Episode 55: Progressive Failure vs Justification Failure

You are listening to the Overcome Pornography for Good podcast episode 55, Progressive Failure Versus Justification Failure.

Welcome to the Overcome Pornography For Good podcast where we take a research-based, trauma informed and results focused approach to quitting porn. This approach has been revolutionary and changed thousands and thousands of lives. I’m your host, Sara Brewer.

Hey, you guys, welcome to the podcast episode this week. I'm so excited, so glad you're here. I'm excited to continue our conversation about failure and how failure is needed, especially when we're learning how to quit porn. And today we're specifically going to talk about which kind of failures will help us quit porn and which kind of failures will keep us stuck and keep us not progressing.

Before we do that I want to share an awesome review I got from one of you. It says, “I don't usually write reviews, but I've also never had something change my life as much as this podcast has. I've struggled with a porn habit ever since I was 10 years old. And for the first time in my life, I found myself starting to not want porn. I also feel more and more in control of my daily life, my choices, and my emotions. I still have difficult things that I deal with in life, but instead of avoiding them through porn, I can actually face them myself and get through them.”

That is so good. I read that and I get chills. I love it. Thank you for sharing that on the reviews on the podcast. Thank you for sharing that with us. And congratulations, I want to celebrate that, that's amazing. I love this last part, like I still have difficult things in my life but instead of avoiding them through porn, I face them.

And when we start doing this, when we learn to stop buffering, jeez, you guys, it's so life-changing. It actually makes things easier. We think that avoiding and buffering our way through the pain is going to make it bearable, but it doesn't. It doesn't, it just makes things worse. Right? Because then instead of just the thing that you're avoiding, you also have all the negative emotion and all the negative side effects from the buffer, plus the thing that you're avoiding that didn't really go away. So, awesome, I love it.

Let's dive into our topic. I titled this podcast episode Progressive Failure versus Justification Failure. I didn't know exactly what to call these two types of failures, so I just made up those words. I think that they describe pretty well the point I'm trying to make here. But the idea here is that there are progressive failures, which are failures that help us develop gradually and get better step-by-step. And then there's justification failure, which is not really trying.

So I want to give you guys an example of this. And I was actually going to share it last week, but I forgot, and I love, love, love this example of my two kids. They're so cute, I have a three year old and a one year old. They're crazy and so cute. Now, my daughter, she is younger, she's the one year old. And my son is the older one.

So when my son was nine months old he started walking, it was pretty early. And by 10 months old he was walking pretty good. And when he started walking he would stand up, take a step, fall down, stand up, take a step, fall down, stand up, take a step, fall down. And he just did that over and over and over and over and over again, to where he got really good at walking and now he can run, and jump, and play.

But he wasn't able to learn how to run and jump and play until he went through that phase of learning how to walk which, hello, if anyone has seen a toddler or baby learning how to walk there is a ton of falling down. And isn't it interesting, right? We don't look at these babies falling down and be like, “Oh man, they keep falling. They're never going to figure it out.” Right?

No, we're like, “Oh yeah, of course, they need to do this, this is just what they need to go through.” And then they'll get older, and their muscles will get stronger, and they'll be really good at running and really good at walking. And them falling down isn't keeping them from figuring that out. The falling down and getting back up is what is allowing them to get strong enough to walk.

Okay, so this is just like what I was talking about in last week's episode. If you haven't listened to it, make sure you go and listen to it. Where we have to have a high tolerance for failure and for messing up and not doing it perfectly in order to gain the skills that we need to, to be really good at it. And this is true with pornography, this is true with everything in your life.

Quitting porn, you have to learn these new skills, these new mindfulness skills. And you've got to have this little period where you're learning how to walk with them. That might mean falling down, and that doesn't mean that you're not doing it right or that you're never going to figure it out.

Okay, so that's my son. My daughter, when she was learning how to walk, she started taking steps even earlier than my son did, but what would happen, it was so cute. She would see her brother running around and so she would get up and try to take some steps. And she would fall down and then she would throw these massive fits. Like on the ground, kicking, screaming, and she was so mad because she couldn't run. She was so mad because she kept falling down.

And what was so fascinating about this, you guys, is it took her significantly longer to learn how to walk and to learn how to run than it took my son. Because when she fell down, instead of getting back up and trying again, she would throw fits and she'd get so mad. And then she’d just lay there, and then she'd finally get up enough energy to start walking again. And she’d try and then she'd fall, and she’d throw these massive fits.

Whereas my son – And, of course, how fast they learned to walk doesn't matter at all. I just think it's a really interesting lesson, right? But my son, where he didn't really have the older sibling and so he didn't expect himself to be running or walking fast, he would fall, get right back up, fall, get right back up, try again, fall, get back up. And he was able to learn how to walk fairly quickly. My daughter, it took way longer because she would fall and stay there because she was so mad at herself, like why can't I just do this?

And this is the trap that so many of us fall into when we're trying to quit porn. We slip up, we fall down, and we stay there. We’re like, “See, I can't do it. See, quitting porn is just not in the cards for me. See, it's too hard. See, I am addicted, and I can't change addictions.” Right?

So back to this idea of progressive failures versus justification failures. Progressive failures are when we're developing gradually. It's that standing up, trying to take a few steps, falling down, standing back up, falling down, failing, falling down, and then getting back up. Justification failure is when you're not really trying. It's like just laying on the floor not even trying because you're like, “Well, I'm supposed to fail anyways.”

These are two very different failures, one will get you where you want to go, one will just keep you where you’re at. And I actually coached a client on this this week. It was really timely because he came to the call and he’s like, “Sara, what's happening is I'm looking at pornography because I tell myself, oh, Sara said I'm supposed to fail anyways. So this is fine and I'm just going to go look at it.”

And I was like, oh, no, this is not the failure that I'm talking about. That's not even really trying, right? Sometimes when I say this and we get out of the shoulds and we get out of the perfection mindset, we want to go immediately to the other side which is just like pure justification. Like, oh, well Sara said I'm supposed to fail, so I'm just going to fail and not really try and just look at it.

That's not what I'm talking about. What we want to do is we want to learn to be somewhere in the middle. We don't want to be all or nothing and we don't want to be in justification mode. We want to be somewhere here in the middle. Okay, there's a difference between failure with honest effort, failure that makes you stronger, failure where you really try and failure because you didn't try, and failure because you didn't give your honest effort.

Okay, so if I have a goal to be a really good public speaker, and let's say I have this event that I'm going to go speak at and I totally botch it. But I show up, I totally botch it, I mumble my way through the whole thing. I'm not making any sense, maybe I start speaking a different language. I don't know, I just totally botch it.

But then I learn from it, and I keep trying and I book some more public speaking gigs and I keep putting myself out there, I'm going to get better and better and better. That's very different than the day of the event coming up and being like, “Oh, I'm just going to skip today. I'm just going to stay home because I'm supposed to fail anyways. So I'm just going to count this as one of those failures.” Way different.

Or like summer sales, I always think of summer sales. I never did them, but I know people who do, and I have some family who loves it, where you go and sell security systems or pest control for the summer months. And what they say when you first start is these first couple weeks are probably going to be rough. If you haven't ever done this before you might not get a lot of sales in the beginning, there might be a lot of failure.

And there's a very big difference between going out and knocking on all the doors and getting them all slammed in your face and not making any sales for the week. It's kind of a bummer, right? Versus sitting on the curb waiting for the day to be over because you're not supposed to make sales that first week anyways.

One is going to help you get better, one is going to push you forward, it's this progressive failure. And one is the justification failure that's like, “Well, I'm supposed to fail anyway so I'm not even going to try.” They’re so, so, so different. We want to be in progressive failure, not giving up. I mean, jeez, we don't even need to call them both failure. One is failure because we tried, and one is just not even trying.

So what does this look like with pornography and trying to quit pornography? This looks like you plan ahead of time, and you decide, hey, Friday nights are the nights that I typically view pornography and I'm deciding right now that I'm not going to. I'm not going to view porn on Friday night.

You make a plan, you are like, okay, I'm going to breathe through these urges. I'm going to process them. I'm going to watch my thoughts. I'm going to do these things that Sarah has taught me. And then you get to Friday night, and maybe you make it halfway through the night and then you slip up.

But here, we're not slipping up because, hey, Sarah said I have to fail in order to progress, so I'm going to fail. That's justification. Okay? What we want to do is we want this to be a progressive fail. And so what that means is we gave our honest effort and then we learn from it.

So you sit down, you think about what happened. If you're in the program, I have a whole process for this in the learn and move on milestone, it walks you through this. But you think about okay, where did I get stuck? Where did I slip up? What worked? What didn't work? What was I thinking? Did I notice myself using willpower or was I allowing it?

All these different things, you really ask yourself what happened, and then you get help. And then you come, and you get coached in one of our weekly calls, or you bring it to the Ask a Coach board in the program. And you use that failure as data and as a way to help you get stronger and to build your muscles and figure out what worked and what didn't work. And you get better and better and better. That’s progressive failure where you're progressing because of it.

What you might notice is you might notice, hey, I'm actually not very good at allowing the feeling and I always slip back into willpower after a couple minutes or after half an hour. Or you might notice justification thoughts that you believe that we need to question and work through.

Or you might notice that you're not really committed, okay? This is going to resonate with some of you, like you say you want to quit porn and you sign up for the things to quit porn. But really on the inside, you're not really sure if you want to quit, right? That's something we can work through.

Or maybe you notice a lot of shame. And you notice that shame is what's leading you to view porn, and we can work on that. There are so many things that we can notice here and it's going to be different for everyone. But it's really important that we have a good, true, honest effort. And if we fail in that good, true, honest effort, we learn from it and it's going to push us forward, it's going to make us even better.

What we don't want is this failure ahead of time and this failure justification. I'm going to say that again because I heard my coach say this years ago when I was just getting into life coaching, she said this term, failure ahead of time. Like so many of us just fail ahead of time and we do not want to do that. That is not what we're going for here.

This will usually show up with a thought that's like, “Well, I'm not going to try because I don't want to fail.” All that is doing is failing ahead of time. It's not even giving yourself a chance. Sometimes we think that we're avoiding failure if we don't try. But whenever we're avoiding failure and not trying, all we're doing is failing ahead of time. We don't want to do that.

Okay, so listen, you guys, let's start to increase our tolerance for failure. Failing is neutral. It doesn't mean anything bad or good until you have a thought about it. You get to make your failures mean anything that you want to. And we coach on this all the time in the program. You don't feel bad because you slipped up. You feel bad because of what you're making that slip up mean.

And we can make it mean like all these negative things and be like my daughter when she was learning how to walk, right? Fall down, we get stuck and we're like throwing these fits. We're like, “Oh, see, I can't do it.” You stay there for a while, and you are angry. Or you can make it mean, “Oh, I slipped up. Let's try again.” And get right back up and keep going.

And I promise you, I promise you, I promise you that as you increase your failure tolerance and you practice good progressive failures without throwing fits when you slip up, without getting stuck and staying down when you slip up, you will be able to quit porn so much faster than you even imagined. And if you can apply this to other areas of your life, you'll be amazed at what you can do here too.

Okay, you guys have a great week. We'll talk to you next week. Bye bye.

I want to invite you to come and listen to my free training called How to Quit Viewing Pornography Even if You've Tried in the Past. If you like the podcast, you will love this free training. We talk about, number one, how to not rely on willpower or phone filters so that you can actually stop wanting pornography.

Number two, how to guarantee that you won't fail no matter how many times you've tried in the past. And number three, how to feel good about yourself while becoming someone who doesn't struggle with pornography. You can access this training at sarabrewer.com/masterclass.