Little Failures: Learning to Build Resilience Through Everyday Setbacks, Challenges, and Obstacles

By Alisha M. Wielfaert

Failure hurts!

It’s painful and can feel damaging, but the truth is failure is the gateway to success, innovation, creativity, learning, and growth.

Like everyone who’s living and growing, we’ve all experienced the pain of failure, and author Alisha Wielfaert is no exception. But while her experience with failure may not be special, she’s realized that her perspective on how to embrace failure as the road to resilience, creativity, and innovation is unique.

Within the pages of this book, you’ll discover that Little Failures, even when painful, can be a portal to resilience and so much more. You’ll learn how to distill the lessons of failures in a tangible way and take recovering actions that will propel you not just forward but also into the next right direction. Ultimately, you should see this book as a guide to help you navigate our own failures when they happen and turn them into fuel.

If you are dreaming of doing something but fear of failure is keeping you from going after it, or if you’re having a difficult time getting over a failure, then Little Failures is the perfect book to have in your hands. Are you ready to make a change?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yoke & Abundance Press
• Release date: May 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885041546

Book preview

cover.jpg

Little Failures

Little Failures

Learning to build resilience through everyday setbacks, challenges, and obstacles

Alisha M. Wielfaert

Yoke & Abundance Press

Copyright © 2022 Alisha M. Wielfaert

All rights reserved.

Little Failures

Learning to Build Resilience Through Everyday Setbacks, Challenges, and Obstacles

ISBN

979-8-88504-917-7 Paperback

979-8-88504-605-3 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-154-6 Ebook

To Mama and Papa, Ann, Zach, Kory, Ellen, and Philip, your love, support, and encouragement in my journey to now, has been everything.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1.

The Case for Little Failures

Chapter 2.

Failure, a Sacred Rite of Learning

Chapter 3.

Failure and Resilience

Chapter 4.

Women and Failure: A Double-Edged Sword

Chapter 5.

Accepting, Feeling, and Grieving

Chapter 6.

The Failure Postmortem

Chapter 7.

Community, Our Support System

Chapter 8.

Recovering Actions

Chapter 9.

Finding Your Compass

Gratitudes

Appendix

Introduction

Failure is the mother of success.

Chinese Proverb

Most people today believe failure is not just a dirty word. It’s the ultimate F-word of our time. A pervasive and chronic fear of failure has caused many of us to become obsessed with perfection, and often it keeps us out of action, afraid to even try. Many of us are afraid to start businesses, change career paths, begin writing the book we’ve been dreaming of, or even pick up that new hobby we’ve been thinking about. We’re afraid if we don’t get it right, or more importantly perfect, on the first try, that will brand us as permanent failures. To compound matters, your friends and closest family members would rather hear you use any four-letter expletive before they’d let you admit you’d failed at something. This lack of risk-taking cripples us, leaves us feeling stuck, and blocks us from accessing our most powerful tool: resiliency. Yes, failure sucks. It hurts. It’s painful beyond words, and we definitely want to avoid the big crushing failures if we can. Little failures are actually the way you avoid the bigger, messier, more painful failures, not just experiencing them but talking about them publicly too.

My own failure in 2017 sparked a curiosity in this topic, and ever since, I have felt compelled to write about the dreaded F-word. I want to help myself and others get more comfortable with the little failures, learn how to process them in useful ways, and adapt to take recovering actions that move us into resiliency. In December of 2013, I opened a yoga studio while I was still working a successful full-time job in Corporate America. It was my first true entrepreneurial activity, and I poured my heart and soul into it. Eventually, after about five years of burning the candle at both ends, I was mentally, emotionally, and physically depleted, not to mention I had lost a lot of money during that time. The goal was to make enough money to leave my corporate job, but instead, my business partner and I sold the studio to our studio manager for what felt like pennies. I closed out years of work with nothing concrete to show for my effort.

Coming home from the lawyer’s office after signing the papers to let the studio go, I wrote a blog post sharing that it felt like I’d failed at my goal. I posted the blog article on Facebook that night and went to bed. I woke up to many comments from friends and patrons of the yoga studio commenting on the post telling me I hadn’t failed because I’d tried, I’d learned something, or because I’d built a community, and the list went on. These quotes encouraging me to look on the bright side were well-intentioned, but they were land mines of toxic positivity asking me to bypass the very real pain and disappointment I was feeling under the circumstances.

In Clifton Mark’s article The psychological secret to turning your next failure into success, he says, Reframing failures as positive might actually stop us from learning from them. A sugary spoonful of positive thinking spoils the bitter medicine of defeat. As painful as it is to be honest about our failures, that pain is actually what helps us use the lesson to get better or flourish the next time we make an attempt at something. Ultra-optimism, in the face of failure, not only keeps us from learning the lesson and doing something different the next go around, but it can also delay us from grieving what happened. When we don’t grieve a failure properly, it can lead to mental, emotional, and physical problems that hold us back from reaching our fullest potential.

Coming out of that failure, I left my job in Corporate America and embarked on a career in coaching. In fact, knowing I had failed at my first business endeavor and had come out the other side helped show me just how strong, capable, and resilient I was. Failure from my first business armed me with valuable lessons, like needing to build a larger stronger email list of potential clients, the importance of creating an impeccable customer experience, as well as doing a better job of networking at larger community events to bring in new clients. With those lessons at the forefront of my mind, I was ready to tackle what I hoped would be a more sustainable business. While my current coaching business has not been all smooth sailing, I have applied the lessons from my first business and am on much better footing as a business owner because of it.

I’m not the only person who’s reframed failure into learning. How did you fail today? That is the question that Sarah Blakely’s father would ask his children every night at dinner. By modern-day standards, Sarah Blakely, founder of SPANX, is one of the most successful women of our time. She’s a self-made billionaire and was named one of Forbes’s top one hundred most influential women in 2015. Early in childhood, her father helped her cultivate a unique and foundational tool that has helped Sarah tremendously along the way. Every night at dinner, he would ask her and her brother that unconventional question: How did you fail today? Then he would celebrate their failures and ask them what they learned from the experience. For Sarah, the greatest failure became not trying.

Sarah wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a lawyer, but she bombed the LSAT not once but twice, and while floundering in after-college limbo, Sarah decided to pivot to selling fax machines door-to-door. Pavement-pounding sales jobs are ego-crushing and humbling in the best of cases. In my opinion, it’s equivalent to a PhD in repeated failure, but also a PhD in refining relationship building and communication skills. According to SPANX Inc.’s website, in the midst of her fax machine sales career, Sarah was getting ready for a party when she realized she didn’t have the right undergarment to provide a smooth look under white pants. Armed with scissors and sheer genius, she cut the feet off her control top pantyhose and the SPANX revolution began! Sarah understood that starting a business from scratch meant she’d not only hear no from countless people, she’d also have to try lots of different things that may or may not work, but that type of rejection and failure didn’t scare her off the idea. The nos and rejections she experienced when selling fax machines were after all a PhD in failure. Her dinner table conversations with her dad led her to believe the only failure here would be not trying, so SPANX was born.

Famously, in a meeting with the gatekeeper of products for Nordstrom, Sarah realized she was losing the woman’s support for the product. Sarah went out on a limb, risked failure and not to mention embarrassment, and asked the woman to go in the bathroom with her so she could show her just how well SPANX worked. Anyone else who had not learned the value of failure might not have even attempted such a bold move. Sarah had something many others didn’t have. She had her father’s childhood lesson that the only real failure here would be in not trying. Sarah rolled the dice, gambled on her belief in her product, and in this case, she won. Sarah’s story has become famous in the world of entrepreneurship, and it’s been one I’ve personally thought about for years. I wondered if that approach to try and gamble on herself was unique or something we could all learn from? What I found has transformed the way I see success today.

When we think about failure, it’s a spectrum between small and large, and what people consider a failure or not is often deeply personal. Talking about failure as big or little can be tricky because a big failure to me might be a small failure to you or vice versa. While interviewing people for this book, sometimes someone would tell me their story about failure, and I would think, that doesn’t sound like a failure. Then I might ask more probing questions about what their definition of failure was to see how our perceptions of failure compared. Despite how Webster defines failure, I learned each of us defines failure differently. Not only do we all define it differently, but we each have different capacities for embracing failure.

Our capacity for embracing failure depends on how much or how little of it we’ve experienced in the past and then what actions we took after failure happened. As you read, keep in mind if something felt like a failure to you, then that is your reality, and that’s okay. My hope is this book will help you frame your personal failures in a way that helps you see failures as growth, as the vitamins and supplements of life that, when framed correctly, actually bolster your resiliency, help you grow, learn, and flourish.

In this book, you’ll hear me advocating for us to embrace little failures in an attempt to avoid the big failures. I believe big failures are the ones that cause tragic physical harm or death to yourself or others, or any failure that causes long-term emotional trauma. For instance, if a marriage fails and ends in divorce, the initial goal of honoring a lifelong vow was broken, and many people view this as a big failure, but if it allowed two people to flourish again separately, it’s probably worth reframing the event into a little failure. The larger, more tragic failure would be two people staying together, stagnating, and never feeling like they are able to grow into their best selves because they’re stifled by the institution of marriage and afraid of the perceived failure of divorce. Unfortunately, little failures are not without pain, but often they are the ones we encounter that help us avoid even more heartbreaking experiences.

I’ve spent the last five years coaching hundreds of women through life, business, and career transitions. I do this work through three main vehicles: community, creativity, and positive psychology, which also happen to be incredible tools for embracing the lessons of little failures. I’ve seen firsthand in my coaching work how fear of failure keeps clients out of action, how unprocessed failure cripples us from learning the lessons failure gifts us, and how empowering and transformative it can be when we take recovering actions after failure has occurred.

This book, Little Failures: Learning to build our resilience through our everyday setbacks, challenges, and obstacles, is for those of you who are ambitious, driven, and full of dreams. I’ve designed this to be the book I wish I had when I started college or was worried about picking the wrong major, or the book I needed when I was early in my career and afraid to make waves or stand out as a new employee. This is the guide I needed when I started both of my businesses. This book will help you not only embrace life’s little failures as the path to your dreams, but it will also help teach you how to process them when they are particularly painful. I will show you how to distill the lessons of failures in a tangible way and take recovering actions that will propel you not just forward but also into the next right direction.

If you’ve got dreams so big they scare you, but fear of failure