Failure vs Feedback (podcast) Transcript
http://www.womanevolving.org/2015/02/episode-19-failure-vs-feedback/

 

[Friends theme song intro]

Cami: Hi and welcome back to Woman Evolving, this is Cami and I have with me, I almost said Jenna Scott (laughs) Jenna Andersen (still laughing)

Jenna: Hi

Cami: Hi Jenna, how are you?

Jenna: I’m doing really good today. It’s been a great week. Minus Monday which we’ll get into.

Cami: Yeah, we’ll get into that. So we want to do a really short segment on Failure vs Feedback. And how we can approach failures and see it as like a springboard to success rather than one more reason not to try. So Jenna tell us a little bit about why you thought of doing this.

Jenna: Well as part of my personal evolution, I will say really quickly, just a bit of background, that I a mother of two, they are 5 and 2 years old. And over the past 5 years or so I’ve been building up a very part-time photography business and then I have a blog that I… I have several blogs… but a main blog that a source of income for me.

                And so right now half of my days are spent… like 3 hours in the mornings my daughter’s in day care so I get to write emails and do blog posts and edit images and then I have her with me in the afternoons and of course, as every mom knows, the mornings and the evenings are just shot.

[Cami laughs]

Jenna: So, that’s, that’s what my schedule looks like and it’s a lot of time by myself and recently I’ve really been feeling this desire to go out and get a job and be around other people. And I think that’s something that I… need… emotionally, I need that for my self-confidence, and… just… I need that validation and feedback and room to grow.

Cami: Hmm-mm

Jenna: And… So… we decided, uh my husband and I, that an excellent route for doing this would be applying for these… I live in San Francisco and there are a lot of software coding programs that… in somewhere between 3 and 6 months will give you enough skills that they claim that 90% of their graduates are making somewhere between 90 and 110 thousand dollars a year. That’s the average kind of among the programs.

Cami: Okay

Jenna: And… So… It’s a really awesome opportunity but as one can imagine they are very competitive. And… So… of… since the end of January I’ve been going through the process of applying for one of these programs, it’s an all-female program, and has a really great reputation. And I put a lot of time into my application and two-weeks of just all day every day, editing, and really diving deep into who I was, facing down a lot of, a lot of my demons, and… waited and was very excited to get a first interview and… um… then I waited for almost two weeks and logged into my account and saw that they had declined me and that I wouldn’t be interviewed for the second interview and…

                So… what I wanted to talk about today was… how I decided to be very public about the process I shared it on my blog and I shared it on Instagram, and for me this was about facing down those inner demons I have that tell me that I’m not good enough to do this… that I need to feel ashamed because I didn’t get in to…

                Whether or not it was competitive, I don’t even think that matters, because I think even if it wasn’t compete- if it was the most competitive program in the world, my inner demons would still tell me that, you know, it was because of me and not because of…

Cami: Right

Jenna: …what the program wanted or how many people applied or who applied. I mean there are so many factors.

Cami: Right

Jenna: Um… and… yeah, I mean, I don’t know, I…. Have you gone through this? I know that you’re going through a school program right now and that you’ve done the transition from um… being a SAHM or WAHM or whatever you want to call it and trying to move out into the workforce and that vulnerability that comes with… saying that I’m worth something, even if the past 5 years have been devoted to cleaning the kitchen and folding the laundry.

Cami: Yeah, and, you know, I I still actually have… and you and I were just talking about this before we started recording but… I was, uh, a SAHM mom for 12 years and before I had to start [clears throat] working some more and obviously jumping into school, and… I… I still feel like oh this is just a nice hobby for me.

[Jenna laughs]

Cami: [laughing] I still felt that. As if, as if I’m scrapbooking, my master’s [still laughing] thesis together or something, and um, Crystal Scott and I have talked about how she and I both are excelling our education yet at times will be like, well these programs must be really easy because I can do it.

[Jenna laughs]

Cami: And it’s… I didn’t… I didn’t even know that I was really thinking that, like, today I was practicing my choreography for my Pio (???) class, and… I was doing a really good job, but I thought, yeah, I’m doing a really good job, yeah, I could be, you know, really good at this. And I’m like, wow this is the first time I haven’t thought of this as a hobby.

Jenna: Yeah

Cami: Isn’t this nice that your hobby can make you money? How sweet little wife.

Jenna: Yes! Oh I… I really faced down. There was one… one question in particular on the application that asked me to talk about something that I was an ex… expert at. Or am an expert at. And I cried over that question. Because I just… you know… I don’t…. I don’t really know what I’ve been doing for the past 6 years that is worth something to the outside world. And that’s why I wanted to do this program and obviously this has just been a really painful process. But I think that I wanted to talk about it incase there was someone out there who was also struggling with these feelings of well I’m… I’m…  not getting it or I won’t get it so… I don’t even want to try.

                And this is me saying that I put a lot of into this and it was really painful to be rejected, but I don’t regret that. And… and now I don’t know that I’ll pursue the exact same route or where it’s going to go but there are a lot of other options that I can try and it was a really healing experience I think to even get the first interview. And have them read through my application and look at me and say “Wow you have promise let’s hear more. “

Cami: So Jenna… can I go to two things on that? Number 1 how you were able to process that? and number 2 how can you use that to build your self-confidence? Rather than you using it to go “See, I’m not worth anything.” So first of all, how did you… did you prepare yourself to be rejected? Did you think about that or were you just trying to focus on getting accepted?

Jenna: Well I knew that the program had around an 8% acceptance rate. So they take 40 people and around 500 of them are, uh, there’s 5, they take 40 people out of

Cami: [laughs] I was gonna say. How do they get 500 out of 40? Okay.

Jenna: We’ll take that. And one of the ways that I personally got through this process I think while keeping my self-confidence in tact, was not just thinking about what I wanted from them, but what they want out of their candidates, and what their incentives are. And I have my personal opinions about what they are looking for in a candidate, and there are things that I… I think they don’t want… that I think they don’t want.

                 But that’s not a firm statement. That’s just my guess but that helped me because then when I saw that they weren’t interested in pursuing with me, in things with me, I could say to myself, “oh okay well I wasn’t the candidate they were looking for” and then this knowledge of I’m going to apply again and what are the things I can do between now and the next application that will make a difference.

                Because I know that as far as the written application, I laid everything that I had out there. There’s nothing else that I can change about that because that’s me and I did my best but it’s a coding program and I don’t know how to code. And so… now between, now and the next application, I can teach myself, X amount of coding. And hope that that’s enough for them to see that I really want this  and that I’m a good candidate for their program.

Cami: Can you explain what coding is?

Jenna: Oh yeah (they both laugh). Software coding is… is… sometimes called Software Engineering, and there’s a lot of, it’s a lang- it’s a foreign language you can think of it that way. So there’s a lot of different versions of it. Python and Ruby on Rails and um… CSS. You’ll see all kinds across the web. And it’s… I live in San Francisco, this is a really common job. There’s so many companies in this area that are looking for someone.

                 And it’s a very flexible job. I could… work from home. I could… integrate it into the business I already own and run. And so, it’s, I think of it as, I’m paying to learn a skill that I can utilize in a variety of different ways.

Cami: Oh okay. Right right right. Okay. So. (clear’s throat) So you kind of prepared yourself if it goes this way or that way and and… I thought that was smart to think about what they’re looking for because, um, I was thinking this the other day when I was watching a tv show and I saw all the people that, um, auditioned for the different roles on the TV show Friends. And like, like, I can’t think of anyone else who would have been as good in each one of those roles as the people who had it, right? And.. And I’ve seen movies before and I’m like “Oh this person sucks. It really would have been better with blah blah blah. But, you know, I.. I saw the people rejected and I’m like “oh gosh” I wanted to go back in time and go “it’s not your fault it’s just that this person fits this role so much better and it’s you know there are other roles for you.” (laughs)  “Keep trying” And that’s basically what it is.

Jenna: And I will say that lest it sound like I got my rejection notice and then bounced right up and had no, you know, (laughs) reverb that the day that I found out I called my husband was really sad. I started listening to sad music because that’s one of the ways that I process sadness. I turned on…

Cami: Air Supply??

Jenna: Dashboard Confessional is what I listened to a lot in college. And I really like to scream/sing along with the lyrics.  (They both laugh) And on the way home from pre-school pickup, my son said “We should bake cookies today.” And I was like “Wow if you wanted to bake cookies any week night, this is the one night where I would say yes.” I let him enable me and I ate way too many cookies.

Cami: Good for you

Jenna: And I woke up the next morning and and felt really good. And I will say that it has helped, around that same timeframe, uh, we started diving into a different project in our lives, and that has been some- very helpful. That I didn’t wallow away the week feeling lost and directionless because we have this other thing that now we’re working toward and it feels good to be doing something productive and I think that’s a lesson that I’m going to try to keep in mind for the next time.

Maybe, maybe you know I do my coding program, and a year or a year and a half from now I’m doing interviews, and I have an interview that I really want and so I want to focus on “okay if I don’t get this job I’m going to throw myself into… maybe something entirely different” because my mind needs a break. From applications. But that really helped me jump bounce back really quickly.

Cami: Okay so my, analogy, back to friends (they both laugh). I don’t know why I’m…

Jenna: I love Friends. I watch it all day, I watched it in college and now that it’s on Netflix I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is I put my little ear buds in and then I get dressed while listening to Friends. Yeah.

[They both laugh]

Cami: Even now I’ll watch it and I’ll just… I know them by heart because I used to watch them when I was in chronic pain for seven years and so… I know it by heart but even now when they act I start laughing so hard.

But back to my analogy. Um, Jennifer Aniston, um, she said that she had everything planned out for when they ended. Um, she had a week retreat at some sort of a spa where you do spa and different like massages and stuff like that as well as therapy. Um for the week that, the first week that Friends ended. And then (clears throat) there was something else that she did and then she went straight into doing some other movies. So she actually set-up some time for her to mourn and collapse, and then…

Jenna: Yeah!

Cami: Yeah! And I thought that was really cool that you, that you just gave yourself that room, to go “What the F I’m just going to have cookies and I’m going to indulge this sadness, however that looks like today.”

Jenna: Yep. And.. And then jumping into something new. I think is important. So if there’s… if there’s someone out there and they’re prepping to do something similar or they’re going through something similar, that would be my advice. Bake yourself a batch of cookies…

Cami: And have a friend to call… Even if it’s your husband

Jenna: Yeah yeah that was really important for me was being able to call my sister, call my friend V, and just say “It didn’t happen and I’m just sad. I’m really sad.”

Cami: Yeah

Jenna: And…

Cami: Yeah, my heart sank when I read that. I read that and I was like my heart sank and I was like “Jenna! I wish I was there.” (laughs) Um, and then, what have you done to make this, um, increase your confidence rather than, um, magnify your insecurities?

Jenna: I think… like I said, making… because it’s a four-step process, that I’ve really held onto that email that I got back from them, saying that they felt like my written application had potential because there are people who don’t even, they don’t even make it that far to the next step, so for me that’s what I try to really hold onto was that… uh… it’s not a race. I’m not better than the other people but that maybe I was 70% there. And what can I do to fill in that extra 30%.

                And I’m lucky because they have the acceptance rate of Harvard and most people only get one chance to get into Harvard and I can apply to this program over and over. If I want to. There’s nothing stopping me from just doing the application process three times a year until I get in. I don’t know that I will do that but…

Cami: I think that that’s great that you can keep doing that. It’s not just a one time thing. What… what do you think you would have done if it was a one-time thing? How would you how would you have handled that?

Jenna: I think it would have been harder. Because that was my immediate thought was “okay, what is this time, this new timeline, I can create for myself. I will say that the hardest period for me was between the written application and or between the first interview and then waiting to find out about the second because I felt like a lot of my life was in limbo and that was hardest that was the hardest feeling for me.

                 I think even even worse to deal with than the sharp sting was just this thinking in my mind that I don’t know if they, like am I good enough, for them, too much time, I think, fixating on…

Cami: Obsessing over

Jenna: Yeah, yeah. And so… I am happy now to move on to the next stage, you know, whatever it is, I’m I’m a wedding photographer, and I am… used to waiting to commit to some wedding photography dates, and now I get to look at the rest of my year and plan it out and and be excited and I think… the sadness I hold now is that I wanted to do this program because I’m lonely.

                Like, I’m spending too much time at home alone and so… what I need to do along with improving my coding skills is develop a new plan to address that loneliness. And so that’s my next step.

Cami: Awesome. I’m glad that you’re doing that. Have you had any thoughts how you’re going to do that?

Jenna: No. (they both laugh) I’m still… I’m still working on that one. I have been… in the summer my daughter will start going to the same preschool as my son, full day, and that’s really going to.. right now my day is split up into this like pick-up drop-off pick-up drop-off pick-up drop-off, and it’s going to be a lot different when I have this huge chunk of time. Maybe I can pursue some sort of opportunity where I go into a group work environment and it’s a bunch of people sitting in a shared work space. And I just work along with other people. 

Cami: Right. I think there is something really um, invigorating about being around people that are like-minded, and that are around the same age-range, or at least, you know, you can talk to them instead of little kids. It’s obviously, you know, going to… develop yourself as a human being.

Jenna: Yeah, yeah. I have friends who love spending, you know, all day with their babies. And I think that’s really wonderful but that’s not the best fit for me. And I’m excited to have an opportunities to find something that is a good fit for me.

Cami: Good for you.

Jenna: Hold on. My, um, my babysitter’s here. I’ll be right back…

Cami: Okay hold on for just a moment, we’re going to take a quick commercial break. (laughs) Okay we’re back from our commercial break. Jenna had to go take care of the babysitter and my daughter came home, so.

Jenna: I thought we could end with maybe, a, a challenge. I would like to issue a challenge to listeners I would love to have them comment on either the post for this podcast, on the Woman Evolving site, or in the Woman Evolving Facebook Group, and talk about a time when they tried something and it didn’t work out how they were hoping and how I’d love to hear did they eat cookies, maybe they drank a bottle of wine, which I don’t judge and fully support, (cami laughs), maybe even…

                I have a sister-in-law, who is very healthy and she seems to process things by going for a run, which sounds very (cami laughs) like ?? to deal with… with failure and so I’d love to hear… And how they, what their sad, how they just be in the sadness and process that and accept it. And then I would love to hear about where they went afterward. Maybe they kept trying and it worked for them. Or maybe they went in an entirely new direction that they never would have expected.

Cami: Oooh I like that, yeah, yeah. Did it lead them into a different opportunity that they wouldn’t have looked at before? Um, or did they keep persisting and uh finally caught the result that they wanted. Um, and I I think that’s an excellent challenge. Yay. In fact, I’m going to take you up on your challenge, and I’ll probably start the thread because, um, I can think of a couple things that had different endings.

Um, one thing that I thought of, when I knew we were going to record this, Jenna, is (clears throat), when I was living in Oregon, when I was 16 by myself, I was feeling really depressed, because obviously I didn’t have my family, I didn’t have my friends, I was in a whole new place and I felt very alone. And I was alone. But I was in typing class, um, at the time where people didn’t have computers at home, it was typing. (laughs) And so I would have my typing class and then I would have my German class. They were both in the same classes and um, one morning I was sitting there and I was feeling really depressed and you know, rightly so, I felt depressed for good reasons.

And I noticed something out the window, something caught my eye and it was like, “Cami, you need to look at this and not think in your head but look at what you’re looking at.” And I realized it was something I had seen every single morning this girl with, um, I believe it was, um, MS, she was still walking, but she has some problems, and she walked limp, you know, with a limp in her arm and you could tell she had some developmental problems mentally, but I hadn’t realized that every morning I would look out that window in my typing class and the same thing happened every morning.

But that morning I noticed it. And what she would do is, she came into school a little bit later. And her mom would drop her off at that curb right out there outside the window. And (clears throat) she would get outside the car and then she would be on one leg and she would sway back and forth back and forth back and forth back and forth and then she would push her other leg up on to the curb and stand up.

And I noticed that a couple of days, her mom would have to help her but usually what she liked is she would do it by herself. And she would get up there and put that foot up on the curb. And the moment her other foot would get up on the curb and she stood up, she just beamed. Just this sunshine came over her face. And she would limp her way into school.

And I remember sitting there that morning and for the first time really seeing what I was seeing every day. And I realized how happy it made her that she accomplished getting up on the curb. That that one act was such an amazing accomplishment to her. And she forever changed my heart. And I would see her in the hallway walking in the hallway, just beaming, so happy. To be there at school. And it changed my outlook on what I appreciated.

Um, so maybe, I’m wrapping this up with. What is it that you have accomplished? What is it that we have accomplished? That really is so amazing and I think we sometimes look at what we haven’t and we feel so depressed, and we let that be the image that we define ourselves by. You know, ‘loser’ and um, instead of. Ohmygosh look at all these things we’ve accomplished. Amazing. You know, so which do we look at, the failure or the feedback that we’re awesome?

Jenna: I love that. I feel like that that woman, well she was a girl then so we can call her a girl, she could be she could define herself as a girl who limps while she walks. Or the girl who masters climbing you know climbing a curb with MS.  That is a beautiful…. I hope that’s how she saw herself.

Cami: I think she did.  Yeah.

Jenna: So, Well, I will, I guess, maybe do an update. If I apply to another program, and maybe it’ll be another one just like this of me saying “it didn’t work out” but maybe it’ll be me saying “I got in” and I am so glad that I persisted and I kept going.

Cami: Yep and you just keep… just some will some won’t. So what. Next.

[they both laugh]

Cami: You’re awesome. Thank you so much Jenna for sharing your progress because I think it’s something that everybody can relate to in so many different ways and you show a lot of courage. And I’m so glad you did share this in still such a tender time for you. So thank you.

Jenna: Thanks Cami! Bye Everyone!

[Friends theme song outro]