Guy Reams (00:01.368)
Today's day 33, shortened the defeat cycle.
So every time we lose or get defeated or fail, we go through a cycle to recover. The cycle has basically five phases effectively. They're very similar to the phases of grief, if you've heard about those before. But it's very similar. Like when we fail, like when we don't achieve something we wanted to achieve, then we fail.
What happens is we first go into a bit of denial or maybe shock. know, initial disbelief, shock, numbness. You replay what happens. You feel like, wow, I can't believe I've lost. So that's kind of the first phase.
Secondly, you go through kind of this pain or this emotion, right? You feel sad, disappointment, frustration, know, those type of things, right? You feel, you know, just loss. And then third, it's kind of like you reflect. You take a look at, you know, what happened. You analyze it. You think about it a little bit, right? You identify what you might have
done wrong, what you could have done differently. And this is where you start to transition from pain and into growth. If that makes sense. So then what else do you do, right? I think then from there you get into acceptance and commitment. So you start to accept that I lost, I defeated. And now it's time for me to stop being weighed down by the loss and pick myself back up and
Guy Reams (01:53.186)
go at it again, right? So then your final phase is to then take action. And this is where you grow, right? This is where you improve. You failed, you went through these phases, and now you've decided to take action to make improvements, to take new actions. You feel reinvigorated, you're empowered, and you go through it again, right? Or you try again. Now, what I would like to talk about here
is that these are five phases you go through every time you fail. But what kind of a superpower would it be if you could shorten that cycle down so that every time you failed, you could immediately go through those phases and pick yourself back up and go again? Now, I'm not saying that I'm totally successful at this, but I try to do this every day.
So every night when I close my day down, I try to go through these five cycles in my mind just to get through them. And because one of the things that I noticed that was hurting me the most personally was that when I would start out a new commitment or habit and I were to have a slip up or I were to feel sick like I do today, like I feel I came up with a cold or a flu or whatever, I've been really sick all day.
So there's certain commitments I just didn't want to do today and I didn't do, I did them, but I didn't do them very well. So I feel like a failure. Well, I've learned to allow myself to fail and to go through these five phases as fast as possible at the end of every day. So that increases the likelihood that in the morning I can wake up and pick right back up again where I was shortening this cycle, what I call shortening the defeat cycle.
has really aided me to pick back up. Because it used to be that if I started a new system or a new commitment or a new thing I was trying to achieve and I slipped up or failed, then I would go into these five cycles and it would take me a while, maybe a week or two or three or four, maybe even a month or two. And then I'd finally get through all the five phases.
Guy Reams (04:17.09)
So my goal is to get through all five of them fast. Now, I've learned you have to deal with each of them individually. can't go through, you have to go through them all, but you can speed them up each individually. So for example, when you first fail, there'll be a little bit of denial and shock about it. You're like, man, you know, there'll be like this shock about it, denial about it maybe. So I think
A way to do this is to journal or better importantly, acknowledge the situation really quickly. Just name it. Like at the end of the day, I'll say to myself, I didn't get this done. I really needed to get this done and I didn't do it. And I didn't do it because of these reasons. That allows me to get over the shock. doing this in a journal form is very helpful for me. It grounds me and gets it out on paper so that I'm no longer dealing with the denial phase.
Second is this pain and emotion you go through. Like if you're really revved up for a big commitment and you miss a day or you make a mistake or you don't do it quite right or whatever, I think you should allow yourself to feel bad but not to dwell. So what I try to do is sit back and observe my feelings about it without any judgment. You'd be surprised on how judgmental we are on ourselves and how very little compassion we have on ourselves.
So I like to just sit back for a moment, take a couple deep breaths, and evaluate, OK, I made a mistake or I missed something. How do I feel about that? How do I really feel about that? Like, let myself think that through, right? Let myself dwell on that for a minute.
Okay, so then the third, reflection and learning. So what can you do to shortcut that process? So you can structure this. So rather than just kind of mindlessly going through this, you can ask yourself some very deliberate questions at the end of the day, such as what is under my control right now? What can I have control over? Or what would I, what am I gonna do different tomorrow?
Guy Reams (06:37.378)
that I didn't do today. So there's a reason why I failed today, right? So what was it that caused me to fail and how can I do that differently tomorrow? So I like to ask those two basic questions. What is actually under my control? What could I control? Like I may have failed because it was completely out of my control, right? Like I got sick. I mean, I can't control that. But what could I do differently the next time, right? And this helps me feel, this helps me get over the overthinking and regret process.
Okay, then you gotta get to acceptance. You gotta accept it and recommit. And the best thing to do that is to do that fast. So what I do to do this is I go back and I review what I wrote down already for my goals and my purpose, my original commitment. Why am I doing it? Why was I doing this in the first place? I visualize all the steps that it's gonna take me to get there. I go back and try to rekindle that motivation again. That's what I do when I fail.
So that always helps. Fifth, take action. You can make this go very fast too. You can decide, you know what? The reason I'm failing is because I'm taking on too much. So instead of sitting there and whining and complaining because you're failing all the time, lower down what you're doing to smaller achievable actions so that you can build momentum. Maybe you're failing because you're taking on too much. Remember,
Small incremental wins will always defeat doing everything at once. So these are really important key principles for getting yourself through this process when you fail. I always like to give myself a timeline way to recover when I fail. And I definitely would encourage talking about it. I I talk about it every day because I write about it and I do these video blogs.
So I'm kind of talking to myself right now actually, really. I'm kind of easing my way through my own failure, right? So I think you can make significant strides by being very purposeful in how you deal with failure. Growing up, I never dealt with failure well at all. I would create beautiful, well-conceived plans, but then I would fail. And it would send me into a tailspin for a few weeks.
Guy Reams (09:02.926)
And then I'd finally recover and I'd get back at it again, right? I've never given up. But man, how much better would it be if I learned a way to fail fast? And that's what I've been working on this last few years. And it has been a dramatic improvement over where it's been in the past. I do fail. I fail just as frequently as I used to. But I've learned to accept failure a lot more. So when failure occurs, I'm willing to pick right back up and go.
And I think that is actually a secret, well, what I've learned is that's a learnable power. You can learn to do that. This is not something that is foreign to you, that you can't get yourself. Like, if you have a hard time with failure like I do, you can teach yourself how to overcome failure, and you can practice at it, and you can get better and better at it. And then eventually, you'll be so damn resilient, every time you fail, you just pick right back up and go again. Right?
So I think it's something that you should practice and train on. It's been helping me at least. Thank you.