Ep. 13 Coaching Lesson 2: Failure: Your friend or foe?

Are you dealing with the feelings of failure? Do you want to eliminate it from your life?

In this coaching episode from Lesson 2 of my online course "Get Me Started!", discover how your own beliefs about failure may be keeping you from pursuing the things you really want in life, and the three essential mindset tools to help you view them differently to  start to change your life immediately!

TIMESTAMP:
0:00 -  Welcome
0:13 -  About the episode
2:18 -  Bereavement course
3:18 -  Vonne's life before & after loss
7:14 -  Personal Power and intention
11:36 - Failure: Your friend or foe
18:22 - The power in failure
21:59  - Mindset tools
25:06 - Working with the journal
26:26 - Closing
 
BOOKS (by Vonne Solis)
Lessons in Surviving Suicide – A Letter to My Daughter
Divine Healing Transforming Pain into Personal Power – A Guide to Heal Pain From Child Loss, Suicide and Other Grief
The Power of Change

RESOURCES (Blog, Course & Meditations)

COURSE Discount

COACHING EPISODES:
Start at Lesson 1: Regrets: Letting them go! Audio or YouTube

Subscribe to the podcast! Share your favourite episodes! Connect with Vonne on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Transcript

Vonne Solis  0:00  
Welcome to another Grief Talk Coffee Chat episode. I'm your host, Vonne Solis.

Vonne Solis  0:13  
Okay, so welcome to Grief Talk everything you want to know about grief and more. I'm your host, Vonne Solis. So this is a another coaching episode two, from my online course Beyond Bereavement Get Me Started. So one of the reasons I started doing these coaching calls on my podcast is because I've always wanted to be able to reach a large number of people at the same time. Previously, I have done that as an author through writing three books. And more recently, having just launched my podcast and deciding to do some coaching calls on this. 

Vonne Solis  0:56  
So in coaching, call one from my 13 lesson online course, we talked about letting go of regrets. And I shared with my audience, viewers and listeners that in the description of all of these lessons, there is a download PDF that you can sign up for, which will take you through the first six lessons as we go along in these calls, where it's called a mini personal growth journal. And I have condensed some of the main points in the online course for you as a free little mini journal, with some exercises at the end of each of the lessons to coincide somewhat with these coaching calls. Although there are 13 lessons in the online course, the first six will give you enough of a of an insight into the course for those that would like to sign up for it and continue through to the 13. The following seven, you kind of have to have been in the course as we get into some really deeper stuff and and more work that needs to be done on the self, where having done the first six lessons is sort of a build up to that point.

Vonne Solis  2:18  
The point of the course is to take a person from wherever they are in their bereavement, or as a person who doesn't identify as someone bereaved, but still is dealing with a lot of the same issues, hence these coaching calls, just to get their life on track. To actually create more in their life. To live the life they dream about. The life they really want. And to develop the mindset and the tools to understand how to go about and actually create that.

Vonne Solis  2:50  
I'm offering a 50% discount for anyone that is interested in signing up for my online course and comes to me through this podcast either through YouTube or as an audio. The I'll put the discount link in the description below and I welcome you to join that course. It's a way for me to just build my community and have people who really want to work with me give them the opportunity to do so.

Vonne Solis  3:18  
So very, very quickly about my own background. I came from having, well, I now have 40 years, but at the time that I became a bereaved mother in 2005, I had a pretty solid background in a spiritual practice, lots of metaphysical interests, and a lot of expanded consciousness stuff that taught about mindset, manifesting, getting that life you want making as much money as you want, living the life of your dreams, and all that sort of stuff. A lot of that is still around today and we have lots of the same and lots of newer coaches and mentors in the public space. And people are still grabbing on to that kind of stuff. They want to know how to live the life that they really want, especially if you're stuck in a rut. And you know, sort of maintain some agency. Some autonomy over how you're choosing to live. The environment, you're putting yourself in. The relationships you're in. The work you do. The profession you enter. The jobs you leave, and you know, the life you change because it doesn't feel aligned with who you really are authentically. 

Vonne Solis  4:35  
So my I wasn't even doing work before my daughter Janaya died in 2005. She was 22. But I was living a really good life and you know. I manifested whatever I wanted. And I was passing that on to my kids, too. And it's like, hey, it's pretty easy, you know, and, you know. There are many different techniques to learn about manifesting and so I'm not going to go into those here. But you know, I was doing that thing, and mostly it was about consciousness. And it was mostly about being really intentional about how we're living and what we want to create in our life. And what people in my opinion, don't really like to hear about, is that we're creating the crappy stuff as much as we're creating the great stuff. 

Vonne Solis  5:18  
But for the most part, again, in my view, when we're talking about learning from manifesters, learning from the mentors, the coaches, the people who have made it really big, and, you know, they're talking about living the life essentially that they have, which quite often is centered around wealth, material gains, looking fantastic, all of these things, back three, plus decades ago, I'm just thinking for a minute here, but anyway, yeah, for sure. Even well, four decades ago, it was still centered around the same things. We were talking about materialism in terms of abundance. And but abundance basically means money, folks, it basically means materialism.

Vonne Solis  6:10  
So I wasn't competing or anything like that. And I always managed with my family to create wonderful things for us. Middle class wonderful things. Didn't have a consciousness of being super wealthy, so never went the went the whole wealthy route. But certainly great family life. Very happy, very content. Needed a job I got a job. Didn't want to work, didn't have to work. That sort of thing.

Vonne Solis  6:35  
So fast forward to 2005, when my world fell apart, because my daughter died, I have two children, a son and a daughter, when she died, well, that was that was the end of that. And so these past several years, and bit by bit and step by step, I have been trying to find a way to redefine manifesting, because when you lose it everything, and you may not lose material things, but when you lose yourself, you've pretty much lost everything, and I lost myself when my daughter died. So suffice it to say I really had nothing.

Vonne Solis  7:14  
It was a very long, hard, lonely journey to build myself up to the point that I wanted to even think about having a life that reflected even a tiny bit of what I used to have. And somewhere along the way, I started getting very interested in personal power again. And understanding what it's like to completely lose your personal power, to lose your autonomy, to lose everything you felt about yourself as a confident, you know, contributing member of society of society, all of that was gone when Janaya died, because it'd being a suicide, there was a lot of stigma attached to that. Being child loss was a lot of stigma attached to that. And when I mean stigma about the child loss, I mean, nobody wants to discuss that. And you become a very, it becomes a very isolating experience. Of course, we're not, you know, the only bereaved people in the world, parents in the world. But, as I've said before, when something really bad happens to you, it's really hard to connect with other people and, you know, sometimes even care that something else has happened to them. You really just can't connect to that. It just really feels like you're being swallowed up whole in the experience when something really traumatic happens initially. And it can take a really long time to get yourself out of it. 

Vonne Solis  8:43  
In my opinion, 17 years later, there still isn't enough to get us out of trauma from grief, grief in itself, and certainly child loss and other traumatic experiences to really, really recover in a very authentic way. Yes, we can go to therapy and so on and try different things. But my own experience, again, has taught me that a lot of those techniques have to be adapted to what we really really are feeling and experiencing that is unique to grief, or trauma, or, you know, a loss of another kind that has impacted us very similarly to losing a human being. Hence my work and my online course.

Vonne Solis  9:29  
So part of these coaching calls, as I said, are to take people with me. I'm going to take everybody through all 13 lessons, but the PDF download is only going to cover the first six to work on at your own pace in your own environment. Once we get beyond that I'm going to be touching on things a little bit differently and as part of that coaching at that point, you know, you would have to be signed up to the course to really get the tools and the the key pieces of information that really help to to get a person when they get to the end of that course, feeling as empowered as they can feel, and able to create and manage the life they want. But the key difference in my teaching is about understanding what it is we really, really want. And I think there's a lot of I don't really want to say confusion, but I do think that we need to focus a lot when we're intending something, because intention really works. We need to focus on what it is we are intending on having in our life, and why and how it's going to change our life and possibly the lives of our loved ones closest to us. 

Vonne Solis  10:49  
So I go into a lot of that in the course so that everything becomes very, very intentional, purposeful, with the next step leading somewhere, even and especially if you can't see the big picture yet. And in some of that, in fact, in many things, we have to give up something to get ourselves to the next stage of where we want to go, even when we're taking little tiny baby steps. So this lesson is all about thinking about our failures. As I said in lesson one, we we talked about regrets and letting them go. And in lesson two, we need to think about our failures. Are they our friend, or are they our foe?

Vonne Solis  11:36  
Regret and failure go hand in hand, and so this is why failure follows the idea of contemplating what needs to be let go of in terms of really having some major regrets about things. Choices. And this is especially impacting when it relates to something that has hurt us tremendously as adults or children, and there's dysfunction associated with it, or the loss of a loved one where we feel even a smidgen of responsibility for that death. And I can tell you, as a bereaved parent, there's a lot more than smidgen that accompanies regret and guilt and failure when you lose your child. 

Vonne Solis  12:19  
So whatever that experience may be for you, anybody here watching listening to this episode and thinking about your failures, one of the things that's so important to do is decide number one, whether or not you even think you've had any failures. There's some debate going on today about whether or not we should acknowledge failure in our life. And some people say yes, and some people say no, let's not acknowledge failure. And I'm in the camp that says, let's acknowledge what didn't work in our life. And so what didn't work in our life typically, is defined as a failure, which is fine. But let's change how we think about that failure. 

Vonne Solis  12:59  
So one of the things we need to do in my teachings is that we need to go back and associate the failure with our choices we made and actions we took, and understand exactly why at that moment, we made that decision and or took that action. And once we understand why we did that, we have an opportunity to consider whether or not we still want to look at whatever the outcome was of that. It maybe did harm somebody else that we loved. It maybe did make us feel really, really awful afterwards. It maybe did make us live with a ton load of guilt, and regret. Whatever amount and to whatever degree we feel the failure represented in our life, by understanding why we did what we did and why we chose what we chose - two different things. We can make a choice and then we can take action to accompany that. Understanding what was going on for us. What was happening in our mind? What was happening in our environment? What was happening at work? What was happening in the family? What was happening with our finances? You know, were we in major trauma, you know? Were were we, did something sudden just happen that rocked us off our world and we did something really crazy? 

Vonne Solis  14:32  
Whatever whatever it was, for some people, it could be, you know, fidelity issues. I mean, the list is too long to go into. But the point is, if it made you feel bad, and it made you feel like a failure and it may even be how you grew up, or how any of us grew up and not having the safety and the security you know, offered to us by our caregivers, parents or guardians. Or it may be what others said to us. Teachers, parents, other leaders in the community, friends, peers. Maybe we were bullied, you know. All of these things that made us feel like we are absolutely worthless and have nothing of value to offer our loved ones, our community, society at large. This is what I mean by the degree or level of failure. How the impact the degree of impact of that failure on us. And what are we going to do about it?

Vonne Solis  15:42  
In my own case, and I won't go too deep here into the story, but you can imagine how much of a failure I have felt as a mother, having a child that decided to leave the planet. And I am not alone. There are many millions of people who lose their children, and of those, a good percentage that are losing their children to suicide. But it feels really, really awful to know that you have birthed a human being that decides one day at whatever age, I don't want to be here anymore. And when you think you have offered that child the perfect everything, their death signifies that we failed as a parent in a pretty big way. 

Vonne Solis  16:31  
So the key point in lesson two, failure your friend or foe, is that you always have a chance to put your negative feelings behind you and choose something different as your truth. So in doing that I have developed this course and this lesson to help people do just that. Coming from something that is their absolute worst, awful feeling of failure, and having an opportunity to change the way they think about that failure by doing what I said earlier. Thinking about what was going on in their life, at the time or your life at the time that you made a choice and you took action or you behaved a certain way, and it resulted in an outcome that is now that you now are considering as a failure. And honestly, it's about stopping, making a decision to stop beating yourself up about it. Letting it go and saying I did it. This is why I did it. This is what was going on at the time. This is what resulted from it. But you're here and you survived it.

Vonne Solis  17:40  
You know, I mean, you could take it a step further and make amends to anybody that you feel that you really hurt by a certain you know, action, choice. And that's entirely up to you. And some people may really want to do that. But if you don't want to do that in person, as long as you've done it in your mind, and forgive yourself, forgive yourself, what you have done in the past, that opens the gateway for you to now start feeling empowered, and confident when you know you're not going to make that same choice or act in that same way, again. Because you are moving forward and becoming a different person.

Vonne Solis  18:22  
Our failures can be actually quite powerful for us to reinvent ourselves, for those of us that are coming from situations where we literally have to do that. And I myself have had to do that. I lost my complete identity as a mother and as a as an individual who just was so wracked with guilt, and worthlessness, and all of the other things that the death of my child has laid on me. That failure was pretty high at the top, where I've had to understand that in order to rebuild my life and rebuild myself with purpose and intention, I have to let go of those failures. I have to forgive myself. And I have to understand that things that I did in the past that I would today for sure do differently, one, there's nothing I can do about it. And two, I'm not really sure it would have changed any outcomes. And I'm talking about my biggest failures. I'm just not sure about that. And that has been a very, very long process for me to actually accept that. I would say I'm 80% there. I still have little, little bits there where I struggle with that. That had I'd done something different. Chose something different, there would have been a different outcome, maybe there would have been. Maybe there wouldn't have been. But because I can't change it, I certainly don't want to live the rest of my life struggling with defeatism, ideas and keeping myself back from what I can truly experience as a wonderful, fulfilling, purposeful passionate life going forward. And that's what I'm choosing to do. 

Vonne Solis  20:10  
There are three exercises in the downloaded PDF lesson two personal growth journal that you're invited to complete that help you get really straight about this. This isn't really something that you can just sit down and think about and go, okay, and have it all figured out in an hour. It requires thoughtful introspection over a good long period of time. Because even when we have dealt with something that's a massive failure in our life, and start to turn our thinking around about it, don't let yourself think that those negative thoughts that are so ingrained in us, you know, are not going to come back and challenge us to not revert to previous negative patterns of thinking. So this is why it's a very, very much an ongoing process step by step, and one that we have to be vigilant about in terms of how we're centering our mind. Centering our thoughts. And catching ourselves when that tape keeps playing in our head about just how much of a failure we really are. 

Vonne Solis  21:23  
Part of the reason this is so challenging, is because we all wear a mask in public. And I speak a little bit more about that in the course, the mask we wear. But it's very true that a lot of people, if not just about everybody, lies to the public about who they are. And that is why we talk about being able to have a soft place to fall in our own home with one or two special loved ones that you can actually really be yourself. I mean, so if you have to sit there and say, Yeah, I can really be myself when I get inside my front door, then ask yourself who you're really being when you're not at home. 

Vonne Solis  21:59  
So that is another aspect to my teaching that I'm all about authentic healing and authentic growth to the point that you are who you are in front of a person out in public world world that you are behind, behind doors. What's the point of living this existence if we can't be our authentic selves? But again, when I'm going back and you know, looking at this in the context of a of a practice, that where people are coming from difficulty. that they feel that they just didn't even have a chance to get behind the eight ball, you know, get out from behind the eight ball, because of things that happened. The way they were raised. Many of us were raised in dysfunction, myself included, where our brains formed. Our neural pathways formed that did not allow ourselves to, you know, feel safe and secure, and, and come out with everything just all regulated by the time we're 25. And I talk about this in other types of my work and in some of the conversations I'm having on this podcast with other guests that you know, you know, discuss this as well in an education, you know, capacity and, you know, and personally. 

Vonne Solis  23:19  
So we have to work on ourselves. So you know, whether you're coming from childhood dysfunction, or whether you're coming from a situation, a traumatic situation. A an impacting loss, but something that has rocked you. That has rocked your mind. That has rocked your identity. That has rocked your environment. That has rocked your relationships. That has rocked every single thing about your life, and you've got to pick up the pieces, okay? The failure part of it, acknowledging it. Being honest with how you feel. Letting it be okay that you that you've had failures, or that you think of yourself as a failure, that's very important as well. But making that decision. Having that turning point where you know you have the opportunity to make a decision to think about your life differently. To actually consider your life as having a different truth, that's freedom folks. Absolute freedom. 

Vonne Solis  24:16  
The last thing I want to say about that is to toss all expectation of who you think you should be. Whether of you know, as a result of your own high expectations for yourself, or that of, you know, somebody else. Could be parents wanting you to do something. It could be a spouse. It could be I don't know. It could be anything or anyone that's challenging you to be somebody you don't really want to be. And failure can be associated, even at a subconscious level, when we feel we're disappointing others or disappointing ourselves. It keeps us in this state of always striving to be something we're not. And even if we're not sure what it is we want to be, we all know when we feel out of alignment. 

Vonne Solis  25:06  
But then there is this sort of two-edged sword where you understand that and you're struggling to get out from behind that, but then doing that will make you a failure because you're not pleasing this person. You're not pleasing, you're not reaching your own expectations, you know, whatever it is. So failure gets very, very, very complicated. And so while I don't want to get into the layers and layers and layers of failure, all I really want to do is invite you to think about how you you view failure number one. And if you don't think you've had any failures, this is not a talk for you. If you do think that you have had major failures, are a major failure, will always be a failure, then this talk is for you. And I would invite you to download the sixth lesson PDF. Watch these coaching episodes in sync with doing the journal exercise, and challenging yourself to start thinking about who you are and who you want to be in a whole new way. In a way that feels super empowering, courageous and authentic.

Vonne Solis  26:26  
Okay, that's it for this coaching episode. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. And I look really forward to seeing you in any of the other episodes on this podcast and in the next coaching episode. Until next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai