Just Between Coaches – Episode 155
Grab Life by the Handlebars—Even After Failing (Tonya Herb)
Tonya Herb: There are times when you feel like the failure is too big. Your whole life is over, everything ripped from underneath you. And I don’t want to say recover from failure because I don’t think we’re recovering from it. It’s a stepping stone.
Melinda Cohan: Hello, everyone. In today’s episode, we’re diving into a topic that can feel pretty heavy but is one of the most transformational aspects of coaching. Failure. We all know setbacks happen, but how can we shift our mindset to see them as stepping stones instead of dead ends? I’m Melinda Cohan, and you’re listening to Just Between Coaches. I run a business called the Coaches Console, and we’re proud to have helped tens of thousands of coaches create profitable and thriving businesses. This is a podcast where we answer burning questions that newer coaches would love to ask a more experienced coach.
My guest today has made failure her compass for growth, empowering clients to turn setbacks into opportunities, build resilience, and move forward. She has a wonderful tagline on her website, grab life by the handlebars and ride. So keep listening. Tonya Herb is joining me today. She’s the founder of Outspoken with Tonya K. She helps individuals and organizations overcome doubt, ignite their potential, and create lives on their own terms. Drawing from her journey from corporate stress and perfectionism to clarity and empowerment, she uses practical strategies and real talk to make personal growth achievable and enjoyable. Welcome, Tonya.
Tonya: Thanks for having me.
Melinda: I am excited to have you on the show. Before we dive in, would you mind sharing a little bit of your background about how failure became such a pivotal part of your work?
Tonya: Well, that’s a loaded question. It wasn’t until I was probably flat on my buns that I realized that failure was really just how I was perceiving it, how I would define failure. The pieces that went with that were first, a few tears, some anger, some of those why me’s? And when I stepped back and realized how important those lessons were, that there was no other way to learn them until I’d been knocked down. So I realized I needed to start recognizing those pieces as ways to move forward faster.
Melinda: I want to talk about that definition of failure. Places where you can move yourself forward. This has been a hard lesson that took me a very long time because I’m a recovering perfectionist. So when I read in your bio about how you draw on your own perfectionist tendencies, I’m like, oh, we’re going to get along just fine. It was a very long time in my business, years before I let go of perfectionism. Now, I see failure as areas in my life that need to be healed or transformed for my future vision, goals, desires to become a reality. Like, these are the specific areas that must be different. And if they can’t be different, then our goals, it’s going to be hard to obtain them. And it’s like, oh, well, I can make those changes because I want to get to that end result.
Tonya: Exactly.
Melinda: Right. So now I can understand that, but it took me years to get there. Let’s talk about perfectionism for a second. I see this all the time. So many new coaches, they’re starting in their business. Heck, I see it with the seasoned coaches.
Tonya: Yes.
Melinda: And perfectionism is running the show. What’s that all about?
Tonya: Well, how do you see perfectionism when you’re looking at other coaches? What are the biggest signs you recognize for perfectionism? I mean, we from the outside can see it so, so clearly, but we’re in the middle of it. It’s hard.
Melinda: For myself, some of the indicators or symptoms or qualities or attributes of perfectionism was countless revisions. Right. If I was doing a campaign webinar or building a piece of content, whatever it was, well, when I make that one last thing. Then it was that when, then that was present. I’m like, ooh, hang on a second. I might be in dangerous territory. So the when then thinking kind of was a pointer to that. The countless revisions.
The other thing, for me, personally, I don’t know if I see this with all folks, but this was for sure my own story. I had to look good doing the thing that I was doing. If I couldn’t look good doing it to others, meaning I got positive praise from the people around me, I lowered the level to which I was doing something. Wow, that was an indication, I didn’t know this at the time until I had perspective from coaches, mentors, colleagues reflecting it back to me. I had no idea. That was the biggest tell for me. I had to look good, get positive praise. And if not, I made things smaller to make sure I looked good. That was another big indicator for me. It’s how I played in my comfort zone.
Tonya: Yes.
Melinda: Even if I was doing new things, I did it in a way that was comfortable for me. Perfectionism kept me playing in that safe sandbox. Now, I had fun and I was getting clients and results, but it was in the confines of that sandbox, of my comfort zone. I was playing small. Like, wow, look at me. I’m doing webinars. Never done that before. I was doing it in a small way. Look at me. I’m working with JV partners for the first time. Never done that before, but in small ways. And so it was how I tiptoed my way to my success in the early days. So those are some indicators for me that perfectionism is showing up.
Tonya: I’ve heard similar things as indicators. I love how you phrased that like a signal instead of saying I was failing or I wasn’t good enough. Yeah, I think one of the first things we learn to recognize is the signs. It’s like a flashing light or a road sign. Oh, there’s danger ahead. There’s curves ahead or whatever. We’re. We’re learning to see those things in our lives. When you brought up validation, I felt that space again, that it was almost a trigger for me and where it really started for me. And this is one of my indicators is. Is when I’m triggered or I’m running up against something that I go, oh, gosh, I wish I would have done that better.
I’ve had to learn to allow myself those thoughts, because you can’t stop them. Let’s not compartmentalize them. Let’s look at those feelings and say, where did that start for me? Can I go back to a place in my life that that feeling was really recognizable? And when you talk about validation, I go back to early childhood. I was Mama’s best helper and daddy’s perfect little girl. I have a brother who was really sick as a youngster, so that took a lot of Mama’s attention. And so as long as I was the best helper and I thought far enough ahead, then I could ease some of that stress for Mom. And Daddy would always say, you’re such a good little girl. Everybody just loves you. How you’re just so polite and so nice.
And I can remember those things in my head. And he still says those things to this day. But I didn’t start recognizing it until my early 50s. I was trying to outwork or be the best at everything that I did. And that meant that in my mind, it was going to have to, just like you said, get praise, be good enough. Because if I didn’t receive that praise, then I was looking for it in other ways. Oh, it must not have been good enough. I was taking on the position of the person receiving it, that it was going to land with them perfectly. I wasn’t considering where they were in their journey, what they needed to hear, and that they would take away what was meant for them. So I was making it all about me all the time. That’s what perfectionism was for me, was making it about me all the time instead of thinking about how others are receiving this or what they need.
Melinda: I remember this moment. We were probably 10 years into our business, my business partner and I at the time, and we were at this mastermind with a lot of our colleagues, and we were up in Vancouver. I know exactly where we were. I can go right back to that. The place in the conference room. And for all the years, we had a very small team for those first several years, but everybody knew I was the perfectionist. And you know, my business partner, she would be like, oh, you’re being perfect again. And I’m like, yes, I know I’m being perfect again. And that’s what we’re going to do. And I was just very adamant about it.
And at this retreat, my business partner jokingly, because it had become a joke that we would both laugh at and kind of laugh it off and keep going and whatever. It didn’t seem like any big deal. And so my business partner was like, oh, there you go, Melinda, being perfect again. And my colleague stopped and she was like, timeout. And it was like, whoa, what’s going on? And she’s like. She looked at my business partner, she’s like, you actually don’t want Melinda to give up her perfectionism tendencies because she has high expectations and you need that in your leader. In that moment, my life changed.
Tonya: Tell me how.
Melinda: That is when I learned the difference between perfectionism and high expectations. I could see the perfectionism showed up when fear was running the show. High expectations of myself, of my team, my clients, everybody around me showed up when confidence was running the show, when certainty was running the show, even in the midst of unknown, the trust. And so I was like, oh, the perfection is a fear reaction. I can still have high expectations. I was able to keep the high expectations without the fear-based perfectionism. That was a game changer for me and that helped me to start seeing failure in a different light.
Tonya: That is incredibly insightful. Isn’t it amazing how it just kind of dropped in for you in that perfect moment?
Melinda: Ever since then, I jokingly say I’m a recovering perfectionist I still have to pay attention to so I don’t flip into that fear-based, stay in a smaller sandbox for the external validation.
Tonya: Right.
Melinda: Just having the. The awareness of that distinction was a game changer for how I led the business, how I worked with my clients, how I treated myself and the way I showed up and everything I was doing.
Tonya: I love how you brought that around, how I treated myself. Because when we have those aha moments, if we use those stepping stones that we’re rephrasing it in a way that allows us to expand.
Melinda: Yeah, yeah.
Tonya: It’s beautiful. You’re a recovering perfectionist. I’m a recovering people pleaser.
Melinda: I understand that one too. Yeah, yeah. We all have that emotion, response, reaction and it’s important. Like we’re talking about perfectionism. It could be good enough people pleaser, no matter what the thing is, when we can dissect the fear based element or aspects of people pleasing versus the empowered aspects, now it can be in service like the stepping stones you talked about.
Tonya: Yes, I agree. Dissect that fear base out of it from a 30,000 foot view. It’s easier to see when you’re in the emotion of it. We all have that emotion. This is where emotional intelligence comes in. Sit with it, be uncomfortable and not fix it. Yeah, there’s nothing to fix. It’s just recognition. What am I gonna do to move forward now? I just need to take one step out of this space and move forward. Because any step helps you move forward. Just that action, it’s those little tiny movements. It’s a really big deal.
Melinda: So let’s dig into failure. This is not an isolated journey. It’s why coaching is so powerful, why we’re passionate about coaching. It’s why I truly believe every coach better have their own coach to handle this stuff and to see it, because we often can’t. I couldn’t see it. It took my colleague having that very loving, truthful, transparent interaction for us realize what we were doing. It’s not an isolated journey first and foremost. If all of our listeners out there, if you venture into this topic on your own, it’s like going into the darkest, scariest neighborhood by yourself. Like, nobody would do that. So let’s talk about failure. Why is it so important for coaches to embrace failure as part of their journey?
Tonya: Well, first and foremost, for me, failure is feedback. And we need feedback so that we can understand where we are. We don’t know what we don’t know until we receive feedback, we’re just moving forward. Failure is simply feedback. We need to get good at receiving feedback or recognizing what it is for us. Once you start to embrace it instead of being defensive about it. I don’t know about you, but I can be defensive. I think I’ve moved past that portion of my life, but there was a long time that I was like, if I wasn’t receiving positive feedback or validation, right, or praise, then I took it so hard.
I think if I would give myself feedback, if I would give myself advice, even if it was just a few months ago, I would say to trust the journey and not take everything so personal and get so defensive about it. Just ask yourself, what is this teaching me? You may not have the answer right away, but the universe shows up for you in ways that you have no idea how many blessings will come from that.
Melinda: And so is that how you begin to address that mindset with your clients? Like, so often, I see coaches feel failure reflects their ability to succeed. They take it personally, get defensive. How do you address that mindset with your clients?
Tonya: You know, I developed for me a formula to actually dissect it because I am a visual learner. I don’t know about you, Melinda, but I spin in my head so fast. The bike on the wall behind me is a symbol for me. It’s a sign for me. And we talked about the handlebars earlier, but I took part of that bike and I separated it out and provided a formula for myself. And it’s called steer. And so the interesting thing about this formula is I can write it out for myself, my clients, whoever. When we write it out and dissect the feelings, you can examine how you’re thinking versus being inside of the hamster wheel.
Steer stands for this. S stands for situations. T stands for thought. E emotion. E effects, R results. And the situation is the fact base. You can just write out the facts in that situation, then you have a thought about that. So the situation creates a thought, which causes an emotion, creating the effects, which are the actions you take the inaction, your. Your behavior. Right. Giving you the results you have. And so when you start to actually write it out, you can dissect what you’re thinking and make a different choice. That’s the situation. You have a thought about it, Then you have an emotion, and you have a behavior or an effect. Cause and effect. And which gives you the results. If you want a different result, go back and think, how do I need to think differently? What do I want to feel? What action do I need to take?
Melinda: That’s awesome. I love that formula. And can you share a personal story or example from your coaching practice where failure became a turning point for you or one of your clients?
Tonya: I’m gonna get real personal here.
Melinda: Okay.
Tonya: I built this formula based on things I was going through several years ago, but how I really used it in the most recent past is in boundary setting. I have always been the person that you can go to for answers to get stuff done, right? I’m always that person. And I prided myself on being that go to person. Right? Go to Tonya. She’s got it. She’s got you. And what happened was, is that I was really starting to feel burnt out because all of a sudden, everyone came to me for everything. Right? Isn’t that what I wanted? I wanted to be the answer person.
And so what happened with that is I started thinking, why can’t anybody think on their own? Because I taught everyone that’s how I was going to show up. They didn’t need to think on their own. I thought I was empowering. But what it was is trying to inspire or motivate people without empowerment. It was disempowering. And so when I reached that burnout point where I was exhausted, my husband had just been diagnosed with bladder cancer just a few months before, and he’s doing very well, by the way. And that was one of the biggest blessings that we could have had. But at the time, it didn’t feel like it.
Our youngest had just graduated from high school. So we’ve got the cancer diagnosis, we’ve got our youngest leaving the nest. We were soon to become empty nesters, and we were moving, we were downsizing the family home. And at the time, I was just surviving, just going through it, and I was the answer girl. Well, that led me to a lot of burnout. All of a sudden, I recognized my life turned out exactly how I planned it, only I didn’t plan it right. So I really had to learn how to set boundaries.
And one of the turning points for me was when grandkids were going to come over, and my husband was having a treatment that day, and he would come home and he would have a nap the rest of the afternoon. But I also wanted see those babies. And so, okay, I’ve got it perfectly planned, perfectly planned. And my husband said, but I can’t rest when everybody’s home. I was sad in that moment because I thought, oh, I’m going to have to say no, but I can handle it all. I can do this. He said, but I can’t. And so when I started to recognize how my actions were affecting everyone else, what really was going on, because I could do it doesn’t mean that I should do it.
And that’s where I really started, really utilizing the formula. I had created it before, just as a way to move you from A to B really quickly, which I can with my clients. But when I really sat with that in learning how to set boundaries. Here was the situation. We had treatment that day, and we wanted the kids to come over. What were my thoughts about it? How did I feel about it? What were my actions? My actions were that I could do it all, and the result was not so great. Right. That not everybody was gonna get what they needed. And so when I backed up, I could really see what I needed to do. And that was kind of the beginning of my boundary setting and learning that I didn’t really know how to empower people.
Melinda: Yeah. Because like you said earlier, failure is feedback. Important feedback that helped you expand your perception, include others, not just. It’s all about you. It helped you adjust the outcomes you wanted to create.
Tonya: Right.
Melinda: Biggest takeaway. Failure is feedback. When you sit down and you actually write it out like you’re staring it right in the face, it loses power over us.
Tonya: 100%.
Melinda: Let me ask you this. Do you think there’s a failure too big to recover from?
Tonya: No.
Melinda: Why? Why is that? Why do you believe that?
Tonya: There are times when you feel like failure’s too big, that your life is over, everything has been ripped from underneath you? And I don’t want to say recover, because I don’t think we’re recovering from it. It’s a stepping stone. It’s really in how you perceive it. You get to define that perception. Sometimes we’re overwhelmed with the emotion. Once we feel through the other side of that, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Now you can reflect on moving forward. The only true failure is if you stay in that failure.
Melinda: If you get lost.
Tonya: If you get lost in it, the victim mindset. And, gosh, I’m not immune to that. I’ve had that poor me. Why me? Why does this keep happening? That question, why does this keep happening? That is one of the biggest signs to step back.
Melinda: What’s one practice or mindset shift beyond what we’ve talked about that coaches can use to reframe failure to see it. It’s not something to recover from. I loved how you said that, by the way. But it’s a learning opportunity rather than a roadblock or something to get stuck by.
Tonya: It’s a reflection for me. One of the first things I do with my clients, and I keep this at the forefront of everything I do, and I just walked through a very difficult situation over the last few weeks where everything was coming at me, and I had to stop and go, hold on. Okay. Why am I doing this? What was the reasoning behind it? So let’s go back to that very first thing. I start with people by deciding or uncovering or working through what your core values are. Because a lot of times we’re going through life, just going through life, and people say, I don’t know what my why is. I don’t know what my purpose is. I don’t know if I add value.
Well, here’s how you find that, right here, is you have to first know what you really value. Because if you don’t really understand what you value, then how will you know what your purpose is? How will you know if you’ve gotten there? So I work with people on their core values. And this sounds maybe even silly, but it’s the only thing that works for me, to ground me so that I can view failure or feedback as a stepping stone. The first time I did this exercise, I was working with a coach. He had me sit down with a hundred words on the page, and he said, circle your core values. And I’m, well, this one sounds good, and this one sounds good. And all of these words, right? I had about 15 in the end.
Well, and one of them was belonging. I remember that one. And then it was authenticity. And, you know, all of those things that we hear. And several iterations later, several years later, I went back to that exercise and I started to understand what matters to me. Because when I was doing that exercise, I was sitting with a leadership group and I was listening to why everyone else chose their core values. Oh, that sounds good. Oh, yeah, that one sounds good, too. Right? And I wasn’t really in my own space.
I have three core values. Love, connection, and gratitude. If I can’t work and show up. Loving, loving you. Loving my life in my version of the word, how I define love. And remember, I said belonging a few minutes ago. What I really started to understand is that it wasn’t belonging that I was looking for. It was connection. Genuine connection. When I’m spinning out of control or when failure hits right. When I see that feedback, I go back to those three words, and that’s how I stay grounded. And when I’m so far out of alignment, when people say they’re out of alignment for me, when I’m so far out of those things, how am I going to get back to those spaces? What do I need to let go of? Who am I being? Who am I showing up as? And how can I be of service? If it is in alignment with that, then I need to let go. I need to create those boundaries and reset.
Melinda: I love that. Yeah, the values, they’re our beacon for showing up in every project, every task, every interaction of every day that we’re doing not just with business, but with family, for everything. It’s the beacon that helps us make decisions. It’s the lenses that we put on to see things through.
Tonya: Right.
Melinda: Because I love what you said. When you’re aware and they’re present at the forefront when a situation comes up that some would call failure, you have a different set of lenses. Love, connection and gratitude. But if we don’t have those, we don’t know what lenses we’re looking through, which puts us in reactionary mode or puts us in somebody else’s mode. Not in alignment with us. When we have that reactionary experience, failure starts being defined as bad, right? As negative, as something to avoid. We have to look through our own lenses to decipher, and then that’s when we can see. Failure is feedback.
Tonya: 100%. The other thing is that we think we’re reaching for success. Those are just milestones. A lot of times you’ll get to success. But here’s what I hear. I thought it would look different when I got here.
Melinda: Doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It’s different.
Tonya: It’s just different. If you go by what you’re saying that movement, then success isn’t just the end destination. It’s road signs along the way. It’s great I got here, great I got there. It’s the steps. So it’s not only important to define with failure is or use it as feedback. It’s also important for you to define what success is and what you think it’s going to get you, or will it help propel you to the next step?
Melinda: I love that our conversation has brought us full circle so that both failure and success are indicators. They’re just signposts. They’re both the same rocks along the river. We just have to keep moving forward. We can’t get stuck. Tonya, is there anything I haven’t asked that you think would be important for our audience?
Tonya: I think on the other side of that mindset of failure, something I often hear is set out on this journey to find happiness or joy. And those things are all part of it. Have you brought those into your world? Are they separate from your journey? It’s just like success, joy, happiness, those things, they’re all part of success. Failure, it’s just part of who we are. We need to define all those things. It’s not just about failure. It’s not about getting to success. It’s not about looking for happiness. It’s really about embracing all of those things inside our journey.
Melinda: I love it and I love how this all translates for the coaches that are listening in, all the entrepreneurs out there. And I love how this also translates to the client work that we do. Like this applies to both of those scenarios. And this has been a powerful conversation and I just want to summarize some of the things that we’ve talked about today. Of course, my favorite write downable, failure is feedback. I love that framing. I’m grateful you shared your steer formula to really get granular with perceived failure so you can really get in there because that’s when it begins to shift.
And you talked to us about how to reframe and took us through a specific exercise for reflection to give us the anchor for how to see things in and then the distinction between perfectionism and high expectations and his fear running this show. And I love just how we really, really got in and around this topic. And I appreciate the conversation. Do you have any parting words?
Tonya: Yes, I do. Thank you for asking. If I were listening to this, hearing this for the first time, I would love for people to imagine, hopping on their bike, grabbing life by the handlebars and taking a ride. Enjoy the journey.
Melinda: Thank you for listening to this episode of Just Between Coaches. And a big thank you to Tonya for this incredible conversation. You can find out more about her at tonyak.co. That’s Tonya T O N Y A K dot C O. In the show notes, you’ll find the link to her website and a link tree with free resources as well. Tonya, thank you so much for coming to the show.
Tonya: Melinda, this has been fun. Thank you for holding this space for us.
Melinda: My pleasure. I’m Melinda Cohan and you’ve been listening to Just Between Coaches. Just Between Coaches is part of the Mirasee CFM Podcast network, which also includes such shows as Course Lab and To Lead Is Human. For more great episodes of Just Between Coaches, follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and tell your friends. Thanks and see you next time. It.