Ep.23 ‘If Things Aren't Going To Plan, You Need To Question The Plan’ The Power Of Failing With Elizabeth Day
Working Hard with Grace Beverley
sophie@grace-beverley.com
4.2 • 901 Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2023
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Elizabeth Day is an award-winning British author, broadcaster, and influential host of the hugely successful How to Fail podcast. A podcast that celebrates failure and lessons learned, every week How to Fail invites a new influential guest to open and talk honestly about challenges and vulnerabilities in their personal life, in a bid to show listeners that perfection doesn't exist.
Elizabeth was inspired to start the podcast following a particularly challenging period in her own life - a time when nothing went according to plan. Approaching her forties, Elizabeth found herself single, divorced, and struggling to conceive the children she’d always dreamed of having. Accepting that life is full of failure, Elizabeth launched the podcast to show people how to turn failings into something more positive, and how it’s never too late to change your life. With influential people from a range of backgrounds desperate to talk about failure, the podcast virtually took off overnight, attracting A-list celebrities including Mel C and Alexandra Burke to come on and share their story.
As well as being podcast host Elizabeth is also the best-selling author of several books, her newest called ‘Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict’ which comes out this April. Alongside this, Elizabeth has a long-standing career in print journalism and has won various awards of recognition, her writing featured in huge publication companies such as Vogue, Elle and Grazia.
Today’s episode is for anyone who needs to celebrate the myriad of things that may be going wrong. In the episode Elizabeth shares her honest, uplifting story of her own experience of failure, as well as the insights gained doing interviews with people from all walks of life. The message of today’s episode is vitally important - things in life WILL go wrong, but failure and what we can learn from it, can inform a future of success.
- Elizabeth's earlier years and time at Cambridge
- Writing for her local newspaper at the age of 12
- Elizabeth's life-changing work experience at The Evening Standard
- The start of Elizabeth's novel-writing career
- Elizabeth and I discuss the side effects of people pleasing
- Elizabeth opens up about the divorce as one of her failures
- The beginnings of the How to Fail podcast
- Confirmation bias between men and women on perceptions of failure
- Elizabeth's biggest failures
- Elizabeth asks me my tips for creating a safe space when having an online presence
- The biggest things Elizabeth's learned from the guests on her podcast
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Transcript
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| 0:32.3 | Some failures are awful and you might never get over them, but the one thing I can guarantee |
| 0:37.3 | is that you will learn |
| 0:38.4 | something from them. I'd always wanted to write books from the age of four. So I had a lot of hope |
| 0:43.6 | for this novel and so it got published and it went out into the world. When you say a savaging, |
| 0:49.3 | that's that's too complimentary. They all absolutely hated it but but not only that, they egged each other on |
| 0:56.2 | to detest it even more. |
| 0:58.2 | I still see my divorce as a failure, |
| 0:59.9 | but I'd no longer see failure as a negative. |
| 1:02.1 | To face up to that took me a really long time. |
| 1:05.4 | I felt so ashamed |
| 1:07.3 | that all of my loved ones had come to that wedding |
| 1:10.3 | and had made an effort to interrupt |
| 1:12.1 | their lives to celebrate that union and it hadn't worked out not for want of trying on my part. |
| 1:19.2 | When you think of your biggest failures, what do you think of? If you don't mind, I probably |
| 1:24.3 | won't talk that much about it. It might derail this conversation because I'm still very much in it. |
| 1:28.6 | It's... |
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