When it’s Good to “Be Bad”
I’ve had countless failures, and for too long I let them hold me back from pursuing my goals. This was really a reflection of my relationship with myself. The secret to shifting from victimhood to creating a powerful life of alignment rested in taking radical self-responsibility. Read on for my biggest takeaways and discoveries as a perfectionist who transformed her life from the inside out. (Hint: You can too!)
We all want the greatest successes in life - a healthy and beautiful body, financial security and wealth, powerful and meaningful relationships, a deep connection to your higher purpose.
Some people seem to have it all, and be able to create it with ease. So what’s holding you back? What has kept you from reaching your potential?
Life. Responsibilities. Failures. Setbacks. Lack of confidence. I used to feel like I could have it all, but now I feel like there’s no way to create all the things I want. So I’ve just… settled.
I get it. We’ve all experienced setback and had a dose of “reality” hit us. And most people let these lower their confidence and sometimes even give up completely on going for their dreams.
BUT THE GOOD NEWS IS, I’VE TOTALLY BEEN THERE.
AND I’VE MADE IT THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE.
I’ve had countless failures, and for waaaaay too many years, I let them hold me back from pursuing my goals. And really, this was a reflection of my relationship with myself.
The secret to my shift from being a victim of my circumstances to creating a powerful life of alignment and purpose rested in taking radical self-responsibility. And throughout this journey, I discovered things that can help you to transform your life from the inside out too.
Below are my biggest takeaways from my years spent as a perfectionist who let fear of failure get in between me and my successful and purpose driven life!
Getting it Wrong Never Felt So Right
I’m doing it all wrong:
I’m not showing up and being visible enough. I’m not an expert at writing and my website copy and posts aren't great. I was told not to use stock photos, but I only have an outdated photoshoot from 3.5 years ago to work with. And even in this photo - everything is wrong behind the scenes!
+ I was about 100lbs overweight (that’s over 7 stone), so my tummy has rolls and I can barely squeeze into my dress.
+ I burnt a huge iron-shaped hole in the other dress I was supposed to wear for the shoot while trying to iron it that morning at the hotel.
+ My makeup artist didn’t speak English, and I don’t speak French, so I couldn’t tell her that she drew on my massive eyebrows too big.
+ And the appointment went WAY over time and I missed my hair appointment. So my hair is terribly dirty for the shoot.
+ My nail appointment got cancelled the day of the shoot, so I have fake press on nails.
+ My taxi driver took me to the wrong location to meet my photographer, and my phone didn’t work in another country, so I could barely find her and panicked in the large Eiffel Tower crowd.
+ I was so broke financially during this trip that I bought my outfit, kept the tags on it, and returned all the pieces to H&M afterwards. (The total outfit was $60, but that felt like a million bucks at the time!)
+ To top it all off, my photographer’s assistant dropped an entire roll of film during this part of the photoshoot and we had to reshoot it all again.
+ And afterwards, I sprained my ankle while wearing heels right before a big event at the Ritz London the next day.
Talk about a mess! I was a walking example of being disempowered.
So why do I keep using these photos - showing my tummy rolls when I’ve lost half of that weight? Why do I keep writing bad copy and putting out mediocre posts? Why do I sometimes show up and speak my message when I’d rather hide away?
BECAUSE I GIVE MYSELF PERMISSION FOR THINGS
TO GO WRONG, AND STILL LOVE MYSELF.
I don’t have a perfect life - no one does, obviously. But I also don’t let it destroy me. I’ve worked for YEARS on my perfectionism, which still holds me back in perfection paralysis sometimes.
But I also know that there’s no way to be good at something, if I’m not first bad at it.
> Van Gogh produced countless bad paintings before he became good.
> Julia Child burnt her dinner more than once.
> Tom Hanks got rejected from auditions over and over.
But they kept going and didn’t let the failure stop them. And eventually, they got good.
If you can uncover the gem hidden within failure, that it’s shaping you into the successful master that you’re meant to become, then it’s only a matter of experience before you live out your Divine destiny.
After all - behind the scenes of this photoshoot I was falling apart at the seams, but the photos came out beautiful and graceful, and I am proud to show off who I am - the good, the bad, and the ugly.
It’s Good to be Bad
I heard this teaching recently, and it really hit home:
The first few times you poach an egg, you get scrambled egg soup. But until you’ve gone through enough scrambled eggs, you’ll never get to the poached egg.
Instead of being deathly afraid of getting it wrong, go ahead and get messy, suck at something, be bad and unsophisticated, don’t have it all mapped out before you start.
Being bad at your passion is a good thing. It means you’re one step closer to being good at it!
I remember when I first started my business, I had no idea what I was doing - just a general idea of how I wanted to help people and an inkling of what my business could become.
And my business went through some really bad times:
+ My very first website was a mess, and I only had one selfie and a bunch of pictures of peonies that I stole from google. I remember I didn’t even know what to put on the website, so I just had a few sentences about what I was kind of thinking about doing.
>> I was really BAD at having a message and putting it into a coherent form. I was scattered and didn’t really know what I was about yet.
+ My first business name was Sarah Liz Byrd (my middle name isn’t even Liz, it’s Elizabeth, which I thought was too long). Then I chose “Hello Lovely Life,” which was cute and catchy, but was really just mimicking what I saw others doing in the industry. It wasn’t true to me goals.
>> I changed who I was and how I represented myself to try to conform to some kind of expectation of what my name should sound like to others. I was BAD at being authentic to myself.
+ I was so broke at the same time that I was trying to teach on prosperity. I thought I had the mindset for it, but my life was in absolute shambles. I got a few first clients, but I didn’t serve them with quality content and work like I should have.
>> I carried guilt about my first clients for years. I was BAD at coaching and I was not living what I preached.
The list of how my business was failing over and over could go on for days…
So how could I continue on with running my business and not die of embarrassment? Well let me tell you, I DID die of embarrassment and hid for many years behind excuse after excuse.
See, growing from your failures rather than being destroyed by them comes down to: Taking responsibility for yourself.
And I wasn’t ready to do this when I was in a state of victimhood. And so, my badness was just that: BAD.
But then I started to develop a different relationship with myself and my failures - I relaxed the pressure to be perfect, and I started to get curious.
I had already figured out that putting pressure on myself to be perfect wasn’t going to get me the results I was looking for. It was just going to keep me feeling bad about myself.
But if I got curious about what was happening in my failures, I might learn something and start to shift.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
- Rita Mae Brown (Often misattributed to Albert Einstein)
And a shift is exactly what happened. Instead of preoccupied with how terrible I was because of my failures, I started to learn and get better.
And this subtle shift holds the key to all greatness:
BEING MORE INTERESTED IN LEARNING THAN BEATING MYSELF UP.
So, if you’re struggling with struggling, the biggest strategy to get unstuck is to get CURIOUS.
And that will be the difference between your BAD being a bad thing or a good thing!
Permission to Mess Up
Can we just pause the self-loathing for a minute and GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION to mess up??
I’ve made huge mistakes and carried the burden of regret for years.
I made bad investments, drained my bank accounts, defaulted my credit cards, and wrecked my credit for years to come.
I took out $100K in student loan debt for a degree in BUDDHISM. (Pre-2008 World Economy Collapse degree major decision.) I graduated in 2009, and immediately regretted my degree.
I stayed with partners well past the relationship expiration date.
I gave my power away to coaches looking for them to rescue me.
I burned bridges with countless friends because I was stuck in my own victimhood.
The list of things I regret could go on and on.
But what they DON’T do: Cause me to hate myself.
It’s perfectly normal to make mistakes and do things we regret. There’s not one human being, living or dead, who hasn’t made at least one regretful decision.
But the difference in letting it weigh on you or picking yourself back up and moving forward? The same difference between shame and guilt.
Shame says, “There’s something wrong with me. I’m a bad person because of this decision.”
Guilt says, “My behavior/decision had consequences I didn’t want to face. I feel bad for the way that turned out.”
Shame internalizes the regret into meaning something is wrong with you.
And guilt recognizes the decision-consequence relationship, but doesn’t make you wrong as a person.
Being able to understand the relationship between your behavior and the result is what it means to take responsibility. It’s actually a victim-mentality behavior to internalize your results as meaning something about who you are as a person (good or bad).
Bad Scenario:
Victim: I really messed up and got into all this debt. I can’t believe I was so stupid! I just need to buy this other course that will show me how to get rich quick so I can get out of this. That’ll save me!
Self-Responsibility: I messed up and got into this debt. It’s really scary but I’m confident that I can get myself out of this situation. What decisions did I make to get here, and what different decisions can I make to get out?
Good Scenario:
Victim: I made $Million in my business, so I’m a good person (even though I exploited people along the way).
Self-Responsibility: I made $Million in my business, but I experienced a LOT of failure and grew from them. AND I made it here with the support of others. I’m eager to share my experiences to give back and help others.
So what are the key qualities of living a life free from regret and self-loathing?
Taking responsibility for yourself
Knowing how to reflect on your behavior in the moment
Letting up on the self-judgement
Realizing that making mistakes is a natural part of the growth process
So give yourself, lovely, the permission to mess up!
Forgiveness Towards Yourself First
Learn to love yourself, not despite your mistakes, but because of them.
Your mess-ups, regrets, and the weight of shame that you’ve been carrying for years are holding you back from inner freedom, the vibrant body you’ve always wanted (science shows that there’s a link between our body and mental health), the meaningful relationships you’re yearning for, and the prosperity and abundance your worthy of.
So what’s the secret to unlocking these in your life? What power do you hold to make the inner shifts and start to liberate your most vibrant, aligned life?
THE SPIRITUAL F-WORD: FORGIVENESS.
And while starting with forgiving others is a powerful act in and of itself, the real key to a life of uninhibited power lies in forgiving yourself.
When you practice forgiveness towards yourself, you’re aligning with your higher truth, with your Divine purpose, and opening your heart to attuning with unconditional love.
Forgiving yourself for your past mistakes, your shame, your self-judgement, your failures, and your shortcomings is an act of taking responsibility, not in a punitive way, but in an embrace of self love.
So try the sacred Ho’Oponopono prayer with yourself and feel the weight of your burdens start to lift:
“I’m sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.”
Embrace Your Wholeness
PERFECTIONISM AND FAILURE ARE INTRICATELY INTERTWINED.
Perfectionism is based on the idea that failure is not an option, everything must be… perfect.
With this thinking, you don’t ever reach your goals because inevitably something will not go as planned, and there’s no room for that. So you either give up at the first sight of a challenge. Or, more commonly for perfectionists, you never even start because of the fear of something not working out perfectly.
Likewise, if you’re holding yourself to these unrealistic standards of “making it,” you’ll always feel like a failure.
I’ll love myself and feel good enough when…
… I’m a millionaire, billionaire, trillionaire.
… I finally reach my perfect weight.
… I have the fairytale relationship.
… I finally have this many followers or that many likes.
Perfectionism standards require that you deem yourself a failure until all things are perfectly aligned and achieved.
Do I even need to describe the problem with this kind of thinking? If you suffer from perfectionism (like I did for YEARS), you already know what I’m talking about.
> You know the self betrayal
> You know about giving up before you’ve even started
> You know the feeling of defeat
> You know the anxiety that comes with making any decision
> You know the pain of constant self judgement
> You know the rigidity of plans and the fear that comes up when something doesn’t go right
You know this isn’t any way to live fully. You know it’s holding you back from your full potential. But you also know tightening your grip on perfectionism won’t get you there. Besides, you’re probably exhausted from it all anyway.
So what’s the path towards freedom? How do you break the chains of perfectionism?
It starts with embracing the fullness of your humanity. The good, the bad, the ugly. The humanly imperfect.
Right now you’re fragmented - You’ve got your presentable self that strives for perfection, and you’ve got the rejected self of failure that you’re ashamed to show others, or even acknowledge yourself.
But luckily, it’s all you - there are no parts of yourself that you need to be afraid of when you approach them with compassion. Every part of yourself belongs and is welcome.
Your inner wisdom sees beyond the perfection, and embraces your wholeness. So tap into this wisdom and welcome all parts of yourself to the conversation.