Overview:
In this episode, Caytie Langford delves into the often overlooked concept of embracing failure as a crucial step toward achieving success. Drawing from personal experiences and research insights, Caytie challenges listeners to shift their perspective on failure and reframe it as a natural part of the journey toward growth and accomplishment.
Key Highlights:
Overview:
In this episode, Caytie Langford delves into the often overlooked concept of embracing failure as a crucial step toward achieving success. Drawing from personal experiences and research insights, Caytie challenges listeners to shift their perspective on failure and reframe it as a natural part of the journey toward growth and accomplishment.
Key Highlights:
I thought, okay, by this point, I should be at the top of my game again, that was the expectation. The expectation was no failing, not time for failing, must succeed, must win, must be able to do it.
Welcome to Not Made To Be Subtle where we celebrate the art of embracing fear, pushing boundaries and making a statement in a world that often expects us to be subtle. I'm your host, Caytie Langford. I'm a full time real estate investor, but along the way I was a nonprofit fundraiser turned executive coach. I once stood at the intersection of This is everything that I've ever wanted. And is this really it? I've learned so much along the way. And now this podcast will be your go to destination for candid discussions with me and with other bad ass women who dared to ask the same, is this it? And decided to chase after more. Stay tuned for riveting stories. unfiltered conversations and actionable advice that will move you from where you are to where you want to go. Welcome to not made to be subtle because you, my dear, you were never made to be subtle.
Caytie:I am super excited to be with you. And listen, there are a lot of great, amazing guests who are going to be on the show in the next few weeks. But before they come on and tell you their awesome stories, before they give you all of this excitement and expertise and inspire you with what is possible. I want to talk about the idea of embracing failure. So often we avoid failure. In fact, it's interesting when we look at the statistics about what girls and women are doing in our school systems, both in K through 12 and then at the college and university level, we are seeing girls and women. Crush it when it comes to grades, when it comes to getting degrees, when it comes to even getting postgraduate degrees. There is a researcher, a professor out at Texas Christian University, who is in the business school who has studied this exact idea. And what she has found is that the reason why girls and women are so great in school is because It's all about giving a direction and then following that direction. We are really, really great at checking the box. We are really, really great at following the plan. How well do you do when you have instructions? How well do you do when you know what path you are supposed to be on? Do you find yourself succeeding? I know that I do. And I know so many of the past women that I coached, they find themselves doing it as well. When the same researcher started studying what happens with women inside corporate America, and specifically where are we dropping off in terms of numbers with promotions, and are we doing as well as what the numbers of undergrad and post grad graduates, are doing, are we keeping up? And the answer is no. No, we're not. And she surmised through her research that the reason why we are not keeping up is because there are no rules, right? Now you might be saying, Caytie, that's not true. I have a job in corporate America and they give me rules. Of course, there is some instruction, although, I mean, let's think about it. Are you actually really trained for your job? how many women I coached in new jobs and they would say, I got no training, right? Most of us are just thrown into whatever our new role is. And so what happens is, when we look at the data of what Men come to the table with, in corporate America, oftentimes we find that they take bigger risks and because they take those bigger risks, they are rewarded. Now, her research didn't exactly say, Hey, we need to embrace failure more, but I'm gonna take her research and. I'm going to tell you that if you want to go far in life, whether it's in your corporate career, whether it is building your own business, whether it is really just living the life that you want, I'm here to tell you that you have got to embrace fear. You've got to expect failure And you've got to look at failure as the gateway to your success. So we're going to dig into this and by the end of this episode, what I hope you have absorbed and taken in is this idea that failure is going to happen and you're just going to be ready for it. So let me start with my own personal story. I've told this story on stages before, but even as I prepare to tell you, it kind of makes me nervous. Back in 2018, I had really gone full speed ahead with my executive coaching, I hired an incredible coach and I went from having an average of three to four clients at a time to having about 18 to 19 clients at a time. And one of the things that women kept coming to me for was career pivots. They wanted me to help them get promoted, they wanted me to help them get a new job, perhaps in a new industry or just at a new company. And so this is really what I became known for in my executive coaching. Well, at about, I don't know, client 50 or so, I realized that I had put together this incredible process to help women get new jobs. It was really taking unique things, doing it the anti. LinkedIn way, the anti, you know, just apply on indeed. com, um, and I helped women understand, get really clear on what they want, build their confidence and belief that they could have it, and then leverage their sphere of influence to go out and get it. And it was working, it was working time and time again, and it was so exciting to me. So, of course, what did I, like so many coaches do? I thought, oh, I'm going to create a group coaching program. And I'm going to go, and I'm going to make this, this big, big, huge thing. So here I am, Caytie from Dallas. I hire a consultant out of New York city. She is going to do my Facebook ads. Listen, she is one of the greatest Facebook ad people in the country, maybe even in the world. And so we had this plan. We put all of this work behind this. I had my entire program written out. She helped drive people to a webinar. I launched with this webinar. Well, things weren't really happening the way that we wanted to. And so, I started thinking, well, maybe it's me. And she started thinking, well, maybe it's Caytie. So she said to me, listen Caytie, I'm doing all this stuff for your Facebook ads, but there's a coach that I work with down in Australia. One of the best of the best and she is somebody who really can help you. get this kicked off the ground. So once again, I invested in this coach and I started down this path. Now listen, didn't put all my eggs in this basket, but I really thought this would be the turning point for my coaching career. I thought that this was going to be the thing that I was building everything on. And so when I say I thought this was going to be the thing, I needed to make a 30, 000 investment. This was 2019, I needed to take$30, 000 and put it into working with these two women, put it into Facebook ads, driving attendance to this thing. So I did. I had a great conversation with my husband, who's super supportive as I am with his career. I called our financial advisor and I had him wire me$30, 000 to my company bank account. Now listen, if you have started a business, you know that it takes capital investment. It takes pouring money into this, but at this time I had already poured tens of thousands of dollars into my business. I had already done all of that. It just, the coaching, And the amount of money that I was making from it, I couldn't justify taking another$30, 000 out of the business and putting it into that. So I went for it. I had my communication strategist work on it. I had my Facebook person working on it. I had this mindset coach and business coach working on it and I was in it and I held, I don't know, three, four, five, six. I honestly don't remember webinars and they were packed. They were so good. They were awesome. And let me tell you that from that investment, I made zero dollars, zero, not one penny, not one dime, not one nickel. I made nothing. And this was at a time where I did not embrace failure. I did not embrace failure. You see just four short years before I had walked away from my C suite job. I had given up my six figure career. I thought, okay, by this point, I should be at the top of my game again, that was the expectation. The expectation was no failing, not time for failing, must succeed, must win, must be able to do it. I remember that last webinar I got off of, I had all my lighting, all my stuff set up in my office. There were about 60 women on this webinar. It went well, there was great interaction, and not one person, bit not one person bought. And I remember getting off of that webinar and closing my laptop and walking into my living room. And just sobbing. I was just sobbing because I thought, Oh my goodness, I have wasted all of this money. I have wasted all of this time and this energy and I couldn't do it. It's crazy. I feel my heart pumping right now as I just relive this moment. And I don't know what it's like for you when you relive your failures, but it's, it's tough. It's tough. I'm having a physical moment right here. But I also know that sharing my failures with you may be able to give you the courage to not be subtle. And to go after it. Now, of course, after the webinars, of course, after me crying myself to sleep that night, not even having dinner, the whole thing, we set off our email campaign, our funnel, still nothing. Nothing. It didn't work. It didn't work. And I let that failure haunt me for about a year. I let that failure eat up at me. It wasn't just the fact that I didn't bring all these coaching clients in. Because I knew that my stuff was good. I knew that one on one I was still coaching clients. It was about the fact that I had tremendous guilt for taking money out of our savings out of our investments and using it for something that didn't work. Now, I've shared with you that my husband Shane is also an entrepreneur. And in fact, he has been an entrepreneur longer than I have. He launched his first business in 2002, which he later sold in 2022. And if it wasn't for him, there's zero way I would have been an entrepreneur because I didn't grow up with that. I never had that experience. I never saw that. And so, I was really quiet about this failure. I didn't share a lot with him about the fact that I had tremendous guilt and anxiety around it. Of course, he knew it didn't work because, I mean, no dollars were rolling in the way that we expected. I really thought this$30,000 investment would turn into about$150,000, right? So it was, it was supposed to be a, a 3 to 6X and we were really aiming for a 5X. I want to share that story with you because even today in 2024, as I talk about it, five years later, I've had to do a lot of work to move past that. And one of the ways that I've moved past and embraced that failure, and now when I look back on it, even though I still get emotional thinking about putting myself into that exact place, and really reliving that memory with you. The truth is, is that the more that I talked about failing, and the more that I got used to failing, the more that I realized, it's not a big deal. Was$30,000 a big deal? No, not really. Does it suck? Sure, of course. Duh. Am I gonna figure out ways to replace that and have I already? Absolutely. And so when I look back at this moment, it really was a turning point for me to be able to say, What if, instead of fearing failure, and why do we fear failure? Well, embarrassment, rejection. We may lose our confidence when we fail,. We may have guilt or anxiety around our failing. I don't know about y'all, but sometimes when I fail, Bob, my ego, as I talked about on a previous episode, he starts going crazy and telling me all the ways that I should have done better. That might happen for you as well. But what if, when we go into something new, instead of fearing the failure, We just say to ourself, you know what? Failure is going to happen. And how do I know it's going to happen? Well, because I'm taking a big chance. Because I'm taking a risk. Because I'm doing something new. I'm going to mess up. I'm going to slip up. I'm going to hit a bump. I'm going to hit a challenge. Something in front of me is not going to be something that I know how to get through or pass by myself. And so I'm just going to expect that somewhere in the journey of whatever it is I'm trying to do or build or who I'm trying to become, that failure is going to happen. And I'm not going to put a block on myself, right? Sometimes when I talk about this idea of expecting to fail, people like brace themselves and think, oh my gosh, oh, now I have to just anticipate it all of the time. No, no, it's going to happen. But here's what's cool about your failures. You have gotten past every single failure you've ever had. Do I love the fact that I failed in that product launch? Absolutely not. Have I failed at more product launches? One thousand percent. Will I probably fail at some other future launch, whatever that looks like? Yeah. Probably. Seriously, I want you to change your perspective. I want you to think back to a time when you were brand new at something. Maybe it's a job. Maybe it's an activity. Maybe it's a hobby. Maybe it's something you were learning. In fact, let's go to something that's pretty universal. Go back to when you were learning to drive. That first moment when you sat in the car, You buckled your seatbelt, you turned on the ignition, you put it into drive or maybe reverse. Remember who was with you in that experience? My gran was with me. My gran is who taught me how to drive. I remember exactly where we were. I remember the exact car that we were driving. It was a Sunday morning at the Town East Mall parking lot in Mesquite, Texas. I was driving her giant Navy blue, Mercury Grand Marquis. And I remember the feeling that I had when I first started learning how to drive. I remember the process. I remember taking my foot off of the brake and putting it onto the pedal. For some of you that might have been really, really exhilarating. Just like it is when you start something new, when you embrace an adventure, when you say you're going to go to the next level, when you're doing the thing. For some of you it may have been really nerve wracking. It may have had you pause. And think, oh my goodness, this is terrifying. Maybe you were somewhere in between. But remember back to driving that it took time and time and time again. You had to practice. Maybe you practiced with your parents or with an older sibling or grandparents. Perhaps like me, you went to driver's ed. There was actually a school that taught you. Maybe you did it at your school. You had different lessons over time and you may have had to take a test. You went to the DMV, maybe you took it through your driving school. I want you to think about the last time that you went to the grocery store. Maybe the last time you went to work. The last time you got in your car and you arrived at the destination and you thought, oh my gosh, I don't even remember doing that. It wasn't the same when you first started driving. You had to be very intentional. You had to think through things. And now, you've been driving for so long that your body knows what to do, and your eyes know what to look at, and your reaction time might be a little faster. You know how to maneuver a car in different weather, different speeds, right? And the reason that I bring up driving is because I want to change your perspective. Now I don't know about y'all, but I totaled my car about 7 months after I got it when I was 16 years old. Have you had any fender benders? Have you gotten into a wreck? Have you gotten a speeding ticket? Have you done something wrong? Most of us have some kind of driving failure. We do something. We hit something. Hopefully it's nothing too serious. Y'all, we kind of have a joke at the Langford house, because every time we get a new car, I am bound to hit it on either the garage Or the fence, because we've always had rear entry garages and then the fence is there. The last car we just sold seven, eight weeks ago, had a big old scrape because I hit the garage. Now, maybe you don't expect to fail when it comes to driving, but you can reframe any opportunity where you're learning something new, when you're doing something, when you're pushing yourself out there, you can reframe that and understand that embracing failure, getting it wrong, being a beginner, being a novice. Using that idea that you're not always going to get it right as motivation to keep going forward. And I will say this, if you are not failing, if you're not hitting challenges regularly, if you're not having bumps and bruises, if you're not Doing things that are hard, that make you uncomfortable. If you are not actually falling flat on your face, I would say you're just coasting. Now, there's a season for coasting and some of you might be like, yeah, I'm in that season right now because I have three kids under the age of ten and that's where it comes hard, right? That's where I feel like I could potentially fail. You're not going to fail with your kids either, I promise. I promise. I promise that you're not. And if you feel like you're going to fail, well, know that you're not. You're not failing. You're a great mom. You're a great mom. You are a great mom. If it still makes you nervous, I don't know, save two or three thousand dollars for your kid's therapy and give it to them when they're twenty five. I would have loved if my mother did that. I've spent thousands of dollars in therapy on my own. Anywho, I digress. You're not failing as a mother. You're crushing it. You're crushing it. But you may be in a season where you're like, You know what Caytie, I'm not taking chances at work. Cool. That's fine. I don't care where it is. I don't even care if you're like, I'm gonna have a new hobby. I'm gonna learn tennis. I have several girlfriends that play tennis. They've taught me all about what it's like to be on a tennis team, and there's different levels, and they have, you know, these, um, these tennis meets and all those things. You're not going to start off at the best tennis level, right? When you started driving, you were not going to be able to be the best driver. If you Start a company, start a business, if you get a promotion, if you start a new job, whatever it is, expect that you are going to fail. Expect that it's not always going to be right and easy. But this is when the power of resilience comes in. This is when we practice self compassion. This is when we seek support from others it may be with a coach or a mentor, maybe a friend, maybe it's somebody in your peer group. And really maintain that growth mindset. In fact, I know people that track their failures. They know that the more they fail, the closer to success that they're going to get. I don't know if any of you are baseball fans. We are in the middle of spring training right now. Opening day is not far away. My husband Shane and I were season ticket holders for the Texas Rangers for many, many years. And right now we're about to walk into the season as world champs, one of the greatest nights of my life when we won the world series. But if you know anything about baseball, you will know that a.300 batting average, 30%, if you can hit 30%, you are considered one of the world's greatest baseball players ever, ever. Like some of the greatest hall of famers. Don't even have 30%. They don't have a.300 batting average. They know that every time they get up there 70 percent or more they're gonna fail. They're not actually going to get a hit. But they still keep swinging. And that is the power of resilience. Going back to my old coaching practice, didn't stop and say, oh, okay, this program and my process didn't work, I just shifted. I went back to one on one coaching and guess what? There are a lot of women who have kick ass roles because of the work that we did together. Because of the process that I took them through and the fact that they were able to take this knowledge, this information, and use it. And in fact, today I have on my shirt, I don't know if you can see it, it's my pink t shirt that says, Nevertheless, She Persisted. Nevertheless, She Persisted. And that's what we have to do when it comes to our failures. And in fact, we've got to start embracing failure and practicing failure. So, I want you to think about where are places that you can fail, that it might be safe. that you can build that failure muscle up. Not the failure muscle, you can build the overcomer muscle. You can build that resilience muscle. One place that I build both confidence and my resistance to failure is in the kitchen. Listen, every time you cook, it's going to be different. I have been making homemade pasta for years. It was a thing that came out of my transition, leaving a full time W2 career to being an entrepreneur. I wanted to learn how to make pasta. So I did Pasta when you make it every time it's a little different because it depends on the weather It depends on how cold or warm the room is. It depends on the size of your eggs. It depends on The humidity it depends on so many things and so you've got to feel for it Well, I've had lots of times where I've made pasta dough and it has come out like crap and guess what? It goes in the garbage time and time again, I Love to make a flat pasta, but i'm not good at stuffed pasta So i've actually cried in my kitchen Making ravioli because it's freaking hard and I can't get it And in fact, I gave up for a while and now I need to get back in it But I have cried because my ravioli didn't come out the way that I wanted it to. It sucked! But did it mean I stopped doing it? No! Of course not! So let's find a place where you can practice your failure. For some of you it's going to be within your career and it's going to be within your business. You're going to be like, yeah, cool, I still am going to fail. And the reality is, Even if you say you're not gonna fail in your career or your business, you absolutely will. 100%, you will. You will. But, how you overcome it, how you stay resilient, that's something you can practice. So maybe it is on the tennis team, maybe it is in the kitchen. You know, goodness gracious, steak. Love to make a steak. There are times where I get the amount of salt right, and there are times when I get it wrong. Right? There are times when I absolutely overcook something, and there are times when I'm like, oh, this is so delicious. It is. Maybe it's in your working out. Yoga, if you have a yoga practice, you understand and know that some days your body won't do the things you think it will do. And some days, you're the right side of your body will do it and the left side won't or vice versa. So find the place where you can practice failure. And in fact, I want to know, shoot me a message on Instagram and tell me where you do you embrace failure? Where are you practicing embracing failure? As I am really getting into my real estate business, I am working on a few incredible things that I cannot wait to share with you all. And they are pretty big and they're pretty scary. They absolutely are big, hairy, audacious goals. And one of the things that I am doing is I am taking the learnings that I have Including the time that I lost$30,000 and I'm using it to my advantage. I don't do career coaching anymore, but I do coach a few real estate investors specifically around confidence and mindset. But I am taking all of those failures, all of those times where I felt flat on my face and I am using them right now with what I am building and it's incredible. And so I want you to remember. That embracing failure is an absolute gateway to success. It's the only way to success. You've got to go through failure to be a success, to gain success. However you define it. We've got to stop fearing it. We've got to understand that even if we're embarrassed or we feel rejected or we feel like we've lost confidence, every single other person on the planet has also failed. Time to shift and change that perspective. Really dig into your resilience. And start practicing failing. Start getting used to failing and not just failing, but the getting back up part, the popping back up, the going after it again, the doing it again. Lady, I know that no matter how many failures you have, you are still amazing. You are still worthy. You are still badass. So if you have forgotten that, I want you to know it and remember it In the midst of all the failure that you have. Know that the journey that you are on, know that what you are doing and creating, who you are becoming is exactly where you're supposed to be going. Don't worry about failure, just embrace it. Till next time. Thanks for tuning in to Not Made To Be Subtle. Remember, life's journey is rarely straightforward, but it's the twists and the turns that make it worth living. Embrace the uncertainty, make bold decisions, and never underestimate your power to create the life that you envision. Will you do me a favor? Will you rate and review and subscribe? This helps more women like you find our podcast. Stay tuned for more episodes packed with insights, inspiration, and a touch of badass boldness. I thought, okay, by this point, I should be at the top of my game again, that was the expectation. The expectation was no failing, not time for failing, must succeed, must win, must be able to do it.