there is a reason for it. You may also have something in your past that is causing this pattern.

This was the case for me, and there is a growing pool of evidence to add to the theory.

You might be surprised to learn that Adverse Childhood Experiences are more common than most people think. And it doesn’t have to be anything huge and shocking to society. Sadly, common occurrences like being bullied, shamed or witnessing the divorce of your parents all counts.

Anyone who has experienced any kind of Adverse Childhood Experience may also be living with the effects of trauma to some degree.

Sometimes we don’t know it’s there, and because these adverse experiences are so common that we don’t give much thought to the life-long effects of them.

But our society is riddled with chronic stress and chronic health conditions, many of which are connected with Adverse Childhood Experiences to some degree.

Then there is the effect on our mindset. Fear, anxiety, low self-worth, and a more general sense of being lost are so common amongst us.

As much as we might aim high in our stronger moments - when the darkness sets in we doubt our abilities, and then we act accordingly, leading to poor results.

We get trapped in our failure, and it’s almost addiction-like.

Wondering if this applies to you?

If you experienced bullying, poor parenting, shaming, or feeling unwanted, then pay attention here.

In his book, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, Pete Walker explains how one of the maladaptive patterns we develop takes us down the route of using flight as a survival mechanism.

We take flight and quit something that feels risky, even if we were close to success. We take flight and focus on perfection, and maybe even develop Obsessive Compulsive tendencies.

Let’s take the example of Entrepreneurship, as I have seen this pattern play out here so many times. And yes, I can include myself in this.

Have you ever started a business or freelance lifestyle, only to find that after a few months you couldn’t fight the pull to go back to an employed job? Yes you might have hated working for somebody else, yet the pull back to the safety of uncomfortable comfort was too great?

Ultimately, you put your dreams to bed and accepted that you had to work for somebody else…

Maybe you thought it was just you? Perhaps you judged yourself harshly for giving up your dream. But you know what? This story is really common.

So many of us are just too afraid of a big failure, so we end up settling for failing our dreams instead.

We accept a life we don’t really want.

But what if we could learn a better habit? What if we could prevent ourselves from subconsciously choosing failure over pushing through to success?

I believe that this is the path we need to walk. So many of us are held back by fear of the unknown, instead choosing familiarity. So let’s look at a simple 3-step process to change our path and align with success.

We need to identify our patterns, adapt our plans, and then progress in life. Let’s break it down.

Identify

Once you can identify that something is making you fearful, you can then look a little deeper.

What are you the most afraid of? Is it the financial implications of a dream failing? Or are you more scared of the loss of the dream?

If you go all in and it fails, then you can’t sit in your miserable day job dreaming of your future goal, because you’ve already lost it.

Years ago I worked at a life coaching school, and I came across this so often. So many scared people choose to hold onto a dream in their mind but never pursue it, because they can’t risk bursting their own bubble.

So ask yourself if you are protecting your own dream by never pursuing it, and then ask yourself what you want more:

  • Do you want a dream you think about while stuck in a job or existence that you hate?
  • Or do you want to take a risk and try to actually live that dream? It’s up to you.

Now you can start to identify the ways in which you hold yourself back from success.

You might quit on an idea just before it pays off. You might procrastinate and never start something. You may take bad job after bad job, feeling safer in a hell you know then risk trying what you don’t know.

Figure out what your pattern is - now you are aware.

Adapt

You can’t just rip off the Band Aid here. The fear and patterns that you have are deep-rooted, and you developed them in a bid to protect yourself. So respect that while you are working on releasing those patterns.

Be slow and mindful, rather than trying to throw yourself all in, which would leave you terrified, raw and likely to relapse into old ways... This isn’t about jumping without wings, it is about adapting your process.

If the goal is entrepreneurship, start with a side hustle. If the goal is fitness, start with mile, not a marathon.

The trick here is to set a small but real goal. Something you can achieve without scaring yourself. That achievement gives you the proof that you can do things, and then you can start to aim higher.

This is about challenging your view of the world, but not about scaring yourself.

Progress

This bit might surprise you, but I want you to let yourself off the hook here.

With a history of failing at stuff, you might think the last thing that you should allow is more failure. But this is a misconception that hurts us more.

The path to success isn’t a straight line, it goes up and down, twists and turns, and that’s okay! You need to learn to forgive yourself when you make mistakes.

You see, before you were so scared to fail that you’d quit before you got there. But failure is not to be feared - it’s a part of everybody’s process. We all have to fail in order to grow.

Maybe not allowing yourself to ever fail is the biggest failure of all.

If Evan Williams hadn't created a few platforms that failed first, then he may never have gone on to co-found Twitter. And did you know that Arianna Huffington's second book was rejected by more than 30 publishers - but she keep going, and look at her now.

So Identify, Adapt, and Progress knowing that progression includes some mistakes and disappointments. But failure is not to be feared. It's all part of the human experience.

References:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020.

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fviolenceprevention%2Facestudy%2Findex.html

Perm & Winter (2002) The Relation Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Health: Turning Gold into Lead. The Permanente Journal.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6220625/

Walker, Pete (2013) Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, Azure Coyote Publishing.

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About the Creator

Sarah K Brandis

Mental health, psychology and neuroscience writer. Survivor. Author of The Musings of an Elective Orphan. www.sarahkbrandisauthor.com

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