Failure is a good thing and here's why

Episode 2

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As a coach, I teach my clients that thoughts are one of the biggest factors in how we feel and act leading to the results that we create. When they view pornography, fall off plan, eat more than they thought they should, most addicts view that as a failure and can often Fall into a self defeating spiral of feeling bad and buffering.

What people often miss is that if we can take a step back and observe our behavior without judgment and without shame, we find an opportunity to learn. Mistakes are our greatest learning opportunities. Becoming a science scientist of your behavior makes you an expert that can see patterns, pathways, and potential that you don't see when you just feel bad, right?

Think about a little baby. Anytime a baby learns to walk, there's nobody out there that's like, Oh, you're a failure. You fell down. No babies take every opportunity that they fail at walking and use it. As a way to improve their ability to walk. So I often ask, what does victory look like when a client comes to me and they say, I failed today, I didn't do what I needed to do to stay away from pornography.

I'm a failure. I say, well, what is fail? What does victory look like? So if you think about it from a sports perspective, Having a winning record in sports means that you lose just under half of the time. 51 percent of the time you're winning. So 49 percent of the time you're actually a loser, right? You've lost whatever match game set, whatever it is.

Having a winning record in sports is just winning 51 percent of the time. The greatest sluggers in baseball. Let's take it to a baseball analogy. The best baseball players in the world. They're only hitting the ball. They're only getting a hit as they call it in baseball 33 percent of the time. That means that more than 60 percent of the time, they're not hitting the ball.

And then if you take that even further, they're When a person gets up to bat and they strike out twice before they actually hit the ball. So first at bat. They get up and they swing at the first pitch, strike. They swing at the second pitch, strike. They swing at the third pitch and they hit it and they get on base.

Their percentage of actual hits to swings is even less than that 33 percent of the very, very best of baseball. Yet, when I hear that someone feels like a complete failure for looking at pornography for 15 minutes over the course of an entire week, I, it really makes me wonder, is that actually what you call a losing record?

I mean, are you a complete failure if for 15 minutes in a given day over the course of an entire week you look at pornography? Now, calm down, mama. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to justify a little sin by saying be good 99 percent of the time, and that's okay. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is taking stock of where you actually are gives you a better chance of moving the dial to where you want to be.

Meaning, if you look at that 15 minutes over the course of an entire week, and you say I'm ashamed of my behavior, and I'm a complete and utter failure, I think you're looking at it wrong. In this instance, as in so many that I see, a small though measurable improvement would make a huge difference in bringing a person out of their despair and into a place of confidence in their own capacity to choose what they want.

There are just over 10, 000 minutes in a week. That means that 99. 85 percent of the time. In this particular scenario, the person who feels like they fail was not looking at pornography. That 0. 15 percent failure rate, 0. 15 percent failure rate far outstrips the acceptable failure rate of electronics.

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But what we can learn from that 0. 15 percent failure rate is invaluable. You see what you think makes a big difference. And if you think I'm a failure. Then you're very likely to be right. You're going to continue to fail over and over and over again. But if you think sweet 0. 15%, 0. 15%, I can, I can change that.

That's tiny, right? If I improve myself by 0. 15%, I can be a hundred percent clear of pornography. Then you're also just as likely to be right. If you think about this in terms of your failures and the perspective that you need to bring to them, you'll actually start to gain a wealth of understanding as you look to improve your record.

So what does that look like? What do you, what am I mean when I say, look at your failures with the right perspective and you'll start to gain a wealth of understanding. Well, the first thing that I want to say there is, so there's a, there's five things that I can think of off the top of my head, right?

The first thing I want to say there is set aside the shame. Anytime you look at a failure and then you double down on that failure with shame. So, for instance, if I got up there to bat and I swung at that pitch and then I felt ashamed, well, I'm definitely never going to hit the ball. Because I'm putting shame, this emotion, on top of a miss.

So a miss doesn't feel good, but then I feel bad about the feeling of feeling bad about missing. You see what I mean? You got two emotions there, you only really need to look at one of them. Shame is never useful. When it comes to Dealing with shame, you have to simply say, I'm not going to feel bad about feeling bad.

Because then you're taking away the opportunity for the double down, the additional hurt and pain and difficulty that comes along with feeling bad already. You're going to feel bad about 50 percent of the time. Anyhow, you might as well not feel bad about feeling bad. The second thing is be honest with yourself and be honest with others.

About 10 years ago we had moved to California and I still had this extraordinarily difficult problem that I was dealing with in not being able to remove myself from pornography use. And my wife, she was beating herself up over this and she decided, you know what, I'm just gonna start Talking to people that I trust.

I'm not just gonna blab that Zach has a problem, but I'm gonna talk to people that I trust and that I love, and I'm going to just tell them. And guess what? Every person she told, every single time she told someone, they exhibited love, they exhibited trust. Kindness, they looked at us and said, Hey, how can we help you?

Never once did someone say, Oh, you're clearly a bad human. You need to get out of my life. No one ever said that to us. No one ever treated us like that because we were honest with them. And I find that when you're honest with other people, they will one reciprocate with honesty. And what I mean by that is that when I share my story, they will reciprocate with honesty.

And when my wife was sharing my story, people would come up to me and, now when I share my story there, I had a Relief Society president who came up to me and she said, this is something my son is dealing with right now, and I am so grateful to know that there's something available, there is freedom available, and that he can get past this, but I also beforehand, before I, I had a success story, every single time I would share my story, people would tell me.

Hey, I know so and so in my family is dealing with this and I'm grateful to know that he's not alone and that there's somebody out there that he could have a conversation with if he needed one. It's an amazing thing to be vulnerable with people and to be honest with people. And when you are, They will almost always reciprocate, and two, they will step in to try and help as best they can in any way.

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And being honest with yourself is hard because as an addict, we're super good at lying, right? I'm super good at telling people what they want to hear. I'm super good at, showing people the face of my life being A OK all the time. And when you're good at that sort of thing, you start to do it not just to others but to yourself and you start to minimize your Your activities, you start to look as though, yeah, I'll be fine.

And when reality hits after an episode or a particularly hard, um, confession or, or conversation with your spouse or with yourself or with someone else, and you're like, gosh, I'm beating myself up on this. You really need to double down on honesty and just be like, I'm going to just tell the truth all the time.

And this is what it looks like. Number three. Observe your own brain dispassionately. And what I mean by this is when you look at your brain, you got to see what's going on, but you also have to Choose to look at it as though you're the narrator of a wildlife film. You, you might've heard of, uh, David Attenborough, right?

And one of the films that he narrates that I saw that I was like blown away. This lizard had to cross this tiny expanse and there's all these snakes there and the lizard kind of crawls into the space and he's super, super, super quiet and he's, he's not making a lot of movement cause that way the snakes don't see him, but eventually one of the snakes is like, Oh.

There's a lizard there and it attacks him. And this David Attenborough is narrating this. The lizard is attacked by one snake and then he gets away and then he's caught by another snake and then a whole ball of snakes. And then he gets out of this ball of snakes and he starts to jump from rock to rock and there's snakes jumping out of crevices.

I mean, it's extraordinary. And David Attenborough is just like, in that very British way of his, he just says. A near miraculous escape. Nothing else. Your heart is in the, in your throat by the end of this and yet you're hearing David Attenborough talk about this as though he's saying I put a teaspoon of sugar in my tea and that's it.

And when you think about your brain and you think about the way that you observe what's happening in your brain, that's the same level of excitement that you need to bring to it. Just Observational. You have to look at your brain and you go, okay, I feel like this, and this is what's happening, and I see this urge, and that is creating a temptation, and that temptation is creating this thought, and this thought is creating this feeling, and when I usually have this feeling, this is what I choose to do, and you all of a sudden will have a new picture of the issue that you're dealing with.

You'll start to see the pieces not just as a hole wherein you seem to fail at the end of your every single temptation, but as an opportunity to interrupt that process at a number of different inflection points. And what I mean by that is all of a sudden you're seeing The problem, you're seeing the temptation, the urge.

It comes along and you see the urge, right? And you're watching the urge and you're observing the urge and you can say, okay, I can either fight this urge or I can simply observe it and see what happens if I just observe it. And then as you observe it, you can either take mental notes or I would recommend that you take physical notes and write it down and say, okay, this is what, this is the urge that came along.

When I had this urge, the thought that came to mind first was, I shouldn't have these thoughts, or I shouldn't have this urge, or I shouldn't have this temptation. , I, you know, I'm married. And so I shouldn't be tempted in this way. Or I'm a missionary and I shouldn't be tempted to look at pornography.

Or I'm a good priesthood holder, so I shouldn't be tempted. And the truth is that, that thought begins to create these feelings of unworthiness, or being trapped, or you know, whatever it is that's creating, uh, your reality. And then those feelings engender. You know, either we fight the urge in unhealthy ways, right?

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That's it. And you're not prepared in that moment to fight it. You've essentially said, I'm going to avoid this until who knows when, and now it's hitting me at a moment when I'm my weakest. If you want to be successful in this. You need to set aside the shoulds and the shouldn'ts and just observe it all as though you are watching a gazelle get eaten by a lion.

The lion has feelings about it. The gazelle has feelings about it, but you, you don't have feelings about it because you're David Attenborough. You are a guy who's just narrating a wildlife film. It's not a big deal, right? Number four. Get yourself a piece of paper and a pen and write it down. Write your observations, make them real because once they're on paper, they're real.

They have been created. They exist. They are now something that you are looking at that you have codified with this fancy thing we call writing and you've turned it into, this is what I'm really dealing with. Which I think is part of that honesty question, but it's another step that allows you to say this is an absolute, right?

And again, do it dispassionately. I feel X. When I feel X, I do Y. When I do Y, it takes me to, and you go on. You just keep going. Until you've written out exactly what your brain is doing. And you'll find that you are fascinated. Just look at it , as though it's this extraordinary curiosity. What am I going to do next?

And what you're doing with that is you're taking everything out of your automatic feeling system, right? Your automatic do system, which you could refer to it as habits. Some of us refer to them as your lower brain. , I've heard epigeneticists call it your automatic negative thoughts. You're taking it out of that space.

The automatic space and you're moving it into the non automatic space and the non automatic space is what I referred to as turn down the radio. I can't see. If you've ever gone somewhere and you're not familiar with the area and you're like, okay, where is it? And what do you do? You turn down the radio as though turning down the radio is going to make it so you can see where you're going better.

But what you're really doing is you're taking your brain power and you're removing it from this automatic space of, I'm just driving to, okay, I got to figure out where I'm going. Same thing's happening with your brain and you're taking, you're All of that information out of that automatic space and you're putting it into a real understandable pathway that you can now say, okay, should I turn left here instead?

And that way you begin to break this process of buffering with pornography and breaking the process of using pornography is what you're doing. I mean, this is what we're working to accomplish, right? We're working to accomplish, , self mastery in a space where we've created a pattern of behavior. And in creating that pattern of behavior, you've relegated a lot of your decision making to your lower brain.

We're just bringing it to the higher brain. And in the higher brain, you have to make decisions. You have to decide, am I going to turn left or right? Am I going to let this feeling that I feel right now Lead me to actions that are contrary to the law. What my higher brain believes and wants to believe in that pornography is not something that I want to choose to do.

I don't want to choose to overeat. I don't want to choose to use video games. Incessantly so that, you know, I'm still living in my mother's basement when I'm 35, right? All of those decisions, if we take them out of, because for, the reality is, is that in the beginning you decided, hey, I'm gonna buffer with whatever it is, pornography, video games, eating, because it feels good and I currently don't want to process the emotion.

That underlies that. I don't want to process my loneliness or tiredness or, Sadness, whatever that is, right? So you turn to a buffer and the first time it's a conscious decision. And the second time it's a conscious decision, but eventually it stops being a conscious decision. So we take it out of that space where it has ceased to be a conscious decision.

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We build the highway that we want to travel rather than the highway that we have been traveling. Number five, and this is the last one we're going to talk about today, but number five is key to really. Overcoming the thing that is holding us back. And this one is, I think, the hardest for most of us because we're not very good at being gracious in this arena.

And so number five is seeking to see your failures as opportunities to learn.

What I mean by that is, You're going to fail in this process. Every step that I've given you here, the steps of observation, whatever step it is that, that we've talked about, you're going to fail at that at some point along the way, because you haven't trained your brain to do it well, right?

In this process, you will fail. That's okay. As long as you take a moment, you write it down again, and just See how your failure can be learned from. Observe your failure. Observe your feelings about your failure. Observe what actions you took because of your feelings. Observe what results happened because of what actions you took.

And now you start to see a whole pattern that you can adjust ever so slightly at each turn. And this one is my favorite because one of the reasons why we use pornography is to avoid feelings like failure. Once you begin to see that, you When you begin to start to understand exactly, okay, what's driving all of this negative behavior, this, this behavior that's a net negative in my life, like pornography use, or excessive gaming, or overeating, or whatever it is, and part of that is not properly feeling your feelings.

When you choose to say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and feel this feeling, rather than automatically buffer to pornography or eating or whatever it is. .

You're changing the pathway, you're starting to change the pathway, but you're not going to be good at it. Unfortunately for you, you're going to be terrible at it. You're going to say, all right, I'm going to feel lonely for a minute. Then you're going to be like, ah, forget it. I'm going to go do the thing that I always do.

And that's okay. That's totally normal in the process. Take a minute, think about it. Fail at feeling your feelings and then try it again the next time. I promise it's going to be an extraordinary beginning to what you really want, which is a long term goal of freedom from whatever buffering behavior you're dealing with, whether it's pornography or overeating or gaming or phone addiction, whatever it is.

This is the, this is the beginning of the path. Failure is, Actually an extraordinarily good thing and if you can be good at failure if you can say I'm gonna just choose to be good at failure You're gonna actually start getting better at whatever it is that you want to be better at and if that is Getting away from pornography.

You're gonna be great at it Listen I really appreciate you guys listening. Take a minute. If you have a minute, go on to iTunes or Google play or whatever it is and review our podcast. It's the way that other people get to hear this. If they don't get to hear it, then they don't get to change the way that you're getting to change.

So please let other people know, feel free to share this podcast, feel free to review us on iTunes. I would really appreciate it if you did that. And then if you are someone who's ready to just take a minute and start listening, Go to zachspafford. com, that's z a c h s p a f f o r d forward slash work with me, and I will set you up with a free 30 minute mini session where you can learn what coaching is all about, and really decide, is this the thing that is going to make the change in my life that I'm looking for?

I would love to see you there. I'm excited for you to start this journey on your way to freedom from pornography use. Thank you very much. I will see you guys next week.