Writing with Coach McCoach podcast
Season 2, episode 1
Created and narrated by Katie McCoach
[Transcript]
Welcome back to the Writing with Coach McCoach podcast; season two.
Today’s episode is about failure.
It may seem odd, starting season two with an episode all about failure, but I think it’s important to talk about. Here’s the thing: you will hit setbacks, and being able to navigate them and move forward is probably the most essential thing you can ever learn in your career and in your life.
And I think it’s essential to start season two with this, because sometimes getting started after some setbacks is the hardest thing. Right? That is one of the hardest things we can do.
What does failure look like to you? Or to you as a writer?
Here are some examples of writing failures:
1. Rejections from agents
2. Bad reviews from readers
3. Sales flop/book launch flops
Maybe it’s something else—maybe you feel failure when you can’t finish a book, or you get stuck on an idea, or find yourself in an endless revision loop. Or maybe you haven’t written your book yet, or you haven’t touched writing in years. You feel like a failure because you stopped.
First, I want you to know I feel you. I see you. You are not alone.
There’s always a reason I talk about what I do on this podcast.
I talk about what’s relevant to me, what I’ve learned, what I’ve taught others, or what someone has recently asked me or struggled with.
I really try to make sure I tailor this content to be helpful for you. I think this episode is one of the most powerful ones to date, or this season, because if at any point you hit failure I want you to come back to this episode and I want you to remember that you’re going to get through it.
This episode is directly inspired by my own failures, specifically, what I considered to be my failure in 2023.
Yep, it is March 2023, already, I have hit a hard failure and I have reached the other side of it.
Let’s give a little background. If you’ve been following my podcast, you’ll have heard a couple promos for The Book Edit Collab. This was a six-month program I was launching, exclusive to 8 writers max, and it was going to be the greatest thing I’d ever done to date.
Well, things did not go as planned. Life dealt a few personal kicks.
I hit a version of rock bottom when I realized The Book Edit Collab was not going to work. Not yet, anyway. It’s a program I deeply cherish and want to do, and I know I will in the future—so feel free to join the waiting list—but for now, I needed to own up to the fact that I hit failure. I hit failure hard.
I failed.
It hurt so freaking bad. I was in a panic for a few weeks.
There were several consequences to this failure. And I HATED having to navigate them, own them, and let people see them.
I’ve heard before that it’s not the fear of failing itself that many struggle with—it’s the fear of people seeing you fail.
Side note: How relatable is that to you? If you are a writer and you’ve talked about your book for years but no one has seen it—maybe it’s not your fear of failing as a writer that’s the problem. Maybe it’s that you don’t want anyone to see you fail? It’s easier, and much more comfortable, just staying put.
And that’s what was hard for me this year too. I worked so hard to make something really great, and in front of everyone, it flopped. In front of my clients, my family, and most importantly, myself.
What will people think of me when I prove I can’t do this? That I couldn’t make this happen?
That’s where I was early January. In a dark pit of failure. My hopes for the year were crushed. I let myself down. I let others down.
It was really bleak for a bit there. I felt like I was done.
I was ready to give up.
I mean I being told to give up after all, wasn’t I? I failed something I believed in. I couldn’t do it.
Spoiler alert: I found my way out and you can too. So, if you’ve ever been in this pit, and it’s very bleak, or you are in it now—just know you are not alone.
Here are the stages I went through after failure. And how I’m in a place now where I know I’m going to be okay.
No. Better than OK.
Because of that—air quote—failure.
That was actually the best thing to ever happen to me.
I’m going to take you through these steps, because I want you to see what it looked like for me, and hopefully you can relate. Or if you are going through it, maybe you are in one of these steps, and you know, hey there is a next step and it’s going to be okay.
First, I was in denial. I denied.
I tried to make it work, I tried to make this thing be the best thing I’d ever done, I made so many efforts, but everything was still very clear: this was not meant to be.
So finally, second, I mourned.
I really needed this step. I need to feel the loss of what could have been. I needed to let myself struggle for a bit. I had a few really bad days and a couple not so great weeks.
And it took time. I was in the mourning period for quite a while.
I want you to know it’s OK. It’s okay to really struggle. It’s okay to just feel like it’s all too much.
I really let myself feel it, I cried a lot.
And sometimes I didn’t think there was a way through.
So, I want you to know that it’s OK. Because here I am, I’m telling you here I am. I made it through. And so you will too.
Mourning is essential. It’s OK to mourn. It’s good. Let yourself grieve. Let yourself feel everything. That is important. If you brush over it, you might not be fully ready to take the next steps, you might jump into them too soon and not make it through to the other side the way you really thought you were going to.
I’ve been there, I’ve definitely rushed through a failure before. I’ve done something and been like, “Oh, that didn’t work, I’m just going to keep going.” And didn’t allow myself to really be in the space of it not working. Of letting it be okay that it failed.
So anyway, first I denied. Second, I mourned.
Third, I freaked out.
You thought this path was a clean, straightforward path? You thought acceptance came next?
Oh hell no.
After mourning, I went to the extremes of my mind. I had a doomsday mentality.
If I failed at this, something I truly believed in and thought I had covered all the bases of what could go wrong (I thought it was fail safe!), then what the hell was I doing anymore? Who was I to run a book coaching business? I mean, yeah, I’d been running it for ten years. SO WHAT. Clearly I’m not meant to be doing this. Clearly this one event proves that everything I’ve ever done before was a waste.
Every author I’ve ever helped—didn’t matter. Because I couldn’t do it this time.
Clearly I need to close shop and go do something else. Something less passion focused. Something that makes less cuts to my heart.
I let myself go there. I did let myself go doomsday. I think it was part of my process. I needed to see what was the other end of if I let myself fail. Right? If I said, “This failure defines me.”
This was the stage where I saw what that looked like.
The third stage of freaking out, of doomsday, was the stage of: if I let myself fail and stay here, this is how it’s going to look. “I need to close shop, I need to give up, I need to throw in the towel.”
Luckily, I moved into step four.
And step four, it wasn’t a smooth transition into this step, by the way. I’m still like kind of doing step three, I’m still kind of freaking out, and then I move into step four, while I’m still working through a little mourning, a little freaking out, but I move into this next step, which is…
[Step four] I talked to my circle.
I opened myself up and allowed myself to be vulnerable with others.
And I’m going to tell you right now that I believe this was the most helpful step out of anything that comes before or after this.
Talking to my support system was absolutely essential.
When I hit this despair, this failure, I was very fortunate to have built connections with people who would understand.
So, when I say support system, although yes, my family I could have talked to, I talked to my husband, I could talk to friends, and they would be there, they would be supportive, they would help me through it.
But that’s not who I needed at this time. I needed people who this situation. Who understood what its like to put everything into something, especially a business venture and have it flop.
I have friends who—I’ve built up these connections with people—I have friends who run their own businesses, I am part of a women/nonbinary mastermind. I have a therapist. I also now have a business coach—which, side note, was a direct result of this situation, but I know if I had had her now and this happened, I would have likely worked through it a lot more smoothly. But we’re getting ahead.
I’ve built up connections with people in business and in the editing world, who are all trying to do this, they are all trying to constantly make something happen. And this was essential for being able to lean on them when it was time.
I reached out to them and I opened up. I told others how I felt. How I wondered if I just was no longer cut out for this life.
They immediately heard me and emphasized and related. They’ve of course, themselves, have been through this, they’ve hit failure, they’ve all had ventures that have flopped or struggled, they’ve all had to pivot, they validated my feelings.
And then they also helped me reframe. They helped me see even my own feelings in a new light that showed me how much I’ve accomplished over the years, how much I’ve done, and how much I’ve helped others, how much I’ve already learned—even in this event. Even though I hadn’t even reached that stage yet, I already was seeing the things that I had learned. Even if I was denying some of it.
This was really essential because these were people who got it.
One friend was even so sweet, she took me out to lunch the next day and she let me just release all of me feelings and helped me brainstorm ways to move forward. It was the best, kindest thing ever and it was exactly what I needed in that moment.
Again, as much as I have support in my family and husband, I needed to be surrounded by people who GOT it. Who were in similar situations and understood the nuances of this. Especially of being a female entrepreneur and trying to do so much to help a certain audience, a certain type of person—in this case I’m here to help writers—and feeling like, not only did I fail myself when this flopped, I failed them.
In case you missed this obvious lesson here—start creating your community of writers to lean on now. They will get you through so much.
This leads me to #5. The fifth step: I accepted.
It happened. I finally accepted what transpired. I flopped. It was time to decide what was next. How would I handle this moving forward? What would I do? Did this change anything?
I had to accept it in order to go anywhere. If I didn’t accept that hey, this happened, then I was going to stay in a loop of mourning, denial, freaking out. So I had to accept it.
The Sixth step was that I learned.
Oh finally!
This was a great step, right? I finally, finally was in a headspace where I could learn from what transpired.
I analyzed what worked, what didn’t. I discovered where I was struggling and why it wasn’t MEANT to be. Not then. It wasn’t the right time for me or my business. And that was important to recognize.
And then it meant determining what was. What was right for my business? What was right moving forward?
What did I need to learn from this event?
There were a lot of mindfulness sessions here. A lot of journaling. Lot of lot of journaling. Lots of contemplating. Listening to podcasts, listening to books, lots of ruminating.
And then finally, I reached the seventh step: moving forward.
This is the best step. The hardest step. And you really can’t move forward until you’ve done, I think, all the others, because you’re not going to be true to yourself.
This step is rooted in a few things:
1. What I do want?
2. Why do I want it?
3. How I want to do it?
I needed to learn the lessons from this experience.
In order to properly move forward, I needed to figure out where I was going. Where was I moving to? What was forward? What was ahead of me? What was I reaching for?
And why?
Did I truly know why I was doing this? Why I was running this business? Why I was creating something new for people? Did I truly know what that could look like? I had to really dig deep (and psst, stay tuned because unearthing your why is our next episode because I think it’s super essential as a writer!) so I really dug deep and finally, I connected to my why. I knew.
Once I tapped into my why¸—why I am even trying to run this business in the first, why I created what I did, why it didn’t work, and then why I want to continue to do something else. Once I tapped into that, I also became unwavering in moving forward again.
Yes, I had flopped. I had done it many times before. This one hit me hard. But it wasn’t until I really and truly understood why I wanted to try again that I felt that I was able to try again.
Once I knew my why, I knew I wanted to go forward. I knew what forward looked like. And also I knew that failure would be in my future again. And I’d be ready for it. Because continuing forward means knowing I’ll hit traction. Lots and lots of traction.
But the need to do so outweighs my fear of it happening again.
I need to move forward. Because I understand why.
And then I determined my how. Which you’ll hear a bit more about soon in upcoming episodes.
So now? I’m freaking grateful for my failure this year. I thought it was the end of Coach McCoach. I honestly thought—sigh—Ill just go get a job, somewhere else, doing something else, I’m going to have no passion in it, but it’s going to keep my family afloat, and that is very important.
But it kind of hurt my soul.
Okay, it hurt my soul so much.
I was not ready for that. I’m not ready for that. I don’t want that. I know why I created the Book Edit Collab in the first place, and I know why I’m moving forward and what that’s going to look like—it’s taken time to figure that out—and how I can best serve authors, like you.
So, I’m very excited for the future.
And I’m very grateful for the failure this year, and all of them—which are many—that came before.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt more tapped into my determination to move forward. My bones shake with the need to move forward.
You will get there too.
If you are struggling. Try a few of these steps—or all, ideally all—and then deep down, you’ll know you’ll make it through it.
You’ll get through. Then I want you to come back and let me know: what does that look like for you?
If you’re struggling, if you’re maybe in the “What is my why stage?” and you really need to find it, then listen to our episode next week, that is all going to be about you why. I’m going to give you quite a few exercises that are really going to help you tap into that.
In upcoming episodes, I’ll be providing exercises and strategies to help you do some of these things on a more practical level. So be sure to subscribe and continue to listen in every Wednesday.
But before I go, let’s just recap.
Failing is not the problem.
We are all going to fail at some point. Writers probably fail more than most…maybe. Writers feel the failure so deeply because it’s usually so personal since it’s our stories. It’s something we put all this passion in. That’s why I felt it so deeply, because this is my business, this is where my passion lies, and same with you.
So, when you do hit failure, because, you will, and it’s OK, come back to this episode, or write down these steps.
First, denial.
You don’t need to go through that one, but you probably will. I’m going to be real; you’re probably going to go through a little denial at first. Or anger.
And it’s going to be directed at everyone but yourself. Fair.
But then, maybe, you move into number two. Mourning. Grieve. Grieve what happened, allow yourself to feel it. Fell all the pain.
Third, you could probably skip this step. This was what was essential to me to whip my head around, I guess? Third was when I freaked out. I went doomsday on myself. And over exaggerated everything.
I am a little emotional. I’m a Cancer. We’re a very emotional people.
But, it was actually an important step because it helped me see where things could go if I accepted the failure and didn’t move forward.
If I said, yes I failed and that means I’m done: this was the version of like, well what does that look like? So, maybe you do need a little doomsday path/freak out.
Four was I talked to my circle and I’m telling you this is the most important thing you need to do. Is to talk to people who get it. And I mean people who understand what it’s like to be going through what you’re going through. Someone who has gotten agent rejections over and over. Or someone who has gotten a bunch of bad reviews.
Others have been there before you and gotten through it and you will too. So talk to your circle. And if you don’t have that circle, start building it now.
And then five, accept. Acceptance is key.
Six, learn from your experience.
And then lastly, seven. Move forward.
Create your plan. What does moving forward look like and create your plan to do so.
And then before you know it, you’re going to be able to look back and say, “That was an experience I had. I’m not there anymore. I’m not in failure anymore. I am moving forward.”
I am so happy for you when you get there. And you will.
Okay, that is all I’ll leave you with today, writer.
Until next time, keep growing.
