Who's To Blame?
It’s fair to say that life doesn’t always go according to plan. Sometimes, even when we think we’ve taken every precaution, everything still goes wrong.
I make no secret of my experience with failure in business. As I look back, I see more clearly why they happened and whilst not everything that went wrong was my own doing, the vast majority was caused by my lack of knowledge and unearned optimism.
There were also some occasions when I trusted people whom I should not have. Was that their fault or my poor judgment? I'm still not sure.
I had a coach and even a mentor, as I’d been told I should. My coach wasn’t very good at the accountability side of coaching, although she was otherwise lovely. My mentor turned out to be mostly living in his car. Not ideal.
Without a doubt, there were times when I blamed others for my failings and poor financial circumstances. There were times that I got downright angry with people who I felt had let me down or led me down a certain path. It may have momentarily lessened my feelings of failure but it didn’t help one bit. Nothing changed.
It is often said that hindsight is 20-20, and as I look back on my early business disasters, I can see that had I made some different decisions and been more willing to buckle down to the hard work of entrepreneurship, I would surely have had more success much sooner. However, that’s not what happened and yet I don’t regret it.
If I hadn’t taken that path, hadn’t decided to become a coach, decided to take redundancy from the airline I worked for, I might still be there today, or I might have been one of the many who were laid off several years back and who knows what from there. Some minimum wage hell, still renting a room in someone else’s house, still in the UK. Who knows?
Much like the ancient parable of the Chinese farmer, we never know if the things that happen to us are good or bad in the great context of life, even when they seem devastating in the moment. We view the events of our lives as the protagonist of our own story, with events either going our way or generating adversity.
As difficult as some of those times were for me, I survived them. As limited as my future sometimes seemed, I created an enviable life. As terminally single as I thought myself to be, I ended up married.
Did I fail? Yes, many times.
Did I succeed? Yes, many times. One thing is for sure, I took action as best I could and I continued. I still do.
Am I to blame for my failures? Yes and no.
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Am I to blame for my successes? Yes and no.
Some of my biggest successes have come from being in the right place at the right time, being connected to the right people at the right time and just saying yes in the moment to see how it turns out.
I was asked this week how I define success, a question I often ask my clients. I don’t know that I would score too highly on most standard or superficial measures of success but I can list the things that I rate successes in my life:
I could go on. All of these things are a mix of my choices and dumb luck but I can tell you this much, I stay grateful for all of them because I know that life can change in a minute.
At my lowest point, facing financial and professional ruin, I turned to a practice of gratitude and it saved me. It slowly started to turn my focus to all that I could still appreciate, even if that was just the breath in my lungs and the earth under my feet, I could be grateful for them.
I’ve been angry and played the victim, but it didn’t make anything better. We all face uncertainty, every day, it’s just that we don’t always recognise it until we’re confronted with it. Blaming, shaming and justifying can feel good for a short while but only taking responsibility changes things for the better.
Am I to blame for all the crappy things that happened to me? It’s a mix of yes and no. Do I take responsibility for my life and how I respond when things go wrong? You betcha. We don’t get to success without failure but I have chosen my path and I know that failures and successes are just stops on the journey, not the final destination.
Along with my friend and colleague Angie, we decided to share the lessons from our successes and failures in coaching. If you're a coach who sometimes struggles on the road to success, you might just like this...
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