Episode 244 Minisode: You Can’t F*** This Up
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In this episode, I’m gonna give you a game changing reframe about why you actually get stuck, even when you feel like you have the motivation and the clarity and a good plan. We’re gonna talk about a tiny little structure in your brain called the habenula, which acts as the kill switch on your motivation whenever you perceive that you might fail, whether you’re dealing with a pattern of failure or whether you’re just worried that you’re not gonna be able to follow through. I’ll explain.
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why you’re going to have to change your definition of failure. Because failure, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But this episode is not about changing or downgrading your goals. You just have to learn how to use curiosity and experimentation and self-compassion to align with an authentic source of motivation that won’t fail you every time you make a mistake.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober, it’s not about the alcohol.
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I am so geeked up right now, I can hardly sit in my chair. I was listening to a podcast this morning, Jim Doty on the magic shop who wrote the magic mind. I’ve done a lot of his research, had a guest on his show, Dr. Kira Bobanet. And she is delivering to the world, to the collective conscious, a completely new framework and way to think about behavior change.
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And she’s talking about a part of the brain that I’ve never heard of. And it’s called the habinula, H-A-B-E-N-U-L-A, habinula. if dopamine is the equivalent to the gas pedal in our brain, the habinula is the break. The habinula is responsible for the no can do gap, you know, where we know we should do something, we’re just not doing it. We have the intention
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even the clarity and even the goals to do something, possibly even the dopamine, but something is blocking us. We just can’t make ourselves do it or make ourselves stick with it. And it comes as no surprise to me that what stimulates the habinula is perceived failure or the threat of failure. The break in our brain is turned on with failure and then it also kills your motivation to keep trying.
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It turns on whenever something triggers us that feels frustrating or disappointing or demoralizing or when we’re experiencing anxiety, which is the negativity bias in our brain, kind of the failing in advance. You know, we’re worried that something isn’t going to work out or there’s a whole lot of shit to figure out before it can work out, which feels overwhelming.
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Dr. Bobbin it actually says that anxiety is the voice of the habanera. And I like to spin that with it’s the song that comes on the radio and the longer and the louder we sing along, the less able we are to move into action. Perceived failure or fear of failure in the future is two times as strong as perceived success of the past or
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Assurance of success in the future a sense of loss or perceived loss Losing something that we had or fear of that loss is two times as strong as The joy of having gained something or the assumption that we’re going to get something in the future Failure and loss are far stronger than success and gain and she talks about how
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Failure is like a fire that you have to put out. It’s like ground zero, the number one thing you have to deal with. You wouldn’t let a fire burn in your house and you can’t try to motivate yourself around a sense of failure. Obviously, moving into action can mitigate that, but the longer you’re carrying a sense of this isn’t going to work out, the harder and harder
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It’s gonna get and the slower you’re gonna move, the less momentum you’re going to have. A perceived failure or fear of failure in the future is the number one obstacle you have when it comes to getting what you want in life. Breaking the drinking habit, losing the weight, getting out of debt, fixing the contempt in your marriage, changing how you respond to your own negative emotions. Like the belief that you failed
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or that you’re not going to be able to keep going and be successful. That sense blocks your motivation that you need to show up and keep going. And the solution is called iteration, an iterative mindset, big ass words. It’s very similar to what I’ve been doing with growth mindset, teaching you how to see yourself in a process of change, but
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The one distinction that I’m going to immediately adopt is to no longer say things like, you need to learn from your failures. The iterative mindset is that there is no such thing as failure. There’s results that you constantly tweak. Iteration is the repetition of a series of events where you’re constantly fiddling with the procedure.
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to get closer and closer to your desired result. And also to not make the desired result like metric base, like some sort of bar that you have to hit, which speaks to what I’ve been doing where we set emotional goals, how you want to feel versus how you want to perform. And while performance goals are really helpful and valuable in
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business and as a collective community of setting goals to achieve the goals, you know, you have to know what sort of metrics you need in order to be quote successful or sustainable. Like when it comes to money or productivity or whatever, when it comes to personal goals, tracking your metrics is actually extremely precarious.
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it really only works for about 1 % of people. Like thinking about an app like Reframe or Sunnyside or Cutback Coach or in other contexts like dieting where you are counting your calories or your points for your food. Dr. Bobbin, it says that most people should not be tracking for more than a short period of time, a week or maybe two, that
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allows them to become aware of, you know, where they’re spending their money or where they’re eating a bunch of calories or how much they’re actually drinking. But once you have that awareness, then the information is really no longer helpful because it doesn’t actually motivate you to change. According to the new research, setting specific performative or as I’ve taught in coaching,
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Smart goals, performative smart goals have about a 1 % success rate and a 99 % failure rate. In contrast, iteration, the iterative mindset has a 99 % success rate with a 1 % failure rate because basically you’re just removing the concept, the framework of failure itself. Using an iterative mindset,
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You define success by running the experiment itself and the evaluation of the data to decide, is this better or worse? Do I want more or less? And then tweaking some of the little variables and repeating the experiment and evaluating the results. And then getting creative and redoing the experiment again. How could I make this better, stronger?
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faster, more pleasant and fun. Because if you’re creating results that set you up in any way to feel like a failure or less than if you don’t get the results, you are demotivating yourself. Because even if you get the perfect result, then you have to face the fear of repeating that and doing it again. Your identity as a winner has to be proven over and over again.
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which as all of us know, gets exhausting. And as you’re always getting older and there’s always unforeseen circumstances, it’s impossible to maintain your place on the leaderboard. You you might be there for one day, but the fear of not being able to maintain that will demotivate you in the future. So using performative goals may create a result the one time, but at some point you will not be able to get
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the same results with the same strategies. Life is always changing. You’re always changing. And that sets you up for perceived failure and motivation problems in the future. And if perceived failure is the killer of your motivation, the antidote, the coping skill that you need to invest your energy and attention in is self-compassion. And if you have not yet come to understand
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that negative self-talk is the reason why you’re stuck and why you don’t feel motivated. And therefore the first and most important thing you need to change, then I hope that’s your takeaway from this episode. Learning how to be safe with yourself inside your own mind requires you to pay attention when feelings of FOMO or failure
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or guilt or shame are starting to crop up because the brakes are on in your brain and flooring the accelerator is only going to exhaust you. And one of my favorite reframes that I’ll leave you with here is to tell yourself in the moment when you realize you’re having these feelings, huh, my habinula must be activated.
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That song I’m hearing sounds suspiciously familiar, like we’re on habinula radio. And if I don’t stop and change the station, life’s gonna start getting harder and I’m gonna start getting slower. So I’m gonna stop and deal with this. So I’m sure I will be doing episodes coming up more on what the iterative mindset is and some specific tools that you can use to shift into it. I haven’t even checked out her website yet and she has a free quiz and I’m geeking out.
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But the question I leave you with to ponder today is, what if there’s no such thing as failure or success? There’s just results, some of which are more pleasant than others. How can I make today fun and easy for myself as I study the results that I’m experiencing now and look for ways to improve them? Because I love myself and life is fun. And I literally can’t fuck this up.
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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80 % so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.