Welcome to the Elevated Edit Podcast.

I'm your host, Blakely Ramsey, and the goal of this podcast is to discuss all things personal development, wellness, and the art of editing your life in an elevated way.

From mastering morning routines to mastering your mindset, we're going to sift through the noise and empower you to take elevated action.

Make sure you catch the show notes for all the details.

Enjoy the show.

At the beginning of this year, I invested a fair amount of money to be in some Mastermind groups.

There were some specific skills that I felt like I needed to sharpen, to improve in order for me to get to the next level.

And as I mentioned, it was an investment to be in these groups.

And they all started in January.

And as of the time of this recording, it is now almost the end of April, so.

So we're looking at three and a half, almost four months in this program.

And there is one thing that I am really starting to notice, and I can't unsee it, and it is that the people who are saying things like, I just don't get it.

I'm not ready yet.

I don't feel ready.

Which is understandable because some of the information in these groups is very difficult.

But those people have not moved since January.

Personally, professionally, their business, they are just stagnant.

And there's a pretty high likelihood that come next January, when this program ends, they're still going to be in the same spot.

But there's also another group of people who, from the beginning, just went for it and aren't afraid to look stupid and mess up publicly and fail 100 times.

And then on that hundredth time, they start to see some momentum.

And I'm proud to say that I can put myself in that second group where I have really made a fool of myself this year, intentionally and with a lot of thought.

But I knew that if I continued doing what I was good at, I was never going to grow.

And there's often this, oh, well, she just blew up overnight.

Oh, well, yeah, her career just took off.

But the truth is, success is not a light switch.

It is a slow burn.

And failure is the fire that lights it.

So today's podcast is all about reframing the way that we look at failure.

It's not an obstacle.

It is an accelerator.

And I'm actually going to go pretty deep into some research that I did on this because I've talked about failure before on the podcast and failing forward, but I really wanted to understand why we fail forward.

And so I think that if this is Something that you're like, I don't know how I feel about failure.

It still kind of makes me uncomfortable.

I think you're really going to enjoy this episode, so let's jump right into it.

We are wired by society, societal expectations to be ready to.

To be polished, especially women.

We are rewarded when we show up as the polished version of ourselves, the polished version of our business.

And the sad truth is, is that being ready is the number one momentum killer.

But it's.

It's almost natural because when you first launch the thing or make the announcement or make the decision, everybody's excited for you.

You know, it's like, okay, like, congratulations.

Proud of you, Great.

And then when you succeed, in their eyes, everybody's got a different definition of success.

When you succeed, they're like, congratulations, Good job.

You did a great job.

It's in the middle that nobody's cheering for you.

In fact, often people start to retract their encouragement and their support, because in the middle, you can see the vision and, you know, the work that you're putting in.

But people around you are like, what you doing, sis?

What's.

What's happening over there?

Like, I had someone very well meaning yesterday, she asked me what I was doing right now, and I told her, and she said.

She said, oh, how.

How do you make money off of that?

Like, oh, wow.

You know, this is.

People think I'm just out here just.

Just going wild with it.

But the truth is, life and business reward momentum and not perfection.

And the people who end up winning, they are the ones who do the thing before they feel ready.

And if doing the thing before they feel ready was a year, that is what 2025 is for me.

Like, I feel like I have done so many things before I was ready for them, and I have failed a lot more than I've ever failed before in my whole life.

I failed publicly a lot, but I failed behind the scenes.

I mean, every single day I've cried, I've been worried and stressed and all the things, but I'm finally starting to see some momentum.

And my momentum is not coming from the wins that I'm having.

My momentum is coming from the fact that I'm failing so many times a day.

Like, I'm doing things that I'm not good at, and I'm not seeing results, and I'm learning every single time.

So let's actually break this down, because all of this isn't just this motivational fluff.

This is actually hardwired into how success works, both biologically.

And behaviorally.

And if you're a little nerdy like me, you're really going to love this information that I found.

So your brain learns best through failure.

There is a part of your brain.

I'm going to try to say it right.

It's called the anterior cingulate cortex.

I'm going to call it the ACC because I'm not a doctor or a scientist, and I'm also really not good at pronouncing things.

But your ACC lights up when you make a mistake.

And it does that because your brain is detecting that it's a prediction error or a moment where your expectation didn't match your reality.

So when you try something and your result, or whatever it is, doesn't match your expectation, it sets off this trigger for the ACC and it considers it an error.

And you literally rewire your brain through failure.

It creates a stronger learning signal than when you actually get it right.

So every time you fail, you are getting a stronger cognitive signal than when you get it right, which is so wild to me.

And I think fundamentally, we all know that there's times where we look back and we go, you know what?

That was really hard, but I learned a lot from that.

Or that season was a really big struggle for me, or that project was a big struggle for me, or working under that boss was a big struggle for me, but I learned a lot from that.

And that is because your brain detected it as a prediction error or as a moment where your expectation didn't match reality.

And you learn from that every single time.

You learn from it more than if you just did the thing that you were good at, or if.

If you got it right every single time.

And if you think about it like that, success is basically like giving you a pat on the back.

Success is saying, good job, you did it again.

Rock on.

Carry on with your day where failure is causing your brain to go, hold up, wait.

Error, error, error.

Something wasn't right.

Let's rewire our brain so that next time maybe we can get it right.

It's like the spaceship that takes off.

I don't.

I'm not going to get into the whole Katy Perry and her cutesy little spaceship with her little group of feminist women.

But anyway, they.

When a spaceship takes off, I think it's like, there's like.

It's like a large percentage.

I want to say, like 95 of the time it is off track, and it literally just is correcting itself the whole way to its destination.

It's like, oh, you corrected too much.

Go Back.

Oh, too, too much.

Go back.

Go.

Oh, too much.

Go back 95 of the time.

That's wild.

But we can think about our lives that way, where if as long as we're moving forward, even if it's failure, we are correcting, we are learning, we are rewiring our brain every single time.

Mistakes don't mean that you're broken.

They mean that your brain is actively upgrading.

And we all, we love a little upgrade around here.

At least I do.

Okay.

There is this principle called the desirable difficulty principle.

And Dr.

Robert Bjork, I had to Google how to pronounce his name.

It's spelled B J O R K.

And I was saying Bajork, which really makes me sound like a hick, but it is Bjork.

He did a study and he found this principle, the desirable difficulty principle.

And what a desirable difficulty is, is when a challenge improves your long term performance.

So when you struggle through something, even when, especially when you fail at first, it triggers deeper processing and a deeper memory for you.

And this goes back to the first point that I made, that every single time you fail, you are learning way more than when you get it right.

And to me, that, that might sound scary and overwhelming to some, but to me, and I feel like we probably think along the same lines, I'm like, that is so encouraging and so exciting because that means every single day, if we get up and fail a hundred times in the day, that means we are that much closer to success.

And to, you know, learning how to do it the right way and learning how to grow like that, to me is so freaking exciting.

There was also a 2010 study from Harvard and the University at Buffalo that showed that people who faced some adversity, not none, not too much, just some, developed greater resilience and life satisfaction.

They were literally more likely to bounce back from challenges and succeed over time.

It is something called the stress inoculation effect, which is like a.

Basically like a B12 shot straight for your brain.

It builds the strength so that you can deal with adversity, so that you can, you know, deal with the stress with your nervous system and all the things.

It is so exciting to me.

And this is something that I.

There were definitely things in my childhood that were not great.

And, you know, I was.

At the time I was like, man, why am I going through this?

And then even like in college, I was like, man, why is this always happening to me?

And in my 20s, I was like, oh, why?

And last year I was like, why does this keep happening to Me, this is terrible.

But now.

Now that I'm in this season, I'm starting to look back and put the dots together, because I am pretty freaking resilient.

Like, you're gonna have to really dig deep to hurt my feelings to bother me now when you do make me mad, no apologies.

Like, there we go.

Off a whole different cliff.

But I do have a.

I have.

I'm very.

I do consider myself very mentally strong, and it's because I have been through a lot.

And the cool thing is, is that failure isn't just something to survive.

You know, at this point in my life, I feel like I survived to get here, but now I have rewired my brain around the way that I look at adversity, and I'm like, man, that was something that built a version of me, and I'm thriving now, and I just think it's so freaking cool.

If y'all do not know who Alex Hormozi is, you need to look him up, especially if you're in business.

But in general, he is so freaking motivating to him.

I have, like, devoured his books this year.

I've read each book twice and watched all the videos.

I mean, he is phenomenal.

But he says the person who's willing to fail the most wins the fastest.

And that's because every failure is a rep, and every rep is a data point.

So the faster you fail, the faster you can get to that winning idea or that winning resume or that winning strategy, whatever it is.

Every test is a tighter system, and every note is a sharpened pitch.

So what can look like chaos to other people is actually refinement in motion.

And like I said, I'm feeling that right now because there's a lot of people that are like, blake, clean.

What are you.

What are you doing?

What are you doing with your life?

Why are you.

Why are you doing this?

You know, you had success.

Why are you changing it up?

I'm like, why not?

Let's go for it.

And I remember, and I'm trying to remind myself, in the season back when I first got into real estate, there was a period about two.

Maybe a year and a half, two years in, where my.

My career did explode.

And I remember people coming up to me and going, I mean, you just took off.

What was the secret sauce?

What.

What did you do?

Was it a social media post that you did?

And I'm like, It was, like, 500 social media posts that I did that nobody liked.

I used to carry around a.

A plain sheet of paper and Every person.

This was before I had the systems that I have now.

This was my system back then.

I had a piece of paper.

I would, y'all, I would carry this piece of paper around with me everywhere.

It's like stresses me out thinking about it now.

And every single person that talked to me about real estate, I would write their name down.

If they asked me, hey, how's the real estate market?

Or hey, how's blah, blah, blah, or, you know, hey, you know, could you run numbers on my house?

Or hey, could you tell me a little bit about.

I would write their name down and every single week I would follow up with them.

Now, the first year, it kind of blew up in my face because I was very.

I came from a corporate sales job, so I was very salesy, I was very grimy.

I was very, like, I just wasn't super comfortable.

I wasn't very confident with my follow up skills because my follow up skills before had been very corporate and very aggressive.

And so I had to learn a little finesse.

And I learned that finesse through a year of people not responding to me, a year of people not texting me back, a year of literally nobody wanted me to be their real estate agent.

The couple of people that ended up closing with me didn't even really know me.

They just happened to like, fall into my lap, you know.

It wasn't.

Nobody was seeking me out.

The second year started to see a little momentum, but it was really about a year and a half, two years in, and it did feel like all of that work just dropped at once and everything fell into place.

And then everyone around me was like, wow, how did you do it?

You're oh.

And I'm like, I've cried every day the last two years.

I have carried around a sheet of paper and I've followed up with everybody on this freaking list every single week.

That's what I've done.

And you just, you sometimes don't see all the little teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny tiny failures that it takes for a person to get to that level of success and to get to that level of confidence into the point where they do feel good.

Like.

And I think especially when we're in that season, you know, it's easy to hear somebody else's story.

It's easy to hear somebody else say, yeah, you know, I had to go through all this adversity and I had to be told no 176 times.

And you're like, oh, wow, I could do that.

But then when you're in the middle of it.

It's like, oh, I just got told no 24 times in a row.

This is really discouraging.

And so I just think it's really important to remember how often we need to fail in order to get where we want to go.

But I think back now, with this brain that I have, I'm like, man, if I had doubled down, I could have only failed for a year instead of two.

You know, when you really start to look at failure from that perspective, you get almost excited to fail.

You're like, okay, how many times can I fail today?

Because that means how many times can I learn today?

And I think when you think about it that way and you think about it from that perspective where you're multiplying failure by iteration and resistance, that is when you are really building success.

Like, you are building your resilience muscle.

You're rebuilding the reps in.

You're building up that failure, and it is leading to success.

Success.

It's just.

Just so exciting, because that means if you're in a spot where nothing is working right now, you're perfectly primed to succeed.

Like, if you're in a spot where you're like, okay, I've been trying.

Nothing's working.

What's happening?

You are on your way to success.

Failure is your tuition, and success is your degree.

I'm gonna give ChatGPT that credit for that little quote, but I thought it was so cute.

Normally, I take.

Normally I completely rewrite all of my podcast outlines because I.

I do.

I brain dump.

And then I put all of my ideas in CHAT GPT to organize, and then I'll rewrite it in my own voice.

But I thought that one was really cute.

Failure is your tuition, and success is your degree.

So good.

And just remember that the only people who fail are the ones that are sitting on the sidelines, not trying at all.

If you are in the arena and you're on the field and you are in motion and you're moving forward or maybe moving backwards, but as long as you're moving, you are on your way to success.

You are becoming qualified through the mess and through the reps and the failures, and it's literally all leading you to success, which, to me, really does.

It makes me so excited because I'm like, okay, this is all for a reason.

This is all happening.

We're going a good place.

Because I'm not gonna lie, y'all.

The last couple months, I've been like, what?

Especially when you hear other people say it too.

You're like, okay, maybe I have lost my mind.

Like, maybe I am doing the wrong thing.

But when you finally start to see a little bit of movement, it's like almost a sigh of relief.

And I'm starting to see a little teeny tiny bit of movement.

At this point in my now year long process, I started outlining the first podcast episode, May of 2024, and it is now April 21st of 2025.

That is wild to me.

It's exciting.

I think if I had known how hard this process is going to be when I first got started, I would not have done it.

I would have gone a different route.

I'm like, wow, it's been a year.

A year, but well worth it.

I have certainly failed forward.

At least I feel like I have.

So I've got two power moves that I want you to do today.

These are your action items and they are going to sound simple.

But remember that simple is not always easy.

And remember that even sometimes the things that are easy to do are also easy not to do.

So I want you to ask yourself, where are you protecting your ego instead of building your empire?

And remember, building your empire can look like a lot of different things.

It can look like your parenting empire, relationship empire, it can be business, maybe it's content, whatever it is, where are you protecting your ego instead of building?

And then number two, where are you playing small because you're afraid of the learning curve?

I get it.

I have learned things this year, especially when it comes to like computer stuff and programming and coding that, I mean, I'm not joking you.

I have to like take breaks sometimes and just lay on the floor because it stresses me out so bad.

Because I, well, I'll like start a module and I'll listen to it for 20 minutes.

And by the end of it I'm like, I, I, I have no clue what was just said, but I'll go and I'll test it out a couple times, and the first four or five times are usually really bad.

And then by the sixth time I'm like, okay, I at least know what I did wrong.

I don't necessarily know how to fix it, but I know what I did wrong that time.

And so then I can work on, okay, how do I fix that?

And then by the 20th time I'm like, oh, I think I get it.

And then I'll go back and watch the module again.

And I'm like, oh, oh, that makes sense.

And every single time you do that, you're building a skill so just remember that you don't need to be perfect.

You really don't even need to be fearless.

You're going to be scared doing a lot of this, and it's okay.

We're going to fail forward.

You just need to be willing to try.

Okay?

I hope you got some value from this episode.

I hope that it inspired you, or I hope even it made you feel like, okay, it's not just me.

Blakely's going through it too.

And trust me, I've got friends.

They're going through it too.

So we are.

We're all in this together.

We're all failing forward.

If you have someone who you think would really enjoy this episode, send this to your personal development business bestie.

And please leave the podcast a review on whatever platform you listen to.

Okay with that, I'll see you in the next episode and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Thank you for tuning in to the Elevated Edit Podcast.

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