inthedougout

I often like to ruminate.  I find it sort of fun, kind of like a sick, tortured hobby.  I sometimes take ideas and run them into the ground.  And yes, sometimes these are good ideas and other times, bad ideas.   Rumination most often fails to end well, however.  Rumination can quickly turn into unbounded worry.  And endless worry wreaks havoc on your mental state, physical state, and emotional state.  We always need to be mindful of pushing and pulling the different levers... such as "let yourself feel the emotion," but let's be realistic: not for too long. When I find myself in a "worry spiral," it usually takes me a few moments, or days, before I catch myself and realize this incredibly helpful mantra: do not worry alone.   In that same vein, why fail alone? Tonight, at the dinner table, my wife put this idea into practice.  She asked each of us to describe "how did we fail today?"  This was, of course, not an invitation for ...

The reason I give a shit about failure is that we all fail.  It is a fact of human life.  And if we all fail, what are we supposed to do with all of this failure that's been piling up?  For me, personally, I didn't know what to do with all of the failure.  It sat and sat and  sat.  Eventually, it began affecting my ability to perform at a level I'm comfortable with (and to be clear, when I am not performing at a high level, I get this existential itch that bothers the hell out of me). A brief detour: a paradox is a statement or situation that seems to contradict itself or go against common sense.   Returning to the point: failure, at least the way we view it, is a bit of a paradox.  That's because failure is most typically experienced as something negative (i.e., the "oh man, that sucks" situation).  By letting that be the end of the story, we are depriving ourselves of a powerful catalyst for developing and growth.  Bumpy roads, ef...

The funny thing about failure is that people are rarely remembered solely  for their failures.  Most observers may not even realize that someone has even endured a particular amount of failure. One of the best examples of this is Abraham Lincoln.  Did Abraham Lincoln really lose 8 elections?  Did you even know that Abraham Lincoln lost 8 elections?  What's really fascinating about Abraham Lincoln is that the dude failed far more than he succeeded.  According to abrahamlincolnonline.org , the guy persisted through what I'd perceive to be a ridiculous amount of failure.  Enough failure to make most of us curl up into a ball and hide in the closet.  Let's run through what happened to him, though briefly, of course.   Between 1832 and 1858, he lost his job, had a failed business, had a nervous breakdown, was defeated for speaker, had a failed bid for Congress, eventually lost a re-nomination, was rejected for land officer, was defeated for U...

In a family, failure is abound.  It going be on a big scale, of course, but most practically, it exists on a micro-scale. To a toddler, maybe you failed by pouring the cereal incorrectly (yes, there is such a thing).  Maybe to a 3-year-old, you light the birthday cake too soon (yes, there is such a thing).  Maybe to your middle-schooler, your screen time protections backfired (yes, there is such a thing).  Maybe you ordered the wrong meal, or item, and brought your family a version less, or different, than they expected. The fact is that these circumstances have a way of accumulating throughout the day... and with those failures, so does our reaction to those events.  Are we throwing pity parties?  Or are we owning it and moving forward?  That responsive, reactive energy has a lot to do with our mental state going into the next micro battle.  The thing is ... i t doesn't always have to be fixed right away.   A delay isn't a bad thing.  E...

Let me guess - you probably spent a ton of money on Thanksgiving items, food, decorations, and so forth.  You may have even dropped a pretty coin to travel. Did the turkey burn?  Did it dry out?   Failed Thanksgiving? Keep it simple and make a new tradition.  Do something wild.  A few ideas - 1)  Thanksgiving Lasagna - you can take this in a few different ways.  You could go traditional (e.g., Italian) or a modern twist (e.g., Thanksgiving foods baked as a lasagna). 2)  McDonald's - no joke.  Just go get some burgers.  I'm usually a healthy dude, but when crisis hits, McDonald's is outstanding.  Those golden arches bring joy.  Where is the nearest McDonald's?  May as well have it handy. 3)  Peanut butter and jelly - you may think this is a joke, but it's not.  There's little more comforting to me than a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  How to make it?  Make it the way you want to make i...

A typical response to failure is to cringe, hide, or bury it.  And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with that.  Those responses are more than healthy. But what if we decided to say thank you to our failure instead of our otherwise automatic, programed response of cringing into a shell of ourselves?   There may be a case that doing the opposite could help: 'Doing the opposite' is a really effective, straightforward strategy to change your emotional state that can be difficult to put into action. This technique involves doing the opposite of whatever behaviors you normally perform due to painful or negative emotions. For this Thanksgiving, I am trying to flip the script completely.  What if we run towards the failure instead of running away from it?  What if we can find what we're thankful for instead of resisting the failure?  What if the failure is there for a reason?  What if we fail to listen to the failure? In general, this is about expandi...