Failing in front of others can easily stick in our brain. We worry we might not be as good as people think we are. We worry about being an imposter. We worry about being laughed out of town.
But at least public failures are public, out in the open
Because on top of that, some of our successes were barely successes…and we know it. No one else knows it but we know we barely made it happen. It should have been a colossal failure but we got lucky at the last second…and now everyone thinks it’s a wild success…but we know how close to the edge we were.
And we carry the weight of that too.
We process the failure as being an imposter. We process ‘unlikely’ success as being an imposter. And those two story lines are so heavy and so rehearsed that even when we have an undisputed big win, we quickly revert to the voices we’re use to.
