#03: I might be good at saving face, but I was NOT good at failing. So when no one showed up to the event I spent months planning, I was humiliated - publicly.
#03: I might be good at saving face, but I was not good at failing. So when no one showed up to the event I spent months planning, I was humiliated - publicly. Fast forward 5 years and over 600 people would show up to the same event. This part of my story would become one of the things I’m most proud of. Which leads me to question: What if there’s a deeper purpose to failures and mistakes? What if it was always safe for us to keep going even when things don’t work out perfectly? What if it’s okay to just be you and just be seen… even failing?
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Shauna VanBogart 0:00
Hi. I'm Shauna Vanbogart. And this is Just Being Seen. In the first few years of my self employed career when I was practicing Image Consulting, if you've listened to season one, you've heard all about the journey, I was always looking for ways to diversify my revenue stream. So I wasn't solely dependent on that one on one work. So I brainstormed this idea to throw an event in Charleston's main shopping district, King Street, if you're familiar, that's where all the retailers are. The jist was, you would get a girl's night out. And it was like a shopping styling event. And so for something like $75, you and a group of female friends could get hands on styling with our team, while we hopped from boutique to boutique sipping champagne, eating snacks, having fun. It was like a sip and shop. So I marched myself down to King Street and I cold outreach the managers of some of the boutiques with my idea. Three boutiques agreed to participate, which was like a huge deal to me at the time. So I set a date, I worked with the stores to organize the shopping itinerary and I started pulling together some marketing. Now, I don't know what I was thinking, I was fiercely optimistic, and rather ignorant at the time, which worked in my favor, to be honest most of the time, but I didn't sell any tickets in advance, but you could buy them at the door. So at the first store, I had this whole registration table setup with fancy lanyard name tags, and this whole display, the three stores that were onboard had brought on extra staff, they had purchased food and drinks. And there I was standing there in eager anticipation for people to show up and buy tickets.
Shauna VanBogart 1:47
And not a single person came. Except for my best friend who was manning the registration table with me. I was totally mortified, because I knew I'm going to have to go to these other stores. And I'm going to have to tell them that no one showed up. Especially after all the effort they put in and the money they had spent, I had this pit in my stomach about it. So I'm walking down the street, King Street, with my head down like sad Charlie Brown style, going store to store having a humiliating conversation with them that no one came and I'm sorry for wasting all of your time. Now failing was not something that I handled well, I could handle it well, on the outside, it might have looked like it because I was pretty well adept at saving face and putting on a show. But inside I was not okay with making mistakes. Failing was terrifying and then failing publicly, and then being seen failing, oh my gosh, the idea of failing is what contributes to our resistance in wanting to show up because what if people see you fail? What will happen then? For some, it triggers the responses we talked about in the previous episode, those fight or flight responses. When this happened, I wanted to crawl in a cave and never see those people again. Now social media was not the thing, then, that it is now. So thankfully, it's not like a lot of people knew what happened. We're really just talking about a small handful of people. But that was just enough to send a perfectionist like me over the edge, I just want to validate that it doesn't take a lot of people to see you fail for it to cause a pretty intense feeling. So let's pause here for a moment, when I support clients through resistance. Or even if we're working on some deeper level narratives that are inherently operating from that are preventing them from showing up and being seen without fail. All of the fear that's holding them back tends to stem from one to two voices from their childhood or previous experiences.
It only takes one event, one moment, one person to invalidate us. And let me just say invalidation can happen in ways that are malicious. But it can also happen in ways that are really well intentioned. But perhaps as a child, we took it in a way that felt invalidating. And in that moment, a story, a narrative can be created. I can't tell you how many creative geniuses I've worked with who are stifling their fullest expression of this genius, because they had an authority figure growing up perhaps a parent telling them to quiet down or they heard things like children should be seen and not heard. Or perhaps there was even one teacher in elementary school who reprimanded their boldness. Again, I want to be very clear that as we take responsibility to explore while we may stifle ourselves, not every invalidation comes from an ill intention place. When we take responsibility over our conditioning. We can ask what narratives am I inherently following? Or you could call them air quotes rules your inherent only following about how to use my voice and how to express myself. And perhaps these are rules you've inherited from parents or other adult figures in your lifetime. You saw it, you simply emulated it, or you were told this is the way that it is. This is what's proper. This is what's appropriate. This is how you get to success by acting this way, by saying things this way.
I've worked with clients who have had incredibly supportive parents who just didn't understand. And so the invalidation happens simply as a result of humans trying to be good parents and doing the best they can. And perhaps this client was and is neurodivergent, or has certain intuitive gifts and information. And for parents, this information and resources about this stuff wasn't available like it is at the time now. And so these traits weren't talked about in previous generations like it is now. Thanks to the power of Instagram, you can find service providers and business owners who now specialize in teaching parents how to recognize certain traits and children. I mean, it's really just amazing that we have all of this information about our own humaness at our fingertips right now. And then I've worked with clients where there was blatant and intentional stifling of their voices. Perhaps they grew up in abusive situations, and they've experienced trauma as a result of speaking up or being seen in a certain way. Bottom line, one story that can drive our entire behavior as it relates to our pursuits of success often stems from one voice in our upbringing. So when you look at where you are stifling your expression, holding back from being seen, whose voice is it that has the strongest influence on you?
Shauna VanBogart 6:52
We take this one voice, and we turn it into many voices out there, waiting to pounce on us, if we divert from our appropriate paths. It's like we take this one voice in, and it's a lens, we cast on everything or a filter, we cast on everything. And we assume that all people must think this way. Now you got to understand this is happening on a very unconscious level, we make the criticism we may face a much louder and exaggerated thing than it really is.
Then what happens is we inadvertently keep deepening another simultaneous narrative, when we stifle ourselves. And that narrative says I can't trust myself to handle adverse reactions to my voice and to being seen. So it gains a stronghold even further preventing us from wanting to show up. As we talked about, in episode two, we will then start to smartly justify reasons to not express or put ourselves out there or take any risks. Very compelling reasons, by the way, that make a lot of rational sense will tell ourselves, we're not ready yet. Or we need more time to prepare, or it's not quite perfect, or I want to get the words right. Obviously, all of those things are admirable. putting in the work to have a well prepared presentation is one thing, but using that as a crutch, as a way to procrastinate, to avoid showing up. That's another thing. I bring all this up to say that if it only takes one voice, to create an entire set of rules that you're inadvertently following on your path of success.
It can only take one voice of equally powerful conviction to snap you out of it.
One Voice, one person who believes in you. You don't need your entire Instagram following to appreciate what you post. You are way more resilient than you're giving yourself credit for. Pushback, trolls, haters. They're just not that big of a deal as that fear base part of you is making it one voice to inspire you to see it differently. One voice with a fresh perspective that hits you like a lightning bolt, just one person to go from not doing that big, scary, audacious thing to actually doing it. What if you just focused on the voices who do get it? How much more momentum would you have if they resonated louder in your mind than the naysayers? How differently would this year look for you if you leaned a little bit more to believing the people who tell you you're amazing, and that you've really got something here? And if you don't have someone like that in your life, there are people out there whose job it is to do that very thing. I introduced you to one of them in the last episode, Sarah Ashman.
So this is where I need to give a special shout out to the manager at that first boutique. The boutique was called V to V, her name is Heidi, where my cute little registration table was set up, because she was so encouraging and so nice about it. She could tell that I was just totally humiliated. And she said to me, Shauna, I love the idea. And we would love to try it again. Would you be willing to do another date in the future? And I looked at her like she had five heads and eight ears, and I thought, are you kidding me? Because she was so convicted, she was so encouraging. And I can't remember if I told her, I'd think about it, or if I made a decision right there and then. I don't really remember, I just remember being in disbelief that she was asking me to do it again. I can't quite remember. But something tells me that she probably just held my feet to the fire just enough that I might have even just said, Yes, I'll do it again, from a people pleasing place, despite being totally mortified in that moment. And so I locked myself into doing it again. I set another date on my calendar, the same three stores agreed to participate, which is still kind of crazy to me. And I made some necessary tweaks to give it another shot. And so the second time I ran it, it was amazing, it was so successful. And this is where the story ends happily ever after. Nope. Like 15 people came, all of which were my friends, who I pretty much bribed. Half of them were men, which wasn't the intended audience, but it filled the room, you know, so it was a failure. I know there were friends at the time that were like it wasn't a failure, and I’m like, No, it was a failure. And again, Heidi, that manager was right there.
Shauna VanBogart 11:45
We loved it, do it again. And I'm like you are crazy, lady.
Shauna VanBogart 11:50
This is not working clearly. Do you not see what's happening here. I don't recall honestly, feeling anything, but just total disappointment. But somewhere in there, among Heidi's conviction and belief in me, I agreed to do it one more time. So this time, a few months later, it was December, this would be the third time that I attempted to do this in one year. And this time, I positioned it as a holiday event. And I made a lot of tweaks to the overall event. And 100 people showed up. This was a huge deal to basically go from two failures to 100 people showing up which by the way, we're not all friends and family that I had to bribe to be there. Can I tell you how satisfying it was to have that success? And after I had that success, I had the momentum to double down and do it again. Because I was able to see what worked, I was able to see what tweaks were beneficial. And I was able to see the true heart of what this actually was. Which also speaks to the power of just taking action for the sake of getting clarity and realizing that most of the time the clarity you are looking for comes in the action, not by sitting there trying to figure it out and think about it. Also, when I ran it this third time, we had a lot more stores involved, I had sponsors, I had a charitable aspect, one of the things that I know really felt good and really worked was holding it in December. So I just committed to doing it once a year every December from that point forward, which would give me a solid at least six to seven months before I would need to start planning for the next one. And so I decided after that third success with 100 people that I would take a longer span of time to really step back and regroup. I ended up running this event for a total of five December's with a full team of people who helped me plan the event starting about six months out, I had local news anchors, emceeing, I had collaborative vendor setup in various stores. There were more than 90 retailers participating. There were a lot of people that were involved. And I had proceeds going to a local nonprofit, the Center for Women, I spoke about them in the first season. So it had this whole philanthropic angle. It was a machine. And it was a hustle. And it was a ton of fun. The very last December that I ran it, we had 600 attendees, 600 attendees, that would have never happened if I would have given in to my humiliation of the failures in the very beginning.
Sometimes I look back at that phase of my career, kind of in disbelief, that that gets to be a part of my story. And I'm really proud of that part of my story. And thank God for Heidi at V to V because I am so glad that she was so encouraging and seem to hold that vision for me, because without her it wouldn't have been a part of my story.
So what is that? Resiliency? I mean sure, I think more so. I was able to leverage one convicted voice outside of myself, who could hold that confidence for me when I didn't have it. And I was intuitive enough to follow it. Even though it didn't feel right to me what felt right to me was putting my head in the sand and never coming out again. I'd like to say that I had my own resiliency here. But if it wasn't for her voice, in a vacuum, I went to bend resilient. If you've been around here for a while, and if you've listened to season one, you know, there's a phrase that I use that goes something like this: All moves are the right moves. And I want to be really clear that this does not mean I know every move of mine is the right one. Because a lot of moves I make my mind tells me: this is wrong. More like that subconscious fear based part of my mind that says this is wrong, you're going to be ostracized for it. Now, what it really means is that no matter what happens, I deeply trust myself. And the moves I make are done with thought and intent so that whatever and however it plays out, it will be for me, meaning all my moves pay off, I stay in the moment, I make decisions with my gut and heart, and I trust that it will play out how it's supposed to play out. This does not always mean it pays off in the way my ego wants it to pay off. Often the payoff is a lesson, experience or wisdom that can only be gleaned through mistakes, making so called air quotes wrong move when reflecting backwards on it. Or discovering something that felt intuitive was not actually intuition, but was a move made from sabotaging tendencies, or my subconscious trying to keep me safe.
Shauna VanBogart 16:52
Now, while none of these insights feel particularly great when discovered, it still shifts me forward in a growth oriented way. And I'm not one to deny anything that catalyzes growth. Wrong move, mistake or not, it's still for me, if I choose to accept it and receive it that way. What's for you doesn't always feel good in the moment, or when you're even thinking about acquiring it. What's for you is not often seen in the beginning, what's for you may have nothing to do with the moves you're making now. And what's for you may come by way of making what you will later label as the wrong move. Here's an even more difficult truth to settle into. You may be making the wrong move right now. But it feels right to you in this moment. And you might look back someday and realize I would have made a different move. There are many times in my life, I can look back and go. Yeah, that was not the right move forward. But I was certainly convinced it was. In fact, a lot of times I call it intuition. You may look back and see that you were in denial. You may look back at this moment and realize you were operating from a scarcity mindset cleverly camouflaged as intuition. But it's all still right. Because what you got was really what you asked for on the deepest level. And that is to know yourself to grow, to be abundant in mind, body and soul. And let me tell you receiving those things as hard as it is sometimes is worth way more than anything tangible.
Newsflash, I have no idea where I'm going or what I'm doing. But I am aware of my intent. And my intent is to make an impact. My intent is to be of service. My intent is to grow and explore all dimensions of myself because seeing myself equates to seeing others more clearly. My intent is to operate from my heart and to know all facets of doing so. And so I moved from this intent. I check in often on my moves to ensure I'm doing it from this place. And I just let the rest go the best that I can. The overthink, the second guessing, the ego voice. I trust I'll get what I need and what I want. I throw time out of the equation. If I can. And I trust I'm well positioned, and if not, I'll be given the course correction necessary to make sustainable pivots and changes. And I trust myself enough to know I will be okay crossing any bridge because I'm not alone. I've got support, and I know I'm loved. And finally I trust my intuition is honed by getting to know it at all discernment points. That means I must make wrong moves to know what is and isn't actually intuition. Because intuition doesn't always feel like 100% alignment. In fact, a lot of times intuition does not feel good. It feels awkward. It feels weird. It feels not comfortable whatsoever, it doesn't feel positive, it doesn't feel expansive and enlightening. It's just a deep knowing of something. This is all I want for you, when I say to you, all moves are the right moves, I want you to move free from attachment to the semantics of right or wrong because a lot of that is relative. And I want you to know you're okay to proceed forward, I want you to know it's okay and in fact advantageous to make mistakes. And I want you to know that you'll be loved despite them.
Shauna VanBogart 20:33
I would say I spent probably a solid year mastering my inner world as it related to making mistakes, it was like putting myself through an intensive for a year around the concept of making mistakes. And I find that as a coach, I often do this with concepts, whether it's trust or patience, or acceptance. Instead of traditional New Year's resolutions, my pattern is to almost pick a sensation or an area for wisdom expansion, and then spend the year going deep to learn every facet of it. It's not going deep in textbooks. Sometimes it's continuing education but most of the time it's surrendering and knowing Okay, Okay world, Okay universe, Okay God, Okay unicorn in the sky, send me all of the experience, and all of the circumstances that will help me no patience, or trust, or making mistakes and failure on those deepest levels. Inevitably, I learned so much from my clients related to these topics as well. And when you break it wide open, while many of us have our unique triggers around making mistakes, it tends to boil down to feeling like you'd be alone defending yourself against an entire world. Because when you ask most people, it's not actually the mistake they're afraid of. Because in a vacuum, there's no fight or flight response when we talk through it. In solo activities in a private world, their reactions to making mistakes is quite different than even if just one person were to witness it. So examine that for yourself. Ask, what is the difference for me, if there is one, between making mistakes when I'm by myself if no one knows it, versus publicly? Usually it comes right back to the idea we talked about in episode two being ostracized, we exaggerate the scenario unconsciously, to a level where we're playing it out as if we'll be totally alone, as if no one will have our back. Of course, when we rationally speak about it, we know people love us, we know there are people around us who will support us. But if you took anything away from season one of Just Being, you know, the subconscious is a pretty powerful force.
Shauna VanBogart 22:47
The best thing you can do is make mistakes and get to know the part of yourself that gets loud when you do so, spend time with her, hold space for that part, hear every exaggerated thought and let the shame have space to express itself instead of jumping to stifle it or push it down. Over time, you will get much faster at this as you lean a little bit more into the intended version of yourself, who knows how to hold your resiliency, while honoring the part of you that's in fear. It's not a let me be resilient and stifle this voice. It's let me be resilient and hold space for all of this ugly shaming, judging, guilty, whatever voice that comes up. Your power center always has your answers and knows what to do in moments where mistakes are made. It's about being so expansive, that the voice that's freaking out is quieter. Because you've made yourself so big, it's quiet or not, because you've stifled it not because you've shamed that part of yourself away, and you've just picked yourself up and decided I'm just going to be positive and move on with that kind of willpower and force, you quiet that voice by acknowledging it. And by showing it it's okay for this fear to exist. You treat it as if it's a part of you that needs acknowledging and you let it regulate itself by inspiring it from your other more powerful energy center.
I do know that as I've gotten to know my inner world as it relates to making mistakes, and you will find this as well, there's a reactive behavior that may or may not be helpful to you. It may or may not make things worse, for example, for a lot of people I talk to their reactive behavior to making a mistake is to find a way to prove to those who witnessed it, that they are in fact capable, sometimes to the point of obsession, where it may start off as resiliency and then over time it can become over functioning and over functioning on the wrong things because that person is just so badly wanting people to know that they know how to do it right. I find what's more important to discern and learn about yourself is not so much what happens in you during the mistake. But what it then drives you to do next. Because if you remember from season one, who you are inspires the action you're taking. So if you're being someone in shame over a mistake, you don't want your actions inspired from the shame version of you. You don't want your actions to be motivated from that place. You want your actions to come from a being who has gotten past the freakout, and has the ability to choose a response, not act from an unconscious reaction of okay, well, now I need to prove to myself and I need to prove to them that I'm capable, I need to prove to them that I know I made a mistake, and that I'm well aware of what needs to happen, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Your ideal ways of responding to circumstances are always within you. So you can find those areas, you can anchor into them, and then bring that essence of them over into other buckets of your life. For example, one of the most important skills I mastered as a classical pianist was the ability to manage mistakes, because if a finger slipped, and it often did, or you hit the wrong note, and you get in your head about it, it can derail the entire performance. So you have to refocus in a millisecond, you're aware of what happened, but you can't obsess or you're totally screwed. You don't correct the mistake, you don't pause, you sort of act like it didn't happen, and you stay in the moment of the piece, you acknowledge, you keep going on to the next notes, and you practice it later. If need be. Sometimes it's just a slip finger it doesn't need working on. But you so badly want to correct it in that moment. You want people to know, you heard it, you want people to know, you know what was wrong. And you want people to know that you know how to play it right. And that you know what it sounds like, right. And all of this is happening in your head. If you're a performer, you totally get it. But you can't do that in a performance, you just have to make yourself as okay with it as possible, as fast as possible and realign forward. And you've got to trust that 90% of your audience more like 98% of your audience won't even know that a wrong note occurred. Unless you draw attention to it, then everyone loses, you miss out, the audience misses out. This isn't easy. It's a muscle that has to be worked, not only the keeping going part, but to pick up from a wrong note in the intended direction versus reacting in a way where the entire piece gets derailed. I learned the hard way that if I memorized my pieces based on my technical skill like solely what my fingers were doing, then it was much harder to move forward after a wrong note because my fingers were only programmed to play a certain sequence. So if I got off track relying solely on technical skill, I would be really off track. And so I had to be able to zoom out from what my fingers were doing and see the whole piece, know what it really sounded like moving forward, set an intention in advance of what the piece was to sound like and stay on track. What a perfect metaphor for life and for our business.
Because I can't tell you how many times in the past where I've made a mistake, oftentimes a small mistake, and I've allowed it to veer me off course to take me off brand. And if you think about that learning from a technical place, like what I was explaining with my fingers, the same thing with business, if you're too technical, and you're too in control, you're white knuckling your business, and things have to be practical and logical and they have to happen in this sequence and you've convinced yourself of this, then one move can take everything off track if you don't have the ability to zoom out and have actually a more general intent of where you're headed. In essence, it's about not sweating the small stuff, yes. But mistakes are purposeful because they build our resiliency, and more importantly, they build our self trust. It's about setting an intention and being clear on where you're going. You do not want to let your past mistakes steal your current and future presence away from you. What if we approach mistakes in our life with this kind of grace? What if instead of over focusing on our mistakes and getting in our heads and internalizing, we strengthen the muscle that allows us to quickly realign to our truth, our trust our bigger intent, so we can let life continue to play out beautifully for you and at the enjoyment of the people around you. How would this change your life?
This is your permission slip to be human and a human makes mistakes, oftentimes in front of other people and it feels humiliating. But don't let that stop you from doing you from showing up from being visible. You get to make mistakes, and you get to make mistakes and still be loved, admired and supported. Trust your intuition the best you can even if you look back and realize it wasn't actually intuition, at least you made moves, at least you showed up, at least you got on the field. Honor your growth and cultivate compassion for yourself on the deepest levels. Because to get where you're going, it's required. All moves are the right moves. Honor this in yourself so you can honor the journey of others. I think the world needs a little bit more of that. And realize that a lot of times, the lesson isn't necessarily something to do differently. The lesson that comes from mistakes is to show you how resilient you actually are. And for you to actually know that like deep soul heart level, know that you have to move through a mistake to be able to experience that sensation. And I would never, ever trade those moments away for anything, because that knowing that you experience within you is so powerful. And realize while some mistakes are there to show you the power of your resiliency. Some other mistakes are in fact red flags that you're off track, perhaps even the universe trying to get your attention. These have a special sort of tinge to them if I'm being honest. And it feels worse than your average mistake. Because it's about integrity. And because the truth you have to face when dealing with these kinds of events is the truth of where a gap within you exists that you need to close and you can't deny it any longer.
Next time on Just Being Seen.
Shauna VanBogart 31:41
Shauna here, hoping that you’re coming off this episode of Just Being Seen feeling inspired and challenged to see how good it can get for you in your journey to showing up and being seen in your gifts. If you want the crash course to deepening into the truth of who you are, you’ll want to get on the waitlist for the next round of Mynd Over Matter. Head on over to ShaunaVanBogart.com/MOMWaitlist to put your name down.
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Just Being is produced by Jeremy Enns and the team at Counterweight Creative. Special thanks to the variety of people who had their hands on some aspect of this creative piece, including my featured guests. And to the right-hand women I am honored to call my team, Kelly Elizabeth and Jess Butler, I see you, I appreciate you, and know that your support in this work is changing the lives of women around the world.