Why Do I Feel Like a Failure When I’m Actually Just Learning?
While I was in a networking meeting with another leader Orit Krug in the sexual health field, we were talking about her work facilitating polyamory retreats and what she has learned from the people who attend them.
She told me there was one thing she kept hearing over and over again: “I’m failing at poly.”
People weren’t saying, “I’m learning how to navigate polyamory,” or “This is harder than I expected,” or even, “I don’t know how to do this yet.”
They were saying, “I’m failing.”
And I thought, "Oh my God. We are doing this everywhere."
I had just been in a room with business owners essentially saying the same thing: “I’m failing at business.”
Then today, I was at the doctor’s office, and my doctor was telling me about moments when she says something to a patient and the patient interprets it differently than she intended. Her mind can immediately go to questioning herself: "Did I do something wrong? Did I fail here?"
And then, of course, there was me.
This morning, I was filling out another speaker application. I’m trying to grow this part of my career. I’ve been hired for some things and not hired for others. I’m not yet making the amount of money from speaking that I ultimately want to make.
Do you know where my brain went?
“I’m failing at speaking.”
Well, shit. Apparently we’re all failing.
Or maybe we have fundamentally misunderstood what learning is supposed to feel like.
Why Does Learning Feel So Much Like Failure?
I think many of us have been taught a shame-based model of learning. You try something. You don’t immediately know how to do it. You make a mistake. You feel anxious. Something doesn’t work. Instead of your brain saying, "Interesting. I’m learning," it says, "What the hell is wrong with me?"
Then comes the shame spiral:
"I should know this already."
"Other people are better at this than I am."
"Maybe I’m not cut out for this."
"Why can’t I figure this out?"
"I’m a failure."
Now, instead of spending your energy actually learning, you have to spend half of it recovering from the emotional ass-kicking you just gave yourself. You have to climb all the way out of I’m a failure before you can get back to "Okay, what happened? What can I learn from this? What should I try next?"
It’s too damn hard to learn that way. We have to make learning easier.
One of the most important things I have learned through my work with the nervous system is that confidence is not where learning begins. In fact, think about almost anything you have ever learned to do. The learning path looks much more like this:
Anxious → Awkward → Familiar → Competent → Confident
Confidence comes at the end. Yet we keep expecting ourselves to begin there.
Of course you’re anxious when you’re starting something new. Of course it feels awkward. Of course you don’t know exactly what you’re doing yet. That isn’t evidence that something has gone wrong. That is the learning path.
The problem isn’t necessarily that we feel anxiety. It's that we experience the normal anxiety of learning and then shame ourselves for having it.
Now we’re anxious about being anxious.
We feel awkward and decide the awkwardness means we aren’t good at it.
We make a mistake and turn that mistake into evidence about who we are.
That’s when learning becomes unnecessarily expensive, not just financially but neurologically and emotionally.
There Is a Better Way to Learn
I’ve spent years developing and teaching my Mind, Body, Heart, Soul, Spirit model through my work with couples, sexual health, the nervous system, and now business. The Mind stage starts with something that sounds deceptively simple: Be kinder and gentler with yourself. Stay curious. Cultivate a beginner’s mindset. And have some damn fun.
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I know this matters because I’ve tested both ways of learning in my own life. I know what happens when I learn through shame, and I know what happens when I learn through curiosity.
When I can stay in a healthier nervous-system state, I learn exponentially faster. I tell myself:
"It’s okay to not know things."
"It’s okay to be learning."
"It’s okay that this feels awkward."
"What can I learn from this?"
"What happens if I try something different?"
I also become far more creative. I experiment. I make connections I wouldn’t have made otherwise. I come up with strategies that would never occur to me while I’m busy trying to prove that I’m not a failure.
And when I add play and actually let myself have fun while I’m figuring something out, holy shit, that’s when things get interesting. I push myself further. I think outside the box. I become willing to test ideas that might not work because every experiment no longer has to become a referendum on my worth as a human being.
There are real dollars attached to learning this way. There are real business outcomes attached to learning this way. There are relationship outcomes attached to learning this way. And there is simply a better quality of life on the other side of it.
It’s Okay to Not Know Things
I actually made a YouTube video about this exact idea because it has become such an important lesson in my own life: It’s Okay to Not Know Things.
We need permission to not know things again. We are living in one of the strangest periods in human history. We have more information available at our fingertips than almost any humans who have ever lived, and somehow that incredible access to knowledge seems to have created an expectation that we should already know everything.
If the answer is searchable, if there’s a YouTube video about it, if somebody wrote a book about it, then why haven’t you figured it out yet?
Because knowing and doing are not the same thing.
That came up in my conversation with Orit Krug, too.
We’re sex therapists. We know a lot of the things people are “supposed” to do. That doesn’t mean we effortlessly execute every healthy behavior in our own lives.
Knowing isn’t doing. Reading isn’t practicing. Understanding isn’t integrating. Information isn’t experience.
You can intellectually understand every single step and still have to awkwardly walk through each one. That’s true in polyamory. It’s true in monogamy. It’s true in marriage. It’s true in parenting. It’s true in medicine. It’s true in business. It’s true when you’re trying to become a speaker. It’s true when you’re trying to do almost anything you have never done before.
Your Mistakes Are Part of the Curriculum
This is the part I keep having to practice myself. I have worked hard on changing the way I learn, and I can still fall straight back into shame-based learning. I did it this morning when my brain told me, "I’m failing at speaking."
But throughout the morning, I kept getting these little touchpoint reminders from other human beings who were wrestling with exactly the same thing.
Nope. I’m learning.
I’m applying. I’m testing. I’m getting some opportunities and not getting others. I’m discovering what works and what doesn’t. I’m becoming more familiar with an industry I’m still learning how to navigate. I’m developing competence. I’m collecting information. I’m making connections. I’m adjusting my strategy. I’m still on the learning path.
And that’s when it hit me: Somewhere right now, someone is saying, "I’m failing at polyamory." Someone else is saying, "I’m failing at marriage." Or, "I’m failing at parenting," "I’m failing at business, "I’m failing at my career," "I’m failing at dating." Someone is saying exactly what I said this morning: "I’m failing at speaking."
Every human being is probably walking around right now believing they’re a failure somewhere.
But what if a significant percentage of us aren’t failing?
What if we’re fucking learning?
That doesn’t mean mistakes don’t matter. It doesn’t mean toxic positivity, or telling yourself everything is wonderful when it clearly isn’t. Sometimes something didn’t work, or you made the wrong decision, or you hurt somebody and need to apologize. Sometimes you need more skills or to completely change your strategy. Sometimes the data really is telling you that something isn’t working.
But none of those things require shame.
Instead of immediately asking, "What is wrong with me?" we can learn to ask:
"What am I learning?"
"What don’t I know yet?"
"What is this experience teaching me?"
"What could I test next?"
"How could I approach this with curiosity?"
"And is there any way I could make this more fun?"
I know what happens when I can stay there because I’ve touched it, tasted it, and experienced it. When I stay on the path of self-compassion, kindness, curiosity, beginner’s mind, and play, my learning accelerates. My creativity expands. I push myself further. I come up with ideas I didn’t know existed.
My business gets better. My relationships get better. My life gets better.
That doesn’t mean I never return to the old shame-based way of learning. I practiced that one for most of my life. Of course my nervous system still knows the route.
The difference is that now I’m learning another route, too.
Maybe that’s the point.
You don’t have to know everything. You don’t have to feel confident yet. You don’t have to skip the anxiety or the awkward part. Anxiety may actually be evidence that you are standing at the beginning of a new learning curve, not evidence that you don’t belong on it.
So maybe the next time your brain says, "I’m failing at this," you can interrupt it long enough to ask a different question:
"Am I actually failing, or am I just fucking learning?"
Because when we stop turning every damn mistake into evidence that something is wrong with us, we make learning easier. And when we can stay on the side of kindness, curiosity, self-compassion, and play long enough to keep learning?
The sky’s the limit.
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