Overcoming Perfectionism: Mindset Shifts to Move Beyond Fear of Failure

Episode 5: Show Notes and Full Transcript

Perfectionism Is Holding You Back—Here’s How to Break Free

Episode Overview 

Perfectionism. Fear of failure. The pressure to get it right the first time.

These patterns keep even the most accomplished women playing small.

In this episode of Better Than This, Meghan French Dunbar shares a very public failure she’s never talked about before—and how it became a turning point in her relationship with risk.

You’ll walk away with three practical tools to help you loosen perfectionism’s grip, take bolder action, and move forward with more clarity and courage.

In This Episode, We Explore:

• Why perfectionism is especially common among high-achieving women
• How the brain processes fear—and how to shift it
• The hidden power of failing publicly
• How to reframe failure as growth
• A mindset shift (EFWO) to help you take risks more confidently

Resources 

•  One research study that found that women have higher rates of perfectionism
• Carol Dweck's research on mastery or learning goals versus performance goals
• Research continues to show that neuroplasticity and resilience are actually strengthened by doing hard things

Favorite Quotes

"Most of the things that we want to do in our life are going to require us to put ourselves out there and risk 'failing.'"

“Beyond things like not applying for jobs or not speaking up in meetings, having this persistent fear of failure and desire to be perfect at everything often holds us back from the things that we actually really want to do. It holds us back from taking risks that could be the difference between a mediocre existence and the existence that we want to have in this short time we have here on the planet.”

"Being a perfectionist and having this incessant fear of failure often gives us the illusion of safety, but we're actually just playing small, right? It doesn't protect us, it stunts us. It holds us back from building the life that we actually want." 

“Whatever is meant for me won’t pass me by.” 

Join the Conversation:

Listen on Apple, Spotify, or other streaming platforms. Tag @meghanfrenchdunbar on Instagram or LinkedIn and use the hashtag #BetterThanThisPodcast to share your thoughts. I read every message. 

💛 Loved the episode?

Please take a moment to rate and review the show. It helps new listeners discover the show—and join the movement to build something better than this. And if you know someone who'd benefit from this episode, please send it their way. 

Better Than This, Episode #5: Full Transcript*

(*this transcript is lightly edited for readability, but as close to verbatim as possible)

Meghan French Dunbar (00:58)

Today's episode is inspired by a recent conversation I had with my quote “mentee,” and I put her mentee title in quotation marks here because she's really just someone that I adore who asked me to be her mentor and I was like I guess we can do that but really I just adore you and we bring value to each other so let's meet on a regular basis in a mutual appreciation society where we talk anything we want to.

One of her questions recently, she asked me how I overcame my fear of failure, especially doing things like launching a magazine and public speaking and all of the things that I've kind of put out that are in a more of a public facing way. How did I overcome crippling perfectionism and the need to 100% guarantee success at everything that I did? And I was like, “Oh, Maddie, I wish that I could say that came easy. It did not. Do I have a story for you.” 

So after she and I had this conversation, I was like, I think this is a great podcast topic because it's something that impacts so many people that I talk to. A perfectionist personality that leads to a crippling fear of failure, making it so many people don't pursue specific things that they want in their life. And when I talked to Maddie about my story here. We, of course, referenced some of the stuff that I talked about in the achievement episode, I think it was episode three. 

I grew up as a high achiever. I mean, from when I was like eight, I'm winning awards and wanting to be the best at the class and captain of the soccer team and basketball team and blah, blah, blah, blah. And as I get older and graduate college, this high-achievement, ambitious personality leads me to a place where I am pretty terrified of failure. I am a perfectionist. Everything that I do, I need to be the best at. I of course need to prove to everyone that everything that I do turns to gold and I'm just the best at the best of the best. And it made it so I was essentially terrified of taking risks like my entire 20s. I never did anything new because I hated of course learning something for the first time and not being perfect at it immediately.

I all of a sudden started becoming very risk averse. So this changes at the end of my 20s in a number of ways that we'll talk a little bit about today. But one of the key ones is when I have the idea with my co-founder to launch a business magazine about conscious and sustainable business, we have to, in order to get this thing off the ground, launch a crowdfunding campaign. 

So we literally set up in my backyard, we make our little video explaining why the world needs this incredible business magazine to celebrate the founders and leaders of businesses that are actually making the world a better place. We put it up on Kickstarter, we want to raise $50,000. We have 30 days to do it. And with the way that Kickstarter worked at the time, if we didn't raise the full $50,000 in the 30 day time period, we would lose all of the money that we had raised. Like talk about stress and pressure. And just to make it more painful, this was a very public thing, right? In order to make this successful, I have to make the video in the Kickstarter campaign and then send it out to every human being I've ever known in the history of my life to ask for money. I'm putting it on social media. We have to bring attention to the campaign in order to hopefully make it successful.

I was pretty terrified. This was probably one of the bigger risks I had taken in my life. And it was just a reputational risk, right? It was just a social judgment risk that people would see me fail if we didn't accomplish this. So as the 30 days are progressing, $10,000, $30,000, we're seeing more and more and more come in. We’re doing cute little things, doing random acts of kindness in the community to bring attention to the campaign. We have like $42,000 on the last day. And I'm like, of course, there's gonna be a Hollywood script here. Some random aunt that I've never even met is gonna throw in the last $8,000 at the final minute. Hail Mary, and we're gonna get it over the finish line and everything's gonna be perfect. 

And as we're getting closer and closer to the deadline, we're getting a little bit more nervous. In the final five minutes, no one else has thrown in the money. And in the last two minutes of the Kickstarter campaign, I'm sitting with my co-founder at her house. It starts counting down by the second, like a bomb is about to go off. And we get to the five, four, three, two, one, and then like the screen flashes. I don't even remember what it said, but it pretty much might have just said, “You failed! Like you failed very publicly and you're a terrible human being as a result of failing at this thing!” Oh my gosh. I was mortified. 

My family's calling me and like checking in if I'm okay and I'm sobbing. so as my co-founder and I process the epic failure of this public crowdfunding campaign. After I do that, I go home and I'm with my husband. My dad comes up, very cute. He like brings me a box of little goodies to help me overcome my failure. And of course, I'm gonna just move on and hopefully get a real job now, right? That is not what happened. 

I decided to dust myself off with my co-founder a few weeks later, and launch another crowdfunding campaign. We went to the same people who had bought into this Kickstarter campaign. We did it on Indiegogo and we chose the option of, we're just going to raise the money, whatever money we get, we'll take. So I think we raised like $20,000 or so, which is just enough to hire a designer, cover the print bill, and get all the distribution for this magazine up and going. And on January 1st, 2015, because of that crowdfunding campaign, we got picked up by every Whole Foods in the world. And all of sudden, this cute little crowdfunding project turned into a serious business. 

So, I'm telling Maddie this around publicly failing, and one of the things that I brought up to her was, like my story shows, most of the things that we want to do in our life are going to require us to put ourselves out there and risk “failing.” It's not that I've just completely overcome my perfectionism; it's that I have a lot of practice with these things at this point, and I have some tools that have helped me along the way. 

And that is what we're gonna talk about today, the perfectionism trap. How do we overcome our fear of failure? And what are three concrete strategies and mindset shifts that have helped many of the people that I know who have pursued epic, extraordinary things and taken huge risks to overcome that fear of failure and that concern about being perfect at all times? Sound good? Cool, cool. Let's do it. 

Why So Many High-Achieving Women Struggle With Perfectionism 

[08:00]

So, our first topic is digging in a little bit more into the context around perfectionism and fear of failure, especially with high-achieving women. So, for me, and I think for many women this is true, this is generalization of course, not saying all women, but many women, growing up in societies where there's a patriarchal lens on the societies in which we're growing up in, girls are socialized to seek perfection in all things, right? Unattainable physical perfection. Social perfection, where we don't want to make mistakes. We don't want to churn the water. We need to make people around us comfortable. There's this socialized perfectionism in young girls as we come of age. 

And then when you’re high-achieving, there's again, you don't wanna fail at anything that you try. You want to prove that you're the best. This extrinsic motivation of rewards and grades and all the things that were indoctrinated our whole lives that we can't make any mistakes, right? 

And then for women specifically, when we get into the business world, we're held to higher standards, our work is doubted, we're ignored, we're overlooked, we're judged more harshly. We're kind of proven incompetent until proven otherwise, and so we have to avoid mistakes at all costs. We have to overperform, go the extra mile. And we begin tying our worth to our performance and our ability to never make a mistake. Because oftentimes as you're ascending the ladder, you're maybe one of the first women who's ever been in this role. So you almost feel this pressure that if you make a mistake, it reflects poorly on women everywhere. So our fear of any misstep or any failure or anything less than perfect is this sense of self-protection or self-preservation. At some point, we just can't accept anything less than perfect. 

How Perfectionism Holds You Back 

[10:11]

There's one research study that found that women have higher rates of perfectionism, while they also have lower rates of self-esteem and higher levels of stress about their performance. Surprising nobody. And this is why we hear many of the statistics that you've probably already heard or experienced around women not applying for roles unless they feel they're 100% qualified when men will easily apply for roles if they're 50% qualified. This also shows up as women holding back their voice or not answering questions or saying, “I don't know if this makes sense” or “I don't know if this is right, but,” or “I don't know if this is a stupid thing to add, but”— just these qualifiers that diminish our contributions because we're not 100% confident that they are perfect. Yeah, you've probably heard of this or experienced it and there's layers and reasons why we feel this way. 

A lot of what I have learned or am cultivating currently as I get older and older is the ability to just have self-compassion. I see that fear and I understand why I'm feeling it because a lot of this has been conditioned in me. What would it look like to step into that opportunity or say the thing without it being 100% “perfect.” It's a lot of what I've been experimenting with lately. Even on this podcast, not every single episode is going to be perfect and that has to be okay.

Beyond things like not applying for jobs or not speaking up in meetings, all of the things that I just detailed, having this persistent fear of failure and desire to be perfect at everything often holds us back from the things that we actually really want to do. It holds us back from taking risks that could be the difference between a mediocre existence and the existence that we want to have in this short time we have here on the planet. 

One of my friends, we were talking a few years ago, and she lives in a small community, and she had talked to me about this business idea that she had. And it wasn't even like I had a little business idea, she detailed key components of this. Like, she'd been thinking about it for a while. The value proposition was there. The need from the community was there. I was like, “Damn, this seems like something you're really passionate about!” And she's like, “I really am. I don't know.” And I said, “Well, what's holding you back?” And she said, “Just risk intolerance.” And I was like, “Well, I have been there. I've done it. Like, let me tell you.” And she's like, “No, like I don't have any risk tolerance. I can't do this.”

She had already talked herself out of pursuing the thing that she actually wants to do and continues to be at a job that she doesn't love as a result. And there's so many situations like this where in order to pursue the things that will actually make you happy or help you flourish in life, you have to make a change to your life, whether it's quitting a job or launching a business or starting a side gig or pursuing something that you're passionate about or going back to school or switching industries. We get this internal story at some point that we're too old to put ourselves out there anymore. And the more and more we get comfortable with just staying in a comfort zone and never putting ourselves in a situation that might not work out the way that we want it to because we have to control every single part of it in order for our little perfectionist brains to be at all comfortable. So we just relegate ourselves to staying in a mediocre job or something that we actively dislike that makes us miserable because we convince ourselves that taking a risk isn't worth it. And yes, taking risk factors into account needs to be done, considering something from all angles, it's a great idea, 100%. But being 100% risk intolerant isn't realistic. 

Being a perfectionist and having this incessant fear of failure often gives us the illusion of safety, but we're actually just playing small, right? It doesn't protect us, it stunts us. It holds us back from building the life that we actually want. I can't tell you how many people that I have talked to, Eileen Fisher, Jane Wurwand the co-founder of Dermalogica—every single one of these women who I know who are thriving, running businesses that they love or have written the book that they want or out public speaking, they are just living the life that is absolutely setting their soul on fire—there is not one of them who didn't have to put themselves out there and risk failing not once, but multiple times. So becoming comfortable with failure and becoming comfortable with things not being perfect is in fact a key tool for you to be able to flourish as a human being.

To illustrate this point, we're going to hear one of my favorite entrepreneurial stories coming from Erin Wade.

Entrepreneur Erin Wade’s Story 

(15:30)

Erin Wade: I did get a job working for a large corporate firm making a shit-load of money, defending America's largest companies from lawsuits. I really hated it and I was miserable. Your time is measured by the minute. It is billed to the client every six minutes and your success is defined honestly, not so much by the outcome for the client as much as how much you bill to the client and for the company. And it's just a really demoralizing way to live. I think it just felt like being on a hamster wheel to nowhere.  

So, not surprisingly, I was not great at it. Every time a partner would ask me to like work later or stay on a weekend, I was like, hell no. I was like the last person to raise my hand. And at some point, they were like, “You know, this is a recession, we could hire anyone we want to do this, to be making a lot of money.” So ,I got let go. It was a real awakening because I had always been a big overachiever and had never failed so spectacularly, honestly. I was fired literally because I didn't care. It's a pretty bad feeling to get fired. 

I sort of thought about where I wanted to go and I had never let go of that love of restaurants. And I honestly had thought I’d just be a lawyer for a decade and make enough money and open one one day. I was like, “You know what, what am I doing? I don't have kids, I don't have a house, I don't have anything to lose here. Why not take a risk and open a restaurant that I had sort of dreamed of opening?” 

I feel so grateful because even though I went into business out of a love of food, the thing I actually fell in love with was business itself. At the end of the day, I think a lot of that drive to do good in the world that had led me to becoming an attorney, I felt like I could do so much more of that in business than I ever could as a lawyer. I think by creating the company you want to create, you create the world you want to create. It's a little microcosm of whatever your values are and whatever values you want to see in the world. I found tremendous meaning and joy in that. 

(17:42)

Meghan French Dunbar: As Erin illustrated here, if she had let her fear of failure stand in the way of launching her dream restaurant, she'd probably still be toiling away as a partner in some gigantic corporate law firm with the golden handcuffs on and probably have a decent amount of money, but be fairly miserable in her life.

This is the story of so many people that I have talked to and why it's so critical to overcome this incessant need to be perfect at everything and control everything and be terrified of failure. So we're going to get into three specific mindset shifts and practices for you to be able to work yourself beyond any sort of risk aversion, fear of failure, perfectionism, and hopefully begin building the capacity to put yourself out there a little bit more. 

And as I mentioned at the top, when my mentee, Maddie, asked me how I overcame my fear of failure, like how am I just totally comfortable putting myself out there? I was like, I'm still not, but I have specific mindset shifts and tools that I've used, and that's what we're going to talk about today. 

Mindset Shift 1: Normalizing Failure and Playing Out the Worst-Case Scenario 

[19:00]

So our first one is normalizing fear and understanding why it's happening and playing it out to its worst case scenario.

Neuroscience continues to tell us that our brains perceive social threats and physical threats very similarly. Essentially, our brains can't really tell the difference between the fear of being socially rejected or failing publicly, like my crowdfunding campaign. We experience that fear in our body of that social threat the same way that we would if we were walking in a crosswalk and saw that all of a sudden a car is coming careening at us. That physical sense of fear that we have, our brain has a really hard time differentiating between the two.

Once I understood this dynamic, it helped me realize that when I experience fear around failure or not doing something perfectly or something not going according to plan, that it's not a personal failing or a weakness. It's literally my adorable little brain trying to protect me.

When we understand the neurological response that's happening in our brain and say this isn't actually scary. This isn't actually a physical threat. It's just my brain not being able to distinguish between the two things, and it helps to normalize the fear. Oftentimes we just feel the fear and so we shy away from the thing, right? I feel the fear of doing this crowdfunding campaign, so absolutely not, I'm not gonna do it. I feel the fear of applying for this job, of quitting my job, of starting a side hustle. All of these things, you feel the instinct of fear that's trying to protect you, and you use that as an excuse to not do the thing. But in this practice, we feel that fear, and once you realize, okay, it's just trying to protect me, but it's actually not a real thing, right? You're not in harm's way right now. You can work to release it and normalize it as just something that happens and something to move beyond. It's going to happen pretty much every time you try something new and the more you practice it the less fear you might feel but it still comes up. It's just how our brains are working.

One of the tools to help normalize this is to play your fear out all the way. This is Erin Wade talking about how a friend helped her do this.

(21:24)

Erin Wade: I had a really helpful conversation with a friend of mine actually when I was sort of reflecting on whether I should try to keep working as an attorney or open this restaurant. And I was really afraid at the time of losing all my savings and failing. 

And she was like, “Well, Erin, what would you do if that happened?” 

And I was like, “Well, I guess I'd just be a lawyer again.” 

And she was like, “So then why would you literally settle for what’s your worst case scenario if you failed as an entrepreneur? Like, why would you immediately go to the worst case scenario?”

And I was like, “Fuck, she's right.” I just was really questioning whether I should do the worst case scenario, I think in large part because of that feeling that I had this sunk cost. It was going to be embarrassing. How was I going to explain this to people? I think at the end of the day, I mean, it's so cliche, but you do only live once. And I just kept thinking like, you know, the day I die, if I looked back on this moment, I’d really regret just staying the course.

(22:27)

Meghan French Dunbar: This practice of extrapolating your fear and taking it out to its worst-case scenario, it helps that fear lose its power. When you ground it into something specific and keep playing it out, “Then what would happen and then what would happen and then what would happen?” All of a sudden you realize (1) some of the stories that you might be completely making up to rationalize why you're avoiding taking the big risk or (2) the failure that you're worried about, when you make it specific, what you're actually worried about loses power because you realize it's really not that big of a deal. 

This was the tool that I used to help me launch the crowdfunding campaign because someone asked me, “What is the worst-case scenario?” And I'm like, okay, worst case scenario is literally what happened. We raise a bunch of money publicly in front of friends and family and everyone I know on social media. And then we fail on the campaign and everyone pities me and sees that I didn't do something. Okay. And so what does that mean? That I'm embarrassed. That…yeah, there's no substance to that. Like, okay, so you feel a little embarrassed for a little bit and then you move on. 

When I actually grounded it, it's not like people were going to take to the internet and shame me or my future employer was gonna look at this and be like, “Ooh, I saw you had a crowdfunding campaign fail in 2014, so I'm not actually gonna hire you.” Like, it has no material consequence on my life except for I wasted a few months of my life trying this thing. If I hadn't tried the crowdfunding campaign and just let this idea go that I was incredibly passionate about, I would have wondered about that for the rest of my life. I went ahead and did it, we failed, the worst thing that I could imagine came to bear, and, okay, it kind of sucked for a few days and then we figured it out anyway. 

Play your fear out all the way to the worst case scenario of what it is that you actually are afraid of or what do you think could happen here? And especially if it's like, “I would be embarrassed,” that's not a good enough reason for you not to do something. So that's practice number one, normalizing the fear and playing it out to its worst case scenario.

Mindset Shift #2: Use Learning-Focused Goals and Lean Into Your Growth

(24:53)

Practice number two is really focusing on growth. I'm going to just praise Carol Dweck. She's probably gonna come up many, many, many times. Stanford psychologist and she's done a ton of pioneering work on growth mindset. This research that she did specifically on growth mindset, on what she calls mastery or learning goals versus performance goals is something that has completely changed my life. 

So performance-based goals are what so many of us are used to, and they're very closely tied to extrinsic motivation, which we talked a lot about in episode three. Performance goals are things like getting the A in the class, getting an award, getting a promotion, getting a bonus— things where you're feeling like you're proving your competence to others or in relation to others, avoiding judgment and wanting some sort of external validation or extrinsic motivation. I, like a lot of us are, was raised based on performance goals, right? You have to get the straight A's and be the best in the class and all of the things are about performance goals. 

On the other hand, growth or mastery or learning goals are focused on doing something because it helps you increase a competence in some area, helps you learn, improve, and grow. It's more rooted in intrinsic motivation, of doing something for the deep inherent satisfaction of actually becoming more competent at something or learning something new. And the famous example that Dweck always talks about is the difference between “I want to get an A in French” versus “I want to learn French.” The two of those things are very different.

While I was writing this book and geeking out about performance goals versus mastery goals, my friend Katie calls me. She's in the middle of her MBA program and she's very stressed. She is working full time. She works in oncology. She's a nurse navigator. She helps people navigate the journey of being diagnosed with cancer. She’s an extraordinary human being. She's doing her full-time MBA and she has two children under the age of nine. So she calls me, she's very stressed out and I'm asking her what's giving her stress about her MBA program and she's talking to me about her accounting class. 

She's like, “I hate it so much. I've gotten such great grades in my entire MBA program but this damn accounting class like, I know that I'm not getting an A. I'm studying late into the night and then it's making it so I'm not getting enough sleep, so when I go to my work I'm really tired.” And 

I'm like, “Katie, Katie, Katie, like back up, slow down. Why do you need an A in accounting?” Because she's a high achiever and performance based goals have always been how she's, you know, determined herself worth. 

She's like, “I've gotten straight A's this entire MBA program. I just need it.” 

And I was like, “Let me tell you about performance goals versus mastery goals. What if we reframed this from ‘I need an A in accounting’ to ‘I just need to learn accounting.’ It doesn't matter what the grade is. I just need to be competent in accounting so that in the future when I use this tool, (she wants to be moving up into a kind of director of operations level role at these oncology centers), that you know the basics of accounting? Are you going to be an accountant? No! You have no desire to do that. You just need to learn and be competent in this thing.” 

She said she literally put “learning goal” up behind her computer and she said it took all of the stress and pressure off of the accounting class. I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an incredible tool. Let's dive in a little bit more about the research on this.

One of the things that Carol Dweck found was that people who have performance-based goals or primarily performance-based goals, tend to have fixed mindsets—believing that they're not really capable of additional growth or development of themselves. They tend to avoid challenging situations, sound familiar? And they're shown to be less resilient in the face of adversity. They often have a greater fear of failure. Makes sense.

On the other hand, Dweck found that people who have learning or mastery-based goals, more often than not, have growth mindsets. They believe that they can get better at things, that they can improve, that there's not some fixed level of intelligence that they're stuck with. They're interested in continual improvement and learning. And as a result, they tend to be more resilient, especially in the face of challenge. They have higher risk tolerance, and they're not as afraid of failure.

This is Carol Dweck, she says, “In the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience, but it doesn't define you. It's a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from…The other thing exceptional people seem to have is a special talent for converting life's setbacks into future successes.” 

Taking this and distilling it down,the long and the short of it is that the more you put yourself out there and have new experiences, the more you're going to learn and the more you're going to grow. Research continues to show that neuroplasticity and resilience are actually strengthened by doing hard things, by challenging ourselves, by putting ourselves at risk of failure and even the failure itself. It helps us strengthen our problem-solving skills and our creativity. It helps us grow and learn and develop. It's one of the better ways to bring this deep, rich texture to your life of having new experiences and constantly developing and evolving into a different version of yourself. 

So just putting this into practice and seeing how it looks, an example that I have is writing the book that I just wrote. The statistics on writing a book, when you really look into what it takes to get a publishing deal and an agent and the whole thing, I would say the odds are not in your favor. It's really hard to get an agent right now. It's really hard to get a publishing deal, to be a New York Times bestseller. It takes tons of investment and external resources, all the things. And when I first wrote my book proposal, I felt excited about trying something new. I felt like I had all of this wisdom and knowledge that I really wanted to share, that I gleaned from all these incredible business leaders. And then I looked at the statistics, which are pretty much performance goals, right? What type of book deal I'm going to get, what type of advance, how high my advance is, if I have any shot of making any sort of bestseller list. When I started looking at those and thinking about how hard it would be to do those specific performance-based goals, I started convincing myself that I couldn't do this and that it wasn't worth it. 

At the time I had been writing this proposal, I had seen Dweck's research and was like, “What if I change these into learning-based goals? What if I, instead of, ‘I want to write a book, get a publishing deal, and become a best seller.’ What if my goal is ‘I want to have the experience of writing a book. I want to have the education that I get from learning by interviewing the incredible people I would get to talk to as a result of writing a book, and of the experience of writing a book.’ That's really cool.” All of a sudden, it becomes something to develop my own growth and development and that's my goal. I maybe want to impact some people's lives but I just want to see if I can do it. That's how I set my growth-based goal on the book, which is what helped me get over all the crippling statistics around how hard it would be to actually get a book published. I 100% probably would have given up if I hadn't set a learning base goal around the book. The entire reason that I was doing it was because I wanted to grow and develop and help other people learn as well. That's it. It takes the pressure off and all of a sudden failure doesn't become so scary. Right? 

Distilling this all down, the practice itself is focusing on noticing when you're setting performance-based goals, seeing if you can reestablish them as learning, mastery, or growth-related goals, and looking at everything that you're doing, all of the failure, anything that doesn't work out according to plan, as something to help you grow, learn, and develop— something that helps you build your resilience, strengthens your decision making, helps your neuroplasticity, helps your problem solving skills. It's just a tool. The more you do, the more things that you experience, the more you learn, grow, and develop. Period. 

Mindset Shift #3: EFWO

(34:13)

Practice number three, and this is my own little gem. This was actually developed when I had my previous company, Conscious Company Media. It's a handy little acronym called EFWO.

I am about to use a cuss word so apologies in advance, but EFWO stands for “everything fucking works out.” And this was kind of a survival based tool for a while but it turned into something that was very helpful for everyone on our team and something that I use to this day.

The foundation of EFWO is really that everything is happening for you, not to you. So many of the things that you perceive as “failure,” actually, later on down the road, you look back and those are the stepping stones that you needed to get to something else. 

Jane Wurwand, the co-founder of Dermalogica, had a bit of a different way of looking at it. This is how she talks about the EFWO theory.

Jane Wurwand’s Dot-to-dot Concept 

(35:11)

Jane Wurwand: I love this analogy of joining the dots up. You can't see what that dot-to-dot puzzle is until you start filling in the space between the dots. The dots were all there all the time, but you can't see what the hell it is until you start making the journey. If you could see it was a zebra, you wouldn't join up the dots. No point because you can see what it is.

It's that journey between the dots. So let's imagine our life is like a dot-to-dot puzzle. So it's all laid out. It's all right there. However, you'll never see it if you don't step, you know and you join them up in sequence. Like you can't just suddenly scribble all over the bloody place. You're not going to know what you're doing. You have to join them up in the order that they're written. Otherwise you don't see what it was meant to be. You might see something completely different. It's abstract, but it's not what it was actually put down for you. So that's how I think of my life.

(36:04)

Meghan French Dunbar: So whether it's stepping stones or dot-to-dot or however it works best in your brain, the idea is just trusting that every single thing that happens, even if you didn't want it to turn out that way, you will look back at some point and that thing will have either cleared the space for or given you enough wisdom or given you a connection or an insight or something that you need later on down the road in order to do something else. 

Specifically, I can put this into practice in so many elements of my life. The night I had the idea for launching a business magazine, I went home from that dinner and was fired from my job. It was the only time I'd ever been fired in my entire life. It was via email at one o'clock in the morning. And I, one, was very unfamiliar with failure. I was like, I don't even understand why this is happening. But I immediately saw it then, I was like, “Wait a second, if I'm being fired right now, maybe this is the universe or the powers that be telling me that I'm supposed to launch this print magazine about sustainable business.” That was a 24 hour turnaround on that one. And that's an extreme example of the EFWO theory in practice.

But I've also had other ones that have taken much longer for me to understand how it was happening for me and not to me. For example, during COVID, the company that had bought my company, because so much of our revenue and everything was based on in-person events, it just wasn't tenable to keep our organization open. So they closed Conscious Company Media. And about a year afterwards, I had a lot of people who'd been reaching out to me like, what happened? And I had a handful of investors reach out and say, "Why don't we try to buy it back?” So we put together a bit of a negotiating deal, like, hey, could we buy this back? And for a number of reasons, it just didn't work out. And I was super bummed out for a few months. It felt like everything that I was trying to do kept falling apart around me. And I didn't understand at the time. 

About a year after this, I realized that that was a door closing. It had to be closed for me so that I would have the space to have the idea for the book proposal. Had I bought my previous company back, who knows if it would have been successful, but I 100% would not have had the time, space, or energy to be able to think of the book proposal and get the book deal and write the dang book. And when I wrote the book, I was like, “This is the thing I was supposed to do!” I was so on fire and so passionate about it. It felt like I was doing the exact right thing. The failure of not being able to buy my previous company back was 100% happening for me. 

So no matter that it definitely feels disappointing in the moment, for sure, a lot of things take time to unfold and understand. When I took my book proposal out for the first time, I sent it to a small publisher who I had a friendly introduction to and I got rejected. If I hadn't gotten rejected from the smaller publisher though, I definitely wouldn't have taken the steps that I did to get my agent and reframe my book proposal. And then I got a much larger book deal at the third largest publishing group in the world. 

There's all these little things that you put yourself out there and you're terrified of failure and often the failure is going to happen but it's happening for you. It's giving you wisdom, it's giving you insights, it's giving you a connection. It's 100% closing a door so that another door is going to open later in the future. And the more that my team and I would lean into EFWO, it just took the stress and pressure off of things. We'd have a major advertiser pull out and we'd be like, “Maybe that's clearing the way for us to be able to think of a new revenue line that we need.” 

Every time something felt disappointing, when someone would call EFWO, we'd almost inevitably take the time to sit down and say, “What could this mean? Why could this be happening for us? What could we learn here? How could this be inspiring us to look at something from a new perspective? How could this be the catalyst that we need to try something different?”

And this is one of the tools that has really helped me throughout my career to put myself out there a bit more and take more risks, is that it's probably not going to go the way that I expect it to or want it to because there's so many things that you can't control in life. But however it works out is exactly how it's supposed to work out. It's going to unfold exactly as it's supposed to. 

There's a quote that I came across at some point in my career that said, “Whatever is meant for me won't pass me by”. This is the foundation of the EFWO theory—a helpful, cute little acronym that has really helped me move beyond my extreme risk aversion that I had earlier in my career to get to the point now where I put myself out there on a regular basis and risk failure quite often. And it's still uncomfortable, but using these particular tools of normalizing fear, playing it out to its worst case scenario, focusing on growth, setting learning and mastery goals, and solid EFWO, it's happening for me not to me, these always help me move beyond my fear of failure. 

As I wrap this up, I think my question to you would be, “If you removed the fear of failure from your life, if it was no longer an obstacle, what are the things that you would pursue? What would change? What would be different? How much richer or more textured would the quality of your life be if you could move beyond some of the fear of failure that you have? Could you move more toward a place of true flourishing and happiness and contentment? How much more could you grow and evolve? What new experiences might you have?” 

All of those things that could open up as a result releasing your fear of failure. All right, with that, I'll talk to you next time.