Moment 35 - Why You’re (Not) A Failure: Elizabeth Day

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. It’s all too easy to feel pressured by the societal expectations that are pressed onto us from a young age. But the fact is, they WILL make you feel like a failure. In this clip Elizabeth Day discusses how she was made to feel like a failure and explains why you should never let society make you feel like one ever again. Episode 77 - https://g2ul0.app.link/C0jYEaxmPlb Elizabeth: https://www.instagram.com/elizabday/ https://twitter.com/elizabday Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Steven Bartlett?

  Society's expectations of how your life is supposed to be going will fuck you up. And when I think about, you know, you've written this amazing book about called Philosophy, about failure. I was thinking, what is objectively, like, what is failure? And my conclusion was that failure is like a byproduct of social expectations. And as is success. So could you talk to me a little bit about how social expectations have made you feel like a failure?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Of course, yeah. I realised I had to define failure after I had launched a podcast called How to Fail and after I had written a book called How to Fail. And then I kept getting asked this very reasonable question. And I realised I'd never come up with a satisfying definition for me. So the definition I came up with in Philosophy is that failure is what happens when life doesn't go according to plan, which totally taps into what you've just asked me about. Because then you need to start to think, well, where does the plan come from? Is it genuinely my plan? Is it genuinely what will make me happy? Or is it what I've been told I should expect my life to be? Because when I looked at some

• 1:16Speaker 01

  of my metrics for how my life should be, and I put that in quotation marks, it kind of came from like 1980s rom-coms and patriarchal society and conditioning. And the idea that I'd been raised in the 80s to be a nice, pleasant, pliable girl, whereas boys were enabled to be mischievous and that was seen as kind of cute and charming. And that led to me being an inveterate people pleaser, which I know is something that a lot of people have in this kind of industry. And it also led to me imagining that I wanted to be married and have children. And that's what I tried to do. And in my 30s, I did get married to the wrong person. I ended up getting divorced and I tried but failed to have babies and went through various fertility treatments that were...

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Emotionally devastating in various ways. And it got to a point when I was thirty six divorced, didn't have children, where I really did feel like a failure. And the reason I felt like a failure is because that's what society had conditioned me to believe of myself. Because actually, after I'd got over the pain and the grief caused by that seminal relationship ending and by all of the IVF and coming to terms with my first miscarriage and all of that, I actually felt strong for having withstood it. And I actually felt kind of liberated too, because I had no plan for the future. And having no plan for the future can be terrifying, and it can also be this enormous

• 2:45Speaker 01

  opportunity to change your life and to redefine it according to who you really are, once you've stripped back that pretense. So that's one way in which I felt like a failure, but I probably wasn't. It was what I'd been told to feel.

• 3:02Steven Bartlett?

  So I wanna, I wanna like pick around this a little bit because I can resonate with this tremendously. In fact, that's why my book has the name it does is because I was conditioned as a black kid who was broke to believe that the thing that would make me a success was becoming this happy sexy millionaire with a Range Rover. And so when I wrote in the front page of my diary, that, you know, that's a kid from Africa who in Africa had nothing but was, you know, my family were happy. Bring that kid into a context or a con, yeah, a context where the context is telling me that unless you're this, you should feel like shit. That's why as a kid I was like, well, I need to be happy sexy. To be fair, if I'd wrote something else, it would have been white, straight hair. Right? I was relaxing my hair chemically from the age of about twelve till about sixteen.

• 3:46Steven Bartlett?

  So my hair was straight. But I wanna, I wanna go back to this, this point about society telling you what you should want. Did you ever figure out what you actually wanted?

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Such a good question. Also, thank you for sharing what you just did. Because I know that, yeah, you believe like I do that vulnerability is the source of connection, true connection. And that was really beautiful. I think I have figured out who I am now, but I sit here as a 42 year old, having only just figured that out. And the reason I figured it out is because of all of those things that went wrong. Those relationships that ended, that imploded, the jobs that weren't right for me. Like, that was what prompted me to do the soul searching. And I'm a big believer in things happening for a reason, the universe unfolding as is intended. Even if you can't make something meaningful as and when it's

• 4:41Speaker 01

  happening, because it's traumatic and it's devastating, I tend to believe that there will be some meaning in there in the fullness of time. There'll be something that I needed to learn. I wish sometimes I'd learnt the lessons more quickly, because I believe I kept being sent the same lessons until I really, really learnt the thing that I needed to learn. But I do think now that I'm aware of who I am, because I've redefined my notion of success. So in the past, my success was not necessarily being a happy, sexy millionaire, although I wouldn't say no. In the past, I had a very different contextual upbringing

• 5:24Speaker 01

  from yours. And I'm immensely privileged in many ways. And one of the ways in which I am privileged is that there was a lot of creativity and cultural discussion in my home. Like, I was surrounded by books. I was never taught to feel that that was odd, that I read all the time, or that I wanted to be an author, even though there was no one in my family who did that. So I had those kind of conversations. And that's an enormously wealthy way to be brought up. And even though we didn't have that much money, that was very wealthy. And so for me then, success was about doing well at school. It was doing well academically. And I realised that when I did well at an exam, I got approval. And that, for me, became a substitute for self-worth.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  So for a long time, I was on this feedback loop where I was like, if only I could just do better and do better at more things, eventually I'll feel I'm worthwhile. And I was on a hiding to nothing because actually I was outsourcing my sense of self to everyone else's opinions of me and to kind of external validation. And I've now realised, and it's taken me a long time to realise this, that my only validation that means anything can come from within and from my cornerstone relationships. So like the four or five people I love most in the world, whose opinion actually means something to me, that's what it is. Now, having worked that out, how can I bring my authentic self into every area of my life?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  And that's why the podcast has failed and the books about failure have genuinely been such a gift to me because they've enabled me to connect with a really big audience whilst being my true self, whilst taking the risk to be vulnerable. And that for me is success, being my authentic self in integrated self. So like professionally, personally, and when I'm asleep, or in my friendship group, or when I'm stroking my cat, it's always the same me.