Failure isn’t something we should be afraid of. Yes, it’s a pain, and the rejection hurts, but it’s what helps us grow as business owners. We can never get better if we don’t figure out what isn’t working. And today we’re going to tackle the most common cause of failure. 

When I started talking to the business owners inside of Courage Driven Latina, I realized that their fear of failure was what was keeping my clients from reaching their full potential. These women were dealing with core wounds that they were having a hard time tackling by themselves. It wasn’t until we started talking things out that we realized they had these feelings of unworthiness and not feeling good enough that were keeping them from succeeding in business. And I could completely empathize with these women because I went through the same thing they did. 

In this week’s episode, we’re talking about what I learned from failing in business. Before I had Courage Driven Latina, I failed a lot. And while I know now that failure is part of the process, I can’t say I wasn’t frustrated. I was doing so much research and planning, and I wanted so badly to be successful. But I was missing a key part of the business process – taking action. Tune in to learn how I got over my fear of failure and actually embraced it.

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http://www.theerikacruz.com

How to work with Erika:

Sign up for the free webinar “ You’re Not Stuck, You’re Scared” here!

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Podcast production for this episode was provided by CCST.

Episode Transcript:

Erika: Hello, friends. Welcome [00:01:00] back to this week’s episode of Chino Nat Revolution podcast. This is your host, Erica Cruz, and today I have a solo episode for you all about the fear of failure, the fear of not being good enough, and these core wounds that stop us from living the life that we want to live.

Whatever your goal is, whether you have a goal of getting your finances in order, or if you want to go back to school, or if you want to date after a divorce, or if you wanna start a business, like we all have goals and dreams, and those goals and dreams can vary. But after having coached at least 300 women at this point, I can tell you that there are the common patterns that get in our way.

And at the core, we’re just scared, right? We’re just afraid. We’re afraid of. Failing. We’re afraid of trying and not being good enough. We’re afraid of being too much, especially as women, especially if you identify as a woman of color. Obviously speaking from my point of view of being a daughter of [00:02:00] immigrants, being Latina.

There was always that saying of which directly translates to you look prettier when you’re quiet, but the English translation or the English saying is women should be seen and not heard. I actually heard Joe Dispenza say this at his event, and when he said that I was like, oh my gosh. That’s what we say.

But we say, so we’ve literally been conditioned to not be too much to, to not be outspoken, but yet we are this. Ambitious driven generation of women who don’t want to play small, who don’t wanna stay quiet, who want to build a life that we absolutely love. And one of the biggest things that comes up over and over with my clients, and even in myself, is this fear of failure.

And the thing that I’ve learned through my journey is that we’re never going to. Learn one lesson and then never repeat it. We are [00:03:00] essentially dealing with a lot of the same. Whatever it is that we’re healing, we are, we’re healing over and over and over through different. Instances in our lives and we revisit a lot of the same themes.

Maybe in relationships you’ve noticed, okay, I am not choosing myself. I keep giving my all to this person. And it keeps kind of happening, but it happens at different levels and it, it like almost sneaks up on you. Or maybe if you identify as being a perfectionist. You will see it come up in one area of your life, and then you’ll work on that and then it’ll, it will come up in another area of your life.

And the fear of failure is one of those core things because at the core of fear of failure, what’s happening is we fear, again, not being good enough or being too much. And at the core, that’s really unworthiness. And I think that that is just a core thing that every human being is, is working towards. And if you listen [00:04:00] to the last solo episode, I did the B FFF method, which is my manifestation framework.

The first letter of the BFF method is B, which stands for belief. And this is all about like believing in your worthiness to receive the thing that you want to receive. Um, if you were watching the video and you just saw a tail in the air, that was my cat. She was hanging out behind me and she just jumped off the chair.

So her little tail just whoop, swooped over the camera and it probably looked like, what the heck is in Erica’s room in her office? So look, I think a big reason that this podcast does well. Is because I’m so honest with you all about my own journey as well, and I’m so not perfect. I literally, sometimes I have to listen to my own podcast episode because I’m like, what would.

The version of me who was regulated and connected to her intuition, what would she say? Because I don’t always feel that way. And [00:05:00] When it comes to the fear of failure, I still deal with the fear of failure. There’s still new decisions that need to be made in my business.

There’s still bigger risks that need to be taken, and it’s scary. It’s scary to change. Change feels scary because the unfamiliar feels scary 

I think that as people listen to my podcast and, and see me on social media, it can be easy to assume that. I just win all the time, that I just have success all the time. But the truth is that even now, even more now, I have more failures than I do success. That is why I have had a lot of successes because I don’t let the failures define who I am or how I feel about myself, and it’s not always easy, right?

Of course, some rejection sucks. Some failures suck. But if you see a brand deal. On my page, chances are I was probably considered for five or [00:06:00] 10 other brand deals that I did not get. And if you’ve seen me do a speaking engagement, then chances are there’s a lot of speaking engagements I was passed over for and even before starting this business, I’ve talked a lot about.

How, when I was in the tech industry, I really wanted to work at one of these tech companies that aligned with my interests because I was working in tech, but it was business to business technology, so I was just pretty much helping other businesses make more money. I wasn’t passionate at all about the type of tech I worked in, but I was like, if I can work at TikTok or Instagram or the Calm app.

And I started to apply to all these different places. I applied to Google as well. I got to the final round and then they canceled the position. But every other job I applied to. I got rejected. And some of ’em, like, I didn’t even get an initial screening. They didn’t even look at my resume. And at that moment, I don’t think I had the [00:07:00] awareness or the tools to think about failure as redirection the way that I do now.

So yeah, I took it real personally, but had it not been for those things not working out, I wouldn’t have a business today. And I, I wanna specifically talk about one instance in my life. That I think is relevant to my clients and to, to my listeners. And that is starting a food blog. And what I would do differently if I could start that food blog all over, because this is, I was still working in tech at the time.

I thought the food blog was going to be my way out of working in the tech industry. And it ended up being a failure. And you know, and I’m even hesitant to call it that because I learned so much from it. But if, I mean, if we’re gonna label it as something, yeah, I would call it a failure and I would say it was a necessary failure that led me to where I am now.

But I think a lot of you can relate to where I was when I started this food [00:08:00] blog. I was looking to do something that was creative, something that was very interesting to me, something that was going to. Give back and help because it was all about healthy cooking. So it was all about making things that I loved, but in an alternative way, and specifically around baking and not having all that I.

Sugar and all that excess processed stuff in, in the baked goods. So I made like really healthy banana breads and I made brownies out of like black beans once or brownies out of sweet potatoes. And that, that doesn’t sound great, but trust me, these things actually tasted really good. I even made like a vegan cheesecake with, um, cashews.

I mean, I really had a good variety of, of different recipes and people couldn’t tell that they weren’t. That they weren’t normal flour. I was actually using alternative baking. It was, it was a very creative and fun time for me, but before I even started it, I would just [00:09:00] sit there and compare myself to other food bloggers and be like, I could never get to that.

Mind you, these food bloggers were already making money. They already had. Income coming in that they could reinvest into their business. They’d been doing it for a long time. Some people had gone to culinary school, so I had all the thoughts. 

And I really sat there and overthought and I kept telling myself that I was just stuck and I didn’t know what to do. But the truth was, I was really just afraid. I think a lot of you can relate to that, right? If you want to launch a podcast or if you wanna start a business, yeah, you may not know all the missing pieces, but what’s really stopping you is that you’re afraid.

You’re afraid of taking that first step because you don’t have to have all the steps. But if you’re not even allowing yourself to take the first step, then you are essentially keeping yourself stuck due to fear. And that’s exactly what I was doing as well. I was keeping myself stuck 

because I was afraid that I [00:10:00] was going to fail, that I wasn’t going to be good enough, or that I was gonna be too much, and people were gonna think X, Y, and Z about me. So how did this show up? I would literally do research. I would test out recipes. I was doing things that were behind the scenes. I was doing everything but starting, and this is a pattern I see in my clients as well.

They have a desire to go start this project or do this thing, and they’ll do everything leading up to it except start. So they’ll do the research, they’ll go and get a certification. Maybe they’ll buy the domain name. They’ll do all these different things. And that’s what I did with the food blog. And I ended up actually buying the domain name, paying somebody to help me set up a food blog.

I got like a logo made. Honestly. Now looking back, I didn’t need any of that.

Of course I can say this to you now because now I’m looking back and now I’ve learned everything I’ve learned. Now I literally have a program that helps people start their dream project and execute [00:11:00] it. So this was my playground. This is where I made kind of all the mistakes. So do I regret it? No, not at all.

I don’t regret having invested all this time. I don’t regret the overthinking because I kind of had to go through all of this so that I can learn, but. Now, whenever I’m supporting my clients, this is definitely not the route I have them take. I have them learn from my mistakes. And again, I’ll get to that in in a moment.

But the important thing here is that there was so much fear around, oh, I don’t want this to fail, that I actually didn’t even allow myself to start. And I think this is where a lot of you find yourself, you’re like, oh man, I really wanna start that Instagram page, but there’s already so many people doing this thing and I don’t know if I should do it right.

These are kind of the thoughts that, that I hear from people. Or maybe you’re like, yeah, I wanna start this business, but I feel like I need the certification first. Or maybe I need a website first, or else people aren’t going to take me seriously. And while this all sounds like great ideas, if I’ve learned anything, it’s that [00:12:00] one failure’s inevitable, right?

And it’s going to happen. But two, it’s always redirection. What’s meant for you is going to work out for you. And if it’s not meant for you, it’s not going to work out for you. And I’m so glad that my food blog ended up not working out or else we wouldn’t be here with the QA Revolution podcast. My program, courage Driven Latina, wouldn’t exist.

I wouldn’t have been featured on the front page of the New York Times. I wouldn’t be speaking on stages. You know, really being able to share my message and help people or interview amazing people for this podcast. So now I’m like, oh, thank goodness that didn’t work out. Just like I’m so grateful that the tech jobs I applied for also didn’t work out.

And the other thing that I’ve learned is that there’s ways of, I don’t wanna say avoiding failure, but there’s ways of testing things out that fast track you towards success. That’s exactly what I’ve implemented inside of my program. Courage Driven Latina, [00:13:00] of course, because of all of my different failures, and this is actually something I’m gonna be teaching in my upcoming webinar.

You’re not stuck, you’re scared, which I absolutely love the name because it’s so accurate and I can even see this show up in my life today. And because the thing is that we’re never gonna be done growing, right? We’re always wanting something new, always wanting something. Something else. We are humans, and humans are meant for growth, and we’re never meant to stay exactly where we are.

You’re never gonna get to this place where you’re done growing, but. My webinar, you’re not stuck, you’re scared. It’s all about like, you can still manifest. Even though you’re scared, you can still take action even though you’re scared. Let’s not let the fear completely stop you because the way to overcome the fear is to still continue to manifest and still begin to take action, which, um, that’s actually happening on July 14th.

So we will have the link down below in the show notes so that you can sign up for that. But. Let me go back [00:14:00] to a point that I realized I skipped over, and let’s talk about why it is that we fear failure so much, and then I’ll tell you more about my failures because people tend to really like when when I share my failures, I think it just helps normalize that this is just something that happens, but the failures do not have to define you.

So one of the reasons that people fear fear failure is because they don’t wanna waste time, right? So this idea of, oh man, I, I don’t wanna waste time. What if I do this and it doesn’t work out? But yet. We’re over here wasting all this time overthinking it and not trying it. So let’s just use My Food blog as a perfect example.

I thought about it for two years before I actually did anything. Do you wanna know how long I actually had my food blog before I pivoted and ended up doing what I’m doing now? I only had it for about a year, so that means I overthought about it. Two times more than the time it took me to actually take the action on it and learn [00:15:00] so much.

Like that year was a year of growth. I learned how to create content. I learned how to talk to the camera. I learned how to be vulnerable. I learned that people actually do find me interesting. It was such a beautiful, it was like almost like the training wheels before I could become this confident coach.

Another thing that people fear whenever they think about failure is what if people laugh? And it’s so easy to think, oh yeah, who cares what people think? No people, we are human beings and we are wired for connection. Everybody cares what somebody thinks, and that’s just human nature. Can you get to this place where you don’t care as much?

Yeah, you can. And I hope we all get there. But I just wanna validate that if you. Like, oh man, what, what are my parents gonna think? Or what are my friends going to think? Or, man, it’s really, it’s really vulnerable. It’s so easy to be like, yeah, well, who cares what people think? No, it’s, it’s actually. A very common thing, and it’s still something that I [00:16:00] struggle with and I feel like I’ve gotten to this place where I’m pretty good at not caring what, what people think.

But here’s what I’ll say. Whenever you’re doing something new that feels very scary and unfamiliar, that’s when we care more what people think because we don’t even know what we think about ourselves. So now, yeah, I can go on live and I can talk about anything, even this. Podcast. Right. I didn’t really come up with an outline.

I just kind of knew I had some talking points and I was like, all right, let’s see how this goes. And you know, this podcast actually came out from, I was supposed to interview someone, and I think we’ve been having some issues with our scheduling. But I’ve had a few people end up canceling last minute because they didn’t have it on their calendar or like, so we don’t know if that’s exactly what it is.

One person said it wasn’t on their calendar. Another person hasn’t given us an an explanation, but just like a lot of last minute, either no shows or, or reschedules. For the podcast. And yeah, we could consider that a failure too. But from that came this podcast episode, I [00:17:00] was like, I’m already ready. Let’s literally just record an episode.

And as I thought, thought about what I wanted to talk about, I was like, Hmm, failures, fear of failure is definitely a big thing. Why don’t we do that? So yes, as we think about what are people going to think about me, I could come on this podcast because at this point I’ve had. Almost 200 episodes and it’s not.

Super new to me anymore. Now this is something that I’m comfortable with, but when I have to dance, like, because, you know, I dance also bachata, maybe you don’t know that, but I, I do Latin dance and then I have to dance at a style that I’m not used to dancing. I’m like, oh my gosh, are people thinking I look stupid?

And I still have those thoughts, right? So I may not have ’em with you. This, but with anything new that I do, I, I still have those thoughts or I’ll still have the thoughts about certain decisions, like, what’s my mom going to think about me? And it doesn’t mean I’m letting my mom dictate my decisions. I just have the [00:18:00] thought.

And I’ve gotten to this place where I trust my journey so much that even if I have the thought, I don’t let that lead me. But it’s still a really common thing. And that’s. A common thought, a common belief around fearing failure. Another reason we fear fear failure, I already kind of talked about this, is the, the tie to unworthiness, right?

The fear of unworthiness feeling either like we are not enough and really doubting our voice and our value or feeling like we’re too much and let’s just use the food blog as my example for this, when I was doing the food blog, I. Was doubting that I had any value because I had the thought of, I didn’t go to culinary school.

Who am I to share recipes? Um, who am, who am I to do this? Why is anybody even going to care? And then on the other end, I also felt like I was too much. Like I was really just taking up too much space, literally on social media, which is. A free place to show up, right, and to [00:19:00] take up space. And may we take up all the space we need to take up there.

But I was so afraid of being too loud. I remember when I was first doing my stories, I would talk like this because I wasn’t confident. I’ve seen some of my stories from back in the day and I’m like, holy moly, I look like I’m terrified because I was. So, these are some of the core reasons that we fear failure.

But it’s not a personal fear. Fear, it’s also very cultural and it’s generational, and sometimes it’s even really gendered as well. So because of my knowledge of the fear of failure through my own experience, my client’s experiences, this is why I. I’ve built out a process inside of my program that prevents women from getting stuck in that research spiral just like I did.

So we specifically call this the ghetto first draft, which is a really low stakes, high feedback way to test your dream. [00:20:00] So this specific framework allows you to. Not invest a ton of time, a ton of money and a ton of energy in something. We find the cheapest, fastest way of testing out the idea to even see if it’s something that you want to do, because the truth is, friends, you do not need a perfect plan.

You need the permission slip to try, and this is your permission slip. You can’t allow the fear of failure to stop you from taking. Possible actions because failure’s gonna happen, but it doesn’t define who you are, and there’s ways of doing it. Again, like you can learn from my lesson, there’s ways of doing it in which you’re not going to invest all this time, all this money, all this energy to figure out if something’s going to work for you or not.

This framework has helped my clients do so many things. It helped my client and IE launch her podcast, and now she’s already on season two and now she has an abundance of guests that wanna be on the podcast. This helped my client, Kay, start her coaching business so she could [00:21:00] start like private coaching.

I just took one of her classes. Oh my gosh. It was so. So good. She’s my kickboxing instructor and she started doing, um, small group and private sessions at the gym. I was so sore the next day and I was like, damn, she’s so in her element and this framework helped her start. I also have had clients who didn’t post before and now they’re posting consistently and even landing collaborations that are paid.

So. If this podcast episode has resonated with you, join us on July 14th for my free webinar. It’s happening at 5:00 PM Pacific and it is called, you Are Not Stuck, you’re Scared. Let’s manifest Anyway, and I’m gonna be breaking down how to go from feeling really stuck and afraid. To clear and courageous.

Within 90 days, we’re going to embed manifestation strategies. I’m going to share, um, the ghetto first draft. And really this is the kind of space that I wish I had when I was launching that food [00:22:00] blog. This is your time. You are invited. I cannot wait to see you there again. The link is down below in the show notes and I realized I said I was going to share a few more failures with you all, and I haven’t done that.

So let’s see, what else can I share? So the food blog was something that ended up not working out, but it helped me so much along the way. Another thing that didn’t work out was I’ve, I’ve pitched myself for a lot of speaking engagements, even now, even with the rapport that I have now, even with the media kit that I have now, all the companies that I’ve worked with, um, I’ve had a lot of big companies reach out to me about.

A potential partnership. And then I get back to them and then they’re, they’re like, okay, yeah, we’re gonna let you know if, uh, if, if you’ve been selected. And most of the time I literally don’t hear back. So it’s just part of this business, right? It’s part of, of growth. I’m not going to get everything. And I am so at peace with that.

And it took a while [00:23:00] to get here. Like I really used to take it very personally. So if you can take anything away from this podcast episode, it’s. I wanna validate how you feel and validate the experience of fearing failure and that feeling of not being good enough. And I want you to know that you have the capacity to change that.

And I think I’m an example of that because I’m a human being as well, and I have, I have, I have so many feelings. Today’s the first day of my cycle. I had all the feelings this morning. I had to clean up the tears so I could get ready for the podcast interview. That ended up not happening, but that’s okay because we’ll reschedule.

It really does get easier with time, but if I can tell you anything, 

 I promise you that when you start taking action and when you do it, you’re gonna say what every single client has said to me, which is I should have started sooner. Literally the fear of failure is worse than just taking the action and experiencing a little bit of failure.

 it’s so much worse in our mind because even if you do experience a [00:24:00] little bit of failure, it’s just redirecting you to something else. So the sooner you can start to take action towards the thing that you want to do, you will no longer feel stuck. You will no longer feel afraid, and you’re no longer going to fear failure.

So I can’t wait to see you on July 14th for the free webinar. Sign up, tell a friend after the webinar, we are opening the doors for Courage Driven Latina, which is my signature group program. It is meant to support you in. Taking action on your dream project. We call it a courage project. Within 90 days. I have a step-by-step framework that helps you do that.

You also get weekly live coaching calls with me. Yep. We meet every Tuesday evening for 90 minutes. You, me, and the group. It is an amazing group of women. Even if you don’t get coached on that call, sometimes people are like, I literally got the coaching I needed. Just hearing other people get coached.

[00:25:00] There’s a ton of support. There’s the live calls, there is the step-by-step videos. There’s also Slack coaching, so you get chat support as well. And we also have monthly business coaching calls, so there’s a lot of support. More workshops coming. And to the program as well. So if this is a program that you’ve been wanting to do, mark your calendars, um, get your finances in order to talk to your partner.

Be ready because as soon as we open the doors, because we will have a special bonus. All right. I can’t wait to see you at the webinar.

[00:26:00]