Ep 74 | Why Failure is Actually Your Friend (Even When It Doesn't Feel Like It)
Let's talk about something we all deal with but rarely discuss openly: failure. And I get it—nobody likes to fail. It's uncomfortable, embarrassing, and honestly? It can really sting.
I used to have a terrible relationship with failure. The mere possibility of messing up would keep me from trying new things or going after bigger goals. Sound familiar? Our culture doesn't exactly help either. We're constantly shown highlight reels of success while the behind-the-scenes struggles get swept under the rug.
Here's what I've learned though: we've got failure all wrong. We tend to think "I failed at this, so I must be a failure as a person." But that's like saying "I got caught in the rain, so I must be made of sugar." It just doesn't add up!
The truth is, failure is one of your most valuable allies on the path to achieving anything meaningful. Those setbacks aren't detours—they're actually the stepping stones that lead you exactly where you want to go.
-
Jayd (00:00):
A lot of people think of failure as the opposite of success when it's actually a part of success. It is a building block towards success, okay? Every failure has something crucial that you can learn from. And when you walk away from your failures, because you're saying to yourself, oh, I might as well not even try, there is gold that you're walking away from. You're leaving money on the table because your failure has such a key lesson for you to learn. And if you learn it, you'll be able to unlock new levels of success. You'll be able to move more effectively, you'll be able to burn fat more effectively. You'll be able to build muscle more effectively. You'll be able to run your business better if you treat the failure like a treasure trove of new knowledge and insight that you didn't have before.
(00:56)
Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I'm a personal trainer and I've created this podcast to help you to get lean, get strong without shame and without burnout. In today's episode, we are going to be talking about failure because as a personal trainer, what I've noticed is that failure is one of the number one difficulties that a lot of my clients face in staying consistent on their fitness journey. Whether you're experiencing failure in terms of missing a lift, not getting the same number of reps as you were hoping, or if you find it difficult or you're having obstacles in getting to the gym, doing your workouts, or doing your meal prep, failure is an opportunity for us to learn and grow. But many people have a pretty poor relationship with failure where they see it as a stop sign or an off ramp onto the shame spiral, which can really sabotage your progress on your fitness journey.
(01:52)
So today I'm going to share with you the message that I give to my clients whenever they deal with obstacles or failures to help them to rethink how they see their failure so that they can turn it into a launchpad for future success. And before we get into the episode, make sure to like this video if you're watching on YouTube and subscribe to the channel so that you never miss new episodes or videos. If you're listening to the podcast, make sure to follow the show so you always get the latest episodes delivered right to your device. And keep in mind that I am currently onboarding new clients in my fat loss transformation program and this 90 day program, I'm going to help you to burn fat and get strong in a way that's sustainable so you can see long-term results. So if you're ready to get toned, check out the link that is in the show notes or in the description of this video. You can also check out my website, Jaydigains.com. That's J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-N s.com to check out my other coaching programs and services. Without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(02:58)
If you want to change your life in some really meaningful way, like you want to get in shape or you want to start a business, be successful in your business, or if you want to learn a new skill, failure is going to happen. And I argue that it's an essential ingredient to success because you cannot reach great success in something really hard and complex without having failed a couple of times at least. And it's the failures that teach you the things that you need to know in order to be successful later down the road. And I think that one of the ways that being on a fitness journey can be a really great support and supplement to your personal growth journey is in how you have to change your relationship towards failure in the context of training. Because when you are trying to build muscle and get stronger, failure is an essential stepping stone towards that.
(04:05)
We have to train the muscles close to failure, if not to failure and order to get them to grow and get stronger. And the same thing is true in life. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about that today and go into the ways that we can maybe reframe how we think about failure in a way that doesn't sabotage our progress, but helps us to embrace it as a part of the journey and alchemize our failures, turning them into successes or key building blocks of our success, because that is what it takes in order to reach a big goal. Whether you're trying to lose 30 pounds or start a business and start getting your business to make a profit, or if you're trying to learn a big skill, learn how to paint really beautiful paintings. You have to trial and error and failure is a big part of that process.
(05:03)
I think a lot of people have a very poor relationship with failure. A lot of people, whenever they fail at something or something doesn't work out exactly the way that they were trying to have it work out. It can be very easy to take that failure and turn it inward and interpret it as meaning, oh, I'm a failure. This didn't work out. Therefore, I am fill in the blank, bad. I am a loser. I am a failure. I'm never going to get it. We learn to do that. We learn to internalize failures by the way that we're raised or how we get our educations. A lot of schools in the United States put so much pressure on students to perform 100% perfect, get a plus plus be good at all the things, your instruments, your sports, right? Like failure isn't an option. That kind of mindset is really deeply ingrained, I think in American culture.
(06:13)
And I mean not just American culture, it's not exclusive to American culture, but it is a big part of it. Some people's parents put a lot of pressure on their children to be perfect, and it makes it so that when you do fail or when you experience failure, you feel like you need to hide it or hide your flaws, hide your failings as though it's something shameful. I need to be perfect or I need to at least present myself as perfect. And I also blame social media for this too, because from the perspective as a fitness coach slash influencer, one of my big pet peeves about fitness on social media is a lot of the fitness influencers that you see, what you get on their pages is the highlights, right? You see them at their leanest before they're about to do a photo shoot or hop on stage.
(07:15)
You see them when they're strongest when they have been, they're at the tail end of a training block and now they're hitting a new pr. That's the kind of stuff that we post to social media our best. We're always putting our best face forward, our best foot forward, and there's a lot of pressure to do that. And people do get punished for their shortcomings and for their failures. Bullying, I think has a lot to do with it, which we experience in school. But I mean in the age of social media, cyber bullying is a thing. And so for whatever reason, at some point along the way, whether it was from one source or multiple sources, you probably learned that you need to hide your failures and your shortcomings as though they are something shameful that needs to be tucked away from the public eye. Otherwise you will be punished in some way, whether that's through bullying from your peers or punishment from your parents, you might lose privileges.
(08:15)
And this ingrains into us a fear of failure to the point where we begin to avoid things when they have a higher possibility of failure. We tend to more and more play it safe and just stick to what we know we can do well. But what I've noticed, and this is something that Angela Lee Duckworth talks about in her research on grit, which is students who are used to things coming easy to them, really, really struggle when they try something new and they don't get it immediately. So if you are neurodivergent in some way, you probably have experienced this where some things come super, super easy for you. If you were like me, maybe that was school and you maybe get used to things coming easily, and then you don't build up the tolerance for failure that normies get and normies have to work for it in the way that maybe people who were in the gifted program didn't have to work quite so hard.
(09:26)
So Angela Lee Duckworth in her book, she's now a psychologist and researcher, but she started as a math teacher. And what she noticed was that the students, there's this discrepancy right from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, the students who did really well at the beginning of the year in her math classes were not necessarily the students who did well at the end of the year. It was actually the students who were kind of in the middle who maybe struggled a little bit at the beginning of the year, who ended up having the best grades and the best performance at the end of the year. Whereas the kids who did really well initially tended to kind of start to decline towards the end of the year. And she was really curious about what is it that makes these students who didn't start out so well performed so much better towards the end?
(10:21)
What's different about them versus the kids that it was really easy for at the beginning? And what she found through her research, she ended up becoming a scientist to research this question. And what she came to discover was that what these kids had, the kids who started out not so well and then ended up doing really well was grit. They had this ability to tolerate failure and basically use it as a challenge to overcome versus where the kids who it was easy for in the beginning never learned how to overcome things, not going the way that they wanted them to for things to not come to them easy. So it's kind of like a skill or a muscle. It's a mental muscle to be able to tolerate failure and overcome it and use it to turn into a strength. And the students who at the end of the year outperformed the students who started really wealthy at the beginning of the year, it was their failures that set them up for being able to end the year on top because they learned from their failures, and that was the skill that they had that was different from the students, that it came easy to.
(11:45)
So it's this ability to turn your failures into reframing them into something that teaches you something, a springboard to launch you into the next phase rather than a stop sign. These students treated their failures as quests, right quests to go on an adventure, level up their skills so that they could come back to it and overcome it just like you would in a video game. So I think that if we want to develop a better relationship with failure, we have to change how we look at failure as not a stop sign. It's not a reflection back to us that says I'm a failure. The failure itself is a challenge. It's a challenge to be overcome. It's a puzzle to solve. It's an opportunity for you to look at what went wrong that caused this breakdown, and what needs to change in my strategy or in my mindset, or what skills do I need to acquire in order to be able to overcome this obstacle next time?
(12:51)
In acceptance and commitment therapy, what we're taught is to separate how we understand the way that our brains work and different types of thoughts. So there's thoughts that are like observations. They just, they're there, they're like facts. Your emotions, your mental state in general. That's just a thing. But then there's a second tier to your thoughts and how you think, which is the reaction to the first thing. And that is where most people get themselves into trouble and tend to spiral into anxiety. For example, I might have a day where I'm feeling kind of sad, and that is just how I feel. So that's like one level tier one. Now, what I might do is notice that I feel sad, observe that, and then as a second step start to beat myself up for feeling sad. Why are you sad? You have nothing to be sad about.
(13:50)
And then I start to stress myself out because I'm reacting to the situation in a way where I'm picking on myself. And that's where we get into trouble. And the same thing is true when we experienced failure. So if you experienced failure, like in the gym, say you miss a set, maybe you wanted to get 15 reps and you were only able to get to 13 before your muscles failed. So that's just the fact. The fact is that your muscles failed at 13 when you were trying to get to 15. Now, that fact alone is neutral. It means nothing. It just is. But what you decide it means to you, what it symbolizes to, you can make or break your ability to overcome that failure and turn it into success. So on the one hand, in the old way of thinking, you might be like, oh, I wasn't able to get to 15.
(14:42)
I'm such a failure. I'm so weak. Why do I even try? Why do I even show up at the gym? And then you might really trouble getting to the gym for the rest of the week. Maybe you decide to skip all of your workouts and you don't get stronger because that turns into a habit where you're skipping a lot of workouts, you're not training, you're not building strength. And guess what? You're never going to get 15. You're never going to get to 15 reps because you gave up because you decided that one failure means that you are a failure and that you should stop trying. So that's the old way of thinking that a lot of people struggle with, even people that I know who have been doing this for years and years and years, self-sabotage in the gym this way. Now, a new way of thinking, a reframe that you might try to practice is, okay, I wasn't able to make it to 15.
(15:34)
What are some of the things that might have caused me to not be able to perform that way? Have I slept enough? Did I sleep enough last night? Am I hydrated? Did I eat enough today? Am I recovered enough from my previous workouts? If you're a woman, am I about to start my period or am I having symptoms of perimenopause? If you have type one diabetes, is my blood sugar low? There are so many things that can cause you to not be able to keep your muscles pushing to a certain extent for a certain period of time or pushing a certain weight. There are many, many factors. And when you can identify what those factors are, then you have an opportunity to fix it. Sometimes it's just, I'm tired today, or for whatever reason it just didn't happen, but I'll try again. And next time I try, I'll make sure that I attend to all of those factors to set myself up for success.
(16:32)
So sometimes, well, I think I just need more muscle. Sometimes I'm just not there yet. I need to keep building, and then I'll be able to do that 15 reps, maybe I'm just not there yet and I just got to keep trying. Got to keep showing up. So when you think about it that way, guess what? You're likely going to show up for your workouts the rest of the week, and you're going to stick to that habit of showing up for your workouts and you're going to build muscle. And then eventually you'll build muscle to the point where 15 reps is easy. Like, oh, that was my stopping point a couple of weeks ago. But that was just like, that's easy. Now, what's next? So those two different pathways that you can go down when you experience a failure has just completely different results. Polar opposite results.
(17:20)
One says, oh, this means something about me as a person. Why even try? The other says, oh, what are all of the factors that contributed to me not being able to be successful here? And it's similar to business. I'll tell you this, something that I learned a couple of years ago that made a huge difference in how I run my business and makes me so much happier in my work now, and I'm so much better at taking care of myself in my business. And one of those things I from a business coach was when I'm not able to do something for my business that I wanted to achieve, maybe I set a benchmark, I set a goal, and I just consistently have not been able to hit that goal. Now, on the one hand, I could interpret that as well, maybe I'm just not cut out for this.
(18:05)
Maybe I should just give up and stop trying. But what one of my business coaches told me was like, if you're consistently not able to reach this goal, it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you. It means that there's something wrong with your systems and you need to update your systems to set you up for success. So sometimes that's what we need to do as well in our fitness and in our life. Is everything in your environment is everything. The factors that are under your control, are they lining up in a way that supports you so that you can show up and perform your best? So those are the two different kind of ways that you can think about failure. And one I would say is more in align with a fixed mindset. The one that says you have somewhere within you a belief that you are a failure or that you're not going to be successful.
(18:59)
And if you've decided in your mind already that that's the case, then you're going to take any little hiccup along the way as evidence of that to further convince yourself that you should give up. And if you stay in that mindset, you're never going to reach your goal. But if you decide instead, okay, maybe I'm not where I need to be in order to reach my goal, but I can grow toward that. I can level up my skills, I can grow as a person, I can learn new things, and I can learn how to do new things, and I'm going to keep doing that until I've leveled up to the point where I can achieve my goal. So one is a fixed mindset where you've decided already this is just my limitations. And that's the mindset that sees failure as a stop and give up.
(19:55)
But a growth mindset where you treat yourself and your life as your own personal RPG treats, failures as opportunities to level up your skills, gain XP level up to the point where you can come back to this challenge and spank it. So that's the approach that I like for my clients to have towards failure because I mean, really think about it. What fricking good does having a fixed mindset do? Really, how does your life benefit when you carry around this core belief that you are a failure and that nothing that you do will ever work out seriously? What possible good outcome is there for that? You may be doing that to protect yourself from the shame of failure so that you don't have to feel the sting of failure, but you're still going to have to live with the sting of not believing in yourself, which I think is worse.
(20:56)
Sometimes you got to risk it for the biscuit, and you got to make peace with the fact that there's going to be failure and good. There should be. There should be failure. Great success is built on countless failures, and you have to be ready to embrace those failures to move forward, learn from them. They're your teachers. They're essential mentors, right? And they're a key part of your journey. And then you don't build muscle without making your muscle break down, without approaching muscle failure or going to muscle failure. You'll never know where your limits are, and you may not even be getting as many gains from the gym as you would be you. If you continue to play it safe and you don't challenge yourself, you never grow, you'll never get stronger. And it's the same thing in life. I want to challenge you to embrace failures as key crucial parts of your growth journey.
(21:55)
If you're trying to burn fat, if you're trying to get strong, if you're trying to achieve anything big, you're going to fail. It's going to happen. You can't prevent it, and nor should you prevent it, because it's the failures that show us where we need to grow. And there are opportunities for us to reflect, make the tweaks that need to happen in order for us to be successful. So I would challenge you to start thinking of failure in that way, but also to really become conscious of how you see yourself. Do you carry a fixed mindset where you have a core belief that nothing will work out for you? Or do you have a growth mindset? And a growth mindset is something that can be cultivated. You just have to practice it just like any other skill, just like a muscle, you have to use it to grow it and get it stronger.
(22:50)
And you want to work on practicing the growth mindset and reminding yourself instead of, oh, I'm bad at this. You practice saying things like, I'm getting better at this. I'm learning. I'm growing in this respect. I have things to learn in this respect. Change how you think of yourself and change how you think of areas where you have shortcomings and treat them like areas where you have more growth to do and start framing it that way. And I guarantee you, you will start to see more successes once you start embracing your failures and seeing them as launchpads for that growth. Yeah, so failure is a lot of people think of failure as the opposite of success when it's actually a part of success. It is a building block towards success, okay? Every failure has something crucial that you can learn from. And when you walk away from your failures, because you're saying to yourself, oh, I might as well not even try, there is gold that you're walking away from. You're leaving money on the table because your failure has such a key lesson for you to learn. And if you learn it, you'll be able to unlock new levels of success. You'll be able to move more effectively. You'll be able to burn fat more effectively. You'll be able to build muscle more effectively. You'll be able to run your business better, right? If you treat the failure as like a treasure trove of new knowledge and insight that you didn't have before.
(24:22)
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. You can follow me on my socials. I am Jaydigains everywhere. And if you would like a little bit more help on your fitness journey, check out my coaching programs on my website. That's Jaydigains.com, and let me know what you think in the comments below this video if you're watching on YouTube. I'll see you soon in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you're eating your veggies, eat your protein, drink your water, and take care of yourself, and I will see you soon.
What the Gym Taught Me About Failing Forward
You know what's funny? The gym is probably the only place where we actively try to fail, and we celebrate it! Every time you lift weights until your muscles can't do another rep, you're literally training to failure—and it's the best thing you can do for getting stronger.
Here's what happens: when you push your muscles to their limit, tiny microscopic tears form in the muscle fibers. Sounds bad, right? But here's the magic—while you're sleeping, your body repairs those "failures" and makes the muscle even stronger than before. The weight that challenged you last week becomes your warm-up this week!
Think about it: everyone who can deadlift impressive weight once struggled with much lighter loads. But it was all those "failed" attempts with lighter weights that built them up to where they are now. Pretty cool, right?
Your Personal Failure Coach
Beyond building physical strength, failure is like having a really honest (sometimes brutally honest) personal coach. It shows you exactly where your weak spots are so you know what to work on next.
I love having my clients do fitness tests—like holding a plank until they can't anymore or doing as many push-ups as possible. Why? Because pushing to that breaking point gives us a roadmap for improvement.
Let's say you try to do a pull-up and... well, let's just say gravity wins. Instead of feeling defeated, you now have a clear action plan! Spend the next few weeks working on grip strength, building up your back and arms with exercises like pull-downs and dead hangs. A few months later, you'll surprise yourself by conquering that pull-up. Your "failure" literally showed you the way.
The Good Kind of Failure vs. The Not-So-Good Kind
Now, I have to be honest with you—not all failure is created equal. There's a big difference between productive failure and the kind that just leaves you spinning your wheels.
The good kind of failure happens when you:
Try your best with proper preparation and safety in mind
Actually learn something specific from what went wrong
Adjust your approach based on what you discovered
See the setback as valuable information, not a judgment on your worth
The not-so-helpful kind happens when you:
Keep making the same mistakes without stopping to think about why
Skip proper preparation or ignore safety (physical or otherwise)
Let the failure define who you are instead of what you learned
Give up instead of trying a different approach
Think about it like this: the entrepreneur who starts three businesses that don't work out but learns crucial lessons from each one? That's productive failure in action. The person who keeps making the same business mistakes over and over without reflection? They're stuck in the unproductive cycle.
Your Safe-to-Fail Toolkit
Smart athletes don't just jump into dangerous situations hoping for the best. They create safe environments where failure can teach them something without causing serious harm. They use spotters, start with manageable weights, and build up gradually.
You can absolutely apply this same approach to any goal in your life:
Get Your Spotters Ready: Find mentors, friends, or advisors who can offer perspective and support when things get tough. You don't have to figure everything out alone!
Start with Your "Training Wheels": Break your big scary goal into smaller, lower-stakes experiments. Want to start a business? Test your idea with a small pilot first. Looking to improve a relationship? Practice those difficult conversations in less intense situations.
Keep Your Learning Journal: After each setback, ask yourself: What specifically went wrong? What would I try differently next time? What assumptions turned out to be incorrect? Treat each experience like a scientist treats an experiment that didn't go as expected.
Level Up Gradually: As you get more comfortable and confident, slowly increase the difficulty and stakes of your challenges. Just like adding weight to the bar at the gym!
Here's the Thing
Failure isn't the enemy of success—it's actually success's best friend and teacher. Every meaningful thing you've achieved in your life was probably built on a foundation of failures that taught you exactly what you needed to know.
The real question isn't whether you'll fail (spoiler alert: you will, and that's totally normal). The question is whether you'll fail in a way that moves you forward.
So the next time you're facing the possibility of failure, take a deep breath and remember: just like your muscles grow strongest when they're challenged to their limits, so do you. Your failures aren't roadblocks—they're stepping stones to becoming the person you're meant to be.
You've got this! 💪
Subscribe for Updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
