F*cking Fail

Val:

Hello. I'm so happy that you are here to listen to me, rant or not rant or whatever is gonna happen. I'm Val Selby from Valful volume here. Thank you for being here. I May Squirrel, longtime listeners been following me for a while. You're probably going, oh my God, I'm going to go grab my cup of coffee, my glass of wine, whatever you need. I have had a head cold for ten days now, I think. So it's not the C word, it's not COVID I have tested for that, but it certainly feels like that and my brain is just not here all the time.

Val:

And then, of course, cold meds don't help with that, right? But one of the things that it has helped with is my give a damn. Busted. I only have limited energy and very limited motivation to do much and I'm paying attention to that. I was talking to the Masterminders today, which as soon as we were wrapping up our Mastermind meeting, I'm like, oh yeah, I think I'm going to go listen to my book for my 15 minutes today that I've been doing. And then it's time to record because we were ending with this whole idea of failure and perfection and how some of us don't feel like we have perfectionism. And yet as we're talking in the Mastermind, because we're all super close, we can call each other out and pinpoint stuff. That has happened because we've been meeting for four years, I believe. Pinpoint stuff, it's like wait.

Val:

It is a form of perfectionism when you feel like you have to have everything be a certain way in order for it to be well received by other people. Which led me down to our topic for today of you're going to fucking fail. You are, and that's a good thing. So let's just get that right off the top. You are going to fail and that is because you are trying. It is because you are doing. If you are not failing, then it means you're not actually doing anything. Take a look.

Val:

Any of the mentors that you follow, any of the big people that you look up to, go and take a look at their history. Go and take a look at their business history. See how many businesses they've had, how many launches they've had and where they are now. I can process this through my head to even just a few of my mentors. And it's amazing how I don't pay attention to the ones that didn't work. We get stuck in what didn't work when we did it. But when we look at other people, the only thing we're focused on is what did work. And we are looking at ourselves and comparing ourselves, of course comparisonitis, comparing ourselves to that versus the whole business, the whole thing.

Val:

One of the things that came up is how many times has Lady Gaga failed in different things? And yet here she is and nobody pays attention to any of that, right? Because we just look at what she has created, and that is what we want to emulate, is the things that have gone correct. But we're not paying attention to the failures. We're not paying attention that every single person in business fails. And I've been failing every day. Well, most days. I don't work every day. I've been having failures every workday for 23 years. And that's a good thing because every time I was failing at something, it means that I was actually doing the only true fail, which is what came out.

Val:

The only true fail is you're not actually doing anything. The only time I'm not failing is when I'm sitting on the couch watching Netflix with my blankie. Like, I have quite a bit in the last ten days. That's the only time I can't fail at something. Otherwise there's going to be things that don't work. There's going to be things that I didn't even have any control over. Let's go there. My PayPal is broke.

Val:

Not just my PayPal. Both my business PayPals are shut down. And I could easily just sit there and go, oh, my God, what am I going to do? And I did for a few seconds because I have a head cold, but then I just looked at it and, okay, so now where do we go from here? What's the next action that we are going to take? PayPal is not the only payment processor on Earth. It's not. They would love to pretend that they are. They act like they are, but they're not. And there's ways around everything online. We did a lot of stuff online before all of the tech came out, and we can go back to that again, but I could use that as a fail of now I can't do this, now I can't do that, blah, blah, blah.

Val:

It's like, no, that's just a hurdle. A hurdle that I have no control over. And what do I have control over? What can I change? I need to pay my affiliate, so I go open new account that connects with my shopping cart, and we're going to change all that. Is that going to work? I don't know. It's a new processor. I've never used it before. I don't know if it's going to work. And I don't care because I'm just going to move forward and we're going to try it and see if it works.

Val:

If it doesn't work, there's some other ones that I can go and try and find and we'll see if that works. That's all I can do. That's all I have control over. It's broke. It failed. Where do we go from here? I can't take affiliate payments. My commissions. I get a few hundred dollars a month in affiliate commissions for bundle bash because that's part of being an internet marketer.

Val:

And now I can't get those payments through PayPal. What's that going to look like, I don't know. I'm not going to fuss over it and get anxiety over it. I'm just going to deal with it as it pops up, because that's all I can do. I'm going to work on what I do have control over. I have control over how I take payments. And that was already switched a couple of months ago because I was already having issues with PayPal, and it didn't want to talk to stuff, and I had already lost all confidence in it, so I'd already switched so I could take payments in other ways. And I have control over my memberships.

Val:

I have control over the bundles. I have control over the schedule of when I do any of this stuff. Shit's hit the fan in my business and in my personal life for the last months, it has absolutely hit the fan. My mom has even commented when I got this cold. She's like, yeah, your body shut down. Your body told you you're done. You're just going to sit. And that's not my mom's personality.

Val:

So for her to come out and say that, it's like, all right, mom even knows. So I obviously am just going to be okay with sitting here and sometimes being in my thoughts when the thoughts would pop through. But the beautiful thing about the head cold and that I don't give a damn is I didn't have emotions attached to things that were popping in my head that aren't going right. It was really a, do I want to do this anymore? How can I switch this? How can I get control of this? How can I make this mine? It was those thoughts that were going through. There wasn't, oh, but I've tried this, and, oh, my God, and it should work. And there was none of that. There is still none of that. I still have that damn head cold, and I am writing stuff down that I just can't be bothered by right now.

Val:

I'm putting that on a list, and some of it could easily be called a failure. Yes, air quotes a failure. It could easily be qualified as that. But so much has changed, and I'm looking at it and going, okay, this was all started when circumstances were this, and that was only in May. Only in May. That's how much my life has changed from May until, let's see, this is October. From May to October, my life has completely flipped around, and business has completely flipped around. I'm still learning to navigate this new life and business that I'm in, which means that some of this stuff that was originally created and started when there was two of us here is no longer going to work because there's one of us here, one of us here.

Val:

And I get to change, and I get to adapt everything around, okay, well, what do I want to bring to the table? What do I want to share? How do I want this to look? I told you this is going to go some directions, right? So it's easy for me in the past to have taken a look and gone, oh, my God, that absolutely should have worked, and it's not working now. And oh, my God, I failed. Let's just scrap the whole damn thing. I suck. Instead of me being in this whole mindset because this is the beauty. Like I said, the beauty. I know I got this head cold for a reason of sitting there and going, so what? So what if it didn't work? That the way I started it out. So what? How do I make it work now? Because I do want it to work, but how do I make it work now? It doesn't have to always be the same because nobody's business or life or anything is the same as when it started.

Val:

No one's, even Coke, even Pepsi, none of their businesses are the same since they started, right? We have to accept that failures are going to mean it's just going to keep calling them failures, I think, because I think that that's how we believe them to be. So let's just keep hearing the word failure and just get it out of our system and not make it such an icky word. Because I got a little twitch going on when I say failure because it feels kind of like I'm talking bad to myself, I guess. I guess I'm going to analyze stuff today. I don't have the brain power to analyze stuff today, but it does. The word failure is cringey. It's making me twitchy. It's cringey.

Val:

It feels icky. It's a horrible word. Nobody wants to be a failure. So let's take ownership of the word failure and realize that when you are failing, it's a good thing because it means that you tried and you probably tried something new. So what can you change when you fail? It doesn't have to be a full scrap. It like throw a hissy fit scrap. It sucks. This is stupid.

Val:

It doesn't have to be the whole throwing a tantrum. It could just be that you have to make some tweaks, and then you go down the road a little bit more and you make some more tweaks, and you go down a little bit more and you make some more tweaks. Nobody's business was created, and instantly it was like, this is all so perfect. Even people that had the money and created a brand new business and they've been doing business for a really long time, I guarantee they're going to launch something and something's going to break, something's going to fail, or it's not going to hit their goals like they wanted. So they're going to have to go in and they're going to have to tweak it. They're going to have to make changes or marketing completely changes by the minute. So even if they've got this amazing product and they've launched it how many times next year when they launch it, they could do it exactly the same way, and it could absolutely bomb. Okay.

Val:

Everything has a learning experience out of it, and every one of us in business is going to fail. It's part of it. It's the part of it that so few people are talking about and not even just fail, but mistakes are going to happen. Flubs are going to happen. Glitches are going to happen. They just are. They just are. I've been in business for 23 years.

Val:

I thought I had everything set up. I did everything correct. I've got PayPal going through my LLC. I got everything set up correctly, and PayPal shut me down. It just is. It's just the way it goes. There's just issues that are out of our control when it comes to business, so we need to pay attention to, okay, I made a mistake. Oh, well, where can I go from here? What can I change so it doesn't happen again? If I have the ability to make it not happen again? And when you're sharing workshops and such, that's a big one.

Val:

Where this conversation started in our mastermind was because I don't believe that anybody wants to watch workshops and have the workshop be 100% perfect. And if they do, it's because no, never mind. Back up, back up. I'm going to stick with my statement. I don't think anybody actually wants to watch workshops that are 100% fully polished. And I say that because it sets us up for this unrealistic view that, oh, my God, I can't make mistakes because look at I can't put a workshop out because mine doesn't look like that, and of course it doesn't because I don't know. Are you paying a couple of your team to put that together, to edit everything, to have the professional photographer you're not just sitting on Zoom to have all of that stuff? I'm thinking of some of the top marketers. They have production teams for a lot of that stuff.

Val:

So when we do our workshops and we flub through, we do our workshops, and we do the, UMS and the ocean that didn't work. It shows them more about what their average day working online could be like. It's a connection. It's a, oh, okay, they've been doing this for years, and they're still going through some of the issues that I'm going through. It's more human. It's more real. Everything does not go perfectly, no matter how many times we've done it. Because anytime we go in to do and I'm specifically thinking of when I'm going to do a walk through for some kind of program that I might have worked with a zillion times and most days week and I will go to record something and all of a sudden something will have changed.

Val:

Never fails. And then I'm like, oh, all right, well, here we go. We're going to learn something new together. It's the human part that will bring more people to you and connect you with your audience. But most importantly, don't set yourself up for looking at these people that have huge production teams, huge teams doing a lot for them and think that you are supposed to look and feel and be exactly like that, because you're not going to be. You're just not. And that's okay, because if you're setting yourself up for having to look like that, you're never going to do anything. You're never going to have to worry about a product launch bombing, because you're not going to launch.

Val:

And that's the only true fail. The only true fail is not doing anything at all. Not getting it out there. Looking at your to do list of workshops that you put on there last year and going, yes, didn't do it again. Yes, I wanted to do that three months ago. No, didn't do that. I wanted to get this website out five years ago. No, still haven't done it.

Val:

Why is it your fear of failure? Fear of being embarrassed when it doesn't look perfect? Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody fails because they're doing so. Be a doer. Be a doer. All right. I'm sure if you're still listening, that that hit you in the fields. So reach out to me. Okay? Let's talk about it.

Val:

Let me know what you're feeling about it. How did it hit you? I want to hear all about it. Share with me, because I want you to get shit done. I want you to get your stuff out there. I want you to fucking fail, because it means that you did it. It means you put it out there. It means that you can take a look at it and see what needs to be changed. How do you adapt it? It also means that I need to help you take a look at it, because it might not have failed.

Val:

Did you connect with one person? We only need to connect with one person, right? Is that a whole nother episode? We're connecting with one person. We're not connecting with the masses. We're connecting with one person and then another person and then another person. So you might not have failed as much as you think you did, as much as you feel you did, because you're comparing yourself, got comparisonitis, and you're like, oh, I didn't sell 200 of it. I suck. But I had two people that really got into the workshop and gave me feedback, and we had a great time, but I failed. Wait, that's not a fail. All right? That's another part of it.

Val:

That's another part of it. So I want you to go out there, and I want you to fucking fail. Go do it. Something popped in your head that you've been trying, wanting to do, and you haven't done it. I know something popped in your head. Go do it and report back. Tell me all about it. I want to hear it.

Val:

Share. My favorite. Share so I can cheer with you. All right. Talk at you next week. Later.