Dealing with Failure in English

Have you experienced a failure this week? Have you done something really embarrassing in English as you've been practising and you feel like a total failure? Are you feeling down and discouraged and like you kind of want to give up? Then I want you to know that first of all, you're not alone. This has been a week that I've experienced failures as well, and we're going to talk about some of the things that you can do. In fact, we're going to talk about three things that you can do that will help you deal with and reframe that feeling of failure.

To get started. I want to share my own story of how I failed in the last week, and it had to do actually with this podcast. I don't know if you heard the previous episode or not, but if you were one of the first ones to download it, you would have heard my mistake. You would have heard how I failed in the production of last week's podcast episode.

Here's what happened. If you heard last week's podcast episode, you will remember that I interviewed I had the privilege of interviewing Masha Honcharova, and in that interview I had the opportunity to try out a new software, a new website that would help me to do the recording because she lives far away from me. She's in Spain and I'm in Canada, so we had to come. We had to use a tool to help us conduct the interview. And I was testing out this website that offers this service of having an Internet based call that records our conversation kind of like Zoom, but supposedly better.

Unfortunately, the interview didn't work. The recording software didn't work properly for some reason. Maybe it was something that we were doing wrong. Maybe it was something that I was doing wrong on my end. I don't know. We tried and it just didn't work out. But before Masha came on, I decided that I was going to prerecord my introduction, me telling you - Well, welcoming you to the episode and and explaining a little bit about what it's all about and who I am and all that stuff that you hear at the very beginning of the episode.

So I recorded that previously on this software, just to get the hang of it, just to make sure that I knew how to use it. And that part seemed to work just fine when Masha appeared. That's when the trouble began. We couldn't make the sound work. She could hear me, but I couldn't hear her. Or she could hear me or. Or I could hear her, but she couldn't hear me. It was kind of like dancing back and forth of not being able to hear each other.

So in the end, Masha came up with the great idea of actually going to Zoom and conducting the interview that way. Now, Zoom probably like most of the people in the world, is a software that we've all gotten pretty good at using thanks to the pandemic. So that's what we did.

We jumped over to Zoom and we were able to carry out the conversation without any problems except for the minor glitch. You know how sometimes when you have Internet recorded or Internet conversations, sometimes maybe if one side has maybe a lower bandwidth on the Internet than the other, you get kind of like this garbled, bad sounding voice for a few minutes or it freezes on you and it makes your voice sound really weird. Well, that happened to us a couple of times, but it wasn't anything like the sound that came from my introduction that I recorded on this new website that I was trying out, and I didn't know how bad it sounded until I put the podcast episode together.

And what's weird is that when I was in the editing phase, when I was, you know, putting the introduction part that I pre-recorded together with the Zoom Call conversation that we had, I could tell that the sound wasn't exactly the same quality of sound, like the the introduction part was a little bit less quality than the Zoom conversation part, but it didn't sound like it was too, too bad. So I just went with it.

And one of the things that I like to do, and I've learned this from other podcasters is that they always download their podcast episode as soon as it goes live, just to make sure that it sounds right, that there's nothing missing, that everything is working properly. And that's what I do every morning, every Tuesday morning.

I always download my own episode and I played in my car as I'm on my way to work and on my way to work, I got the shock of my life. The opening audio sounded horrible. It was terrible sounding. It sounded like I was in, I don't know, like this weird room that well, the just the quality of the sound was bad. It was really, really bad. And I felt so bad as I was listening to that episode and I was thinking, Oh, no, what a terrible sounding podcast opening. If someone's joining this show for the very first time. And I heard that they would probably, well, shut it off or they would probably jump to something else to listen to because the quality of the sound was it was horrible.

It was so bad. But what could I do? That's what was going through my mind as I was driving to work. My first instinct was to turn around and go back home and see if I could fix it. But that wouldn't work out because I was on my way to work and I needed to arrive on time. So all the way into work I was fretting. Do you know what fretting means? That means worry. I was upset. I was thinking to myself, Oh, this was a terrible mistake. I started feeling bad about myself. I started feeling like, Oh, how could I make this terrible mistake?

And probably, you know, how our minds like to go to the worst case possible scenario. Well, mind mine tends to do that in my head. I was thinking, I'm going to lose all of the people who like to listen to the show just because of the first three or 4 minutes. The sound is terrible. Everybody's going to give up on me.

Those were the weird things that I was telling myself. But I bet that never happens to you, right? So anyway, I make it to work and I'm thinking to myself, What am I going to do? How am I going to fix this? I don't know. I was feeling like this is this is a horrible, horrible failure, But I didn't know what to do. So I made my way to my office. I set up my computer. I started getting ready to get started during the day. And then I just sat down at my desk for just a minute, just a process, just to think about it. And I didn't know this, but I was actually practicing one of the tips that I'm going to be sharing with you today, because that experience of failing with my podcast intro gave me the idea to share today's episode with you. It gave me the the idea for today's episode, because when you're learning English, when you're trying to use English, when you're practicing English, when you're trying to do something as important as the CELPIP exam, you're going to fail.

There's going to be moments where you commit embarrassing mistakes. There's going to be moments where what you've been working so hard towards doesn't work out the way you wanted it to.

Failing. It's all part of the process, isn't it? And that's why I thought, well, I can use what happened to me as a story to go along with the days episode. So in my research that I'm going to share a little with you today, some of the ideas that I discovered about dealing with failure, where some of the things that I actually started to do, much to my happy surprise. like I said, I set up my office to get ready for my work day.

In my mind, I was going over and over this mistake that I had made with the recording of my of my podcast. I was really bothering me. So I just sat down with myself at my desk and I talked to myself for a minute and I said, Erin, there's nothing you can do about it right now. There's just nothing. You can't go home. You can't start working on it here in the office because you're at work. There's just nothing you can do. If you lose people, you lose people.

And if people stay, God bless them. If people stay and they listen anyway, that's amazing. And if you were one of those people that you heard that crummy, terrible sounding intro and you stayed with it and you listened to the whole thing, thank you so much. Thank you for not giving up on it just because it didn't sound good at the very beginning. I hope that that interview with Masha was a was really helpful for you. But yeah, if you heard that and you listened anyway, thank you.

But I had to have that conversation with myself, like, there's nothing you can do. Just relax, go. But they do the things that you have to do, and when you get home, you can fix it. Because as I was sitting there at my desk, the plan was formulated in my head about how I could solve the problem. I knew exactly what I would need to do. It wouldn't take me long to do it at all. In fact, I worked it out in my head the three steps that I would take to fix it, and I knew I'd be I would have it solved in less than 15 minutes.

As soon as I got home, all they had to do was make it through the day and that would be that. And I would fix the episode and maybe future hearers would have no clue that I had screwed up. So that was my failure. That was how I began my Tuesday last week. And like I said, that failure experience became the idea for today's episode.

And what I wanted to share with you were three things that you can do to deal with and reframe the failures that you experience so that you'll be able to position yourself for success. So here's the thing: Failure frames you.

If you don't do anything about that feeling of failure that maybe you are sitting with right now, if you don't do anything with it, if you just ignore it and pretend it's not there. Failure has a tendency to lead you places that you don't really want to go. Can you think of a few of what those places might be?

For one, failure, leads you to the decision to quit faster than probably anything else. When I was listening to that podcast introduction, the first thing in my head that went through that went through my head was, I'm horrible at this. Maybe I should just quit. Maybe I shouldn't keep doing this. This is horrible. That was the first thing that went through my head.

Thankfully, I was able to switch my thinking around pretty quickly. But if we don't do that, those feelings, those thoughts of quitting become louder and louder. Failure also has the tendency to make us or help us not take risks anymore because you're trying to protect yourself. You don't want to expose yourself to that feeling of failure again, or that feeling of being embarrassed again because you made a mistake with English. So failure has a pretty powerful you can have a pretty powerful, powerful result in our lives. It can lead us to quit or it can lead us to stop taking risks. And both things are required if you want to progress in your English. Not quitting is pretty important If you want to succeed with your English, isn't it?

You need to keep going if you want to find success. And also, risk taking is just part of the game. If you're not taking risks with English, you're not making progress. So in short, failure has the ability to stop you or severely limit your progress in English.

If you don't do something to deal with it and reframe it and reframing, according to the Oxford Dictionary, it means to change the way something is expressed or considered. I'll say that again. Reframing, according to the Oxford Dictionary, a means to change the way something is expressed or considered.

In other words, changing the way you talk about or think about something instead of allowing failure to drive you to give up on your English or instead of allowing failure to keep you cautious, let's think about some different ways to look at it, some different ways to think about it.

In other words, let's reframe failure to make it work for you.

Okay, so here are three strategies To help you deal with and reframe failure.

According to an Edutopia article that I found on the topic of dealing with failure, it was written by someone named Rusul Alrubail, and I'm pretty sure I didn't say her name correctly. And I'm so sorry, Rusul, but in her article, she says something really interesting.

She said, You should completely express how you feel. Don't hide anything. If you're feeling frustrated, let it all out. If you're feeling embarrassed, let that all out. Talk about it. Journal it. Talk to a friend about it. Talk to yourself about it. If that's something that you want to do. But don't ignore how upset you feel. give full expression to those feelings. Sit with them. Allow yourself to express how you're really feeling.

But here's the neat part of what she had to say: She suggested to set a time limit for yourself, like maybe a couple of hours, maybe a day. But the point is not to give yourself too much time as you sit with this sense of disappointment.

Set a timer, set a limit, and when that time and limit has passed. Move on. Pick another activity to do. Even if it's nothing to do with English. Just to get your mind off of what happened. And as you do, you'll begin to notice your negative emotions will begin to quiet down. It's kind of like resetting yourself, giving yourself a break. Focusing on something different. So that is a strategy that can help you to deal with failure. Another tip that Rusul Alrubail revealed was that you can learn a lot from your failure if you take time to reflect on it.

You can learn a lot from your failure if you take time to reflect on it. That's kind of what I was doing as I sat in my office and I didn't know that I was doing or I was practicing something that was actually suggested by someone who knows how to deal with failure.

I was just thinking about, you know, how can I how can I deal with my situation? I was actually reflecting on what had happened and as I was reflecting on the fact that I couldn't deal with it. As I was reflecting on the fact that I would just have to let it go as I was reflecting on what had happened, a solution came to mind. I knew how to solve the problem.

And that happened just because I took time to think through it. The same thing can happen for you, you know, take some time to reflect on what went wrong, what led to that embarrassing moment.

Did you use the wrong word? Did you mispronounce that word or on the on a big exam that you freeze? What made you freeze? What made you forget everything that you had worked so hard to learn? Think about it. Journal about it. Talk to a friend about it. Or just talk to yourself about it. See if you can process through what happened.

The third and final tip that I want to share with you. I found in the Open Journal of Social Sciences, and it's by a writer named Ruihong Huang. I know. I just have this gift of finding writers with interesting names that are hard for me to pronounce. Ruihong, if you hear this by some miracle, you hear, hear me talking about your article. I am so sorry for how I pronounce your name. I'm sure I didn't say it correctly, but I tried my best.

But one of his points was really interesting to me: He said, Use the power of alternative experience. And what he's talking about is to start looking at how other people who are trying to do the same thing as you have failed and how they have gone through it, how they have worked their way through it.

Study them, listen to their stories, read their stories. Because as you do, you can gain from what they experienced. And if you heard last week's episode, the one where I interviewed Masha, you have a great example that you could listen to if you are going through a season of failure where you feel like you just can't make progress with your English, or if you feel like you're suddenly, you know, if you suddenly got bumped back to the very beginning after thinking that you actually had made progress with your English, then Masha's story has a lot that you can learn from.

She experienced those things. And according to Huang, the person who wrote this article in the Open Journal of Social Sciences, we can learn a lot from other people's experiences and how they have worked through failure.

Listen to Masha's story. What can you learn from how she overcame the failures that she was faced with, that she experienced? So for me, these three points reflect on your failure to acknowledge your failure. But don't live in it and use the power of alternative experience. Those are three powerful strategies that you can use to deal with that experience of failure that maybe you are dealing with right now.

Reflecting on your failure will help you to reframe. It will help you to think about it differently as you think through what happened. It's not with the lens of beating yourself up. It's not thinking what a horrible student I am. It's not thinking about, you know, I'm never going to learn English. No, it's coming at it from the perspective of like, a detective. You're looking at what went wrong and how could you do better next time? Can you see anything that you that you can improve on immediately? Like how I noticed when I took time to reflect on my failure with my introduction As I thought about it, I immediately came up with the solution. And it really did only take me about ten or 15 minutes to fix it once I got home. But if I hadn't have taken that time to calmly think through what happened, I probably wouldn't have come up with the solution. The same thing can happen for you. Use those opportunities. Use those failures as opportunities to improve. Use those failures as things that help you focus on where you need to get better. That's reframing. That's thinking differently about what happened, The other two points that I mentioned acknowledge your failure, but don't live in it and use the power of alternative experiences where you listen to other people's stories and see how they went through failures that are similar to what you are experiencing. Those are strategies that will help you position yourself for success. I hope this helps you to think differently about what you're going through this week.