Faith and Values: From failure comes lessons

I failed at something this summer, and I’m still harping about it.

Some months ago, I was invited to apply to be a part of a speakers bureau for a statewide humanities organization. I was honored by the ask.

But I’m not a good public speaker. I stumble over my words, and my hands shake. I write and rewrite what I’m going to say, agonizing over every word, and then repeatedly practice my talk in the mirror. Even if I have my speech memorized, I need my notes, because surely a transition or sentence or maybe even an entire paragraph will just disappear from my brain.

So, naturally, I accepted the invitation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.”

That’s why I gave both a TEDx Spokane and Pivot talk in 2020.

But that was during COVID, when the crowds were smaller or virtual. It was a good step outside of my comfort zone, but I knew I still needed to improve my public speaking skills.

The speakers bureau was a way to keep pushing and challenging myself.

Plus I had something to say.

For my audition, I decided to focus my talk on the importance of religion reporting.

Perhaps that was my first mistake. People tend to be more interested in my experience growing up in a cult, but I wasn’t sure how to connect that to the humanities.

Journalism and religion, to me, seemed like an obvious fit. Religion reporting explains how people experience and express the world around them based on their values. After 20 years on the beat, I could talk about that all day.

The virtual audition, though, came at a bad time.

It’s a poor excuse, but I had just gotten home from three weeks in Greece where I had led 21 undergraduate students on a journalism study abroad trip.

I was jet -lagged. While abroad, I didn’t have as much time as I thought I would have to prepare my talk and prep for questions. And I hadn’t used Zoom in weeks and with program updates, had unexpected technical snafus, like not being able to play audio or share only a portion of my screen.

As a result, the committee saw me reading tiredly from my notes and heard a speech that was written on a 12-hour plane ride and needed refinement and a lot more editing.

I wouldn’t have selected me either, based on that performance.

So I wasn’t surprised when I got the “We’re sorry to inform you” email.

Still, I was disappointed.

I know better. I know I need to write drafts and practice, but I didn’t make the time. Maybe I was a little cocky because I was invited to apply for this bureau and thought I had an edge. Thinking I had an edge, and lost it, makes it worse.

The experience has me thinking about failure, which has always been unacceptable to me.

Buddhist nun Pema Chodron once said at a commencement address that failure can be like a “portal to creativity, to learning something new, to having a fresh perspective.”

That means there’s a lesson in this: an opportunity.

I do still believe in the key message I was trying to share – that religion reporting makes a difference in communities.

Perhaps there’s still an innovative way I can share this idea.

But maybe the more important lesson is about self -compassion. We all mess up sometimes, and that’s OK; it’s part of what makes us human.

And I’ll try again if an opportunity like this one comes along again. It would be a failure not to.

Tracy Simmons, a longtime religion reporter, is a Washington State University scholarly assistant professor and the editor of FāVS News, a website dedicated to covering faith, ethics and values in the Spokane region.