I used to think I wasn’t afraid of failure. Then I heard Rachel Hollis say that most people who think they are afraid of failure are really afraid of other people seeing them fail. That’s me for sure.

The reason I didn’t feel I was afraid of failure is to me, “failure” sounds so heavy it’s almost impossible. Like, how badly to you have to screw up for it to really be a fail? I didn’t believe I had failed if I made a mistake and had to start again or do something over or take a different path. I don’t think that mindset is all bad either, except that I couldn’t disconnect from the possibility that other people would perceive those mistakes or changes of direction as failures, and that was so much worse to me.

My eyes weren’t on the right target. I wasn’t thinking about who I really wanted to please, or why. And I really wasn’t thinking about the fact that when I tell a coworker who runs marathons that I’m cancelling my registration for the half marathon and taking it down to a 10k, they actually don’t go home to their families and say, “you are never going to believe what Tori told me today. Actually, you will because she’s so unmotivated she never meets her goals.”

In case you don’t have anxiety backseat driving your life, let me take this moment to tell you I’m not usually such a narcissist that I think everyone I’ve ever met cares deeply about my life and talks trash about me behind my back, but worry is like the ex-best friend I never call back but always run into and she is there for me in all the wrong ways.

The point is they aren’t stressing about my decisions or my failures, but even if they did care, even if they did talk about what a loser I am at their dinner table that night, does it really matter? Nope. Do conversations they could possibly be having about me get in between me and my goals? Only if I let them. But does my insecurity drive me to be more to concerned about what the world thinks of me than what the Father does? It certainly can and lady, this is the problem.

This is where your “why” comes in. It’s okay to do something badly – in fact, that’s how you learn. When something works, good. But then you do that on repeat forever. When something doesn’t work, there’s an opportunity for analysis: What should I have done differently? What shouldn’t I have done at all? What advice may I have disregarded at the start that could have saved me this struggle? And most importantly, why am I doing this in the first place?

In January I signed up for a half marathon. I’m an optimist. But I didn’t get enough training in and finally got comfortable with the fact that it would be a 10k. Then I injured myself and now I may not get to run any race at all. (Update in a week!) But as much as I wish I had been able to do what I set out to do, I wouldn’t trade the work God has done on me in the process for running any race without Him.

If my “why” for running this half marathon had been “to show other people that I can do it,” this would be a failure. But since my “why” has become “to get closer to God and to hear Him speak to me,” my measure of success or failure has changed. I’m writing this partly to remind myself of that because I’ll admit, I was sad to accept that I wasn’t going to meet my goal. But I have learned throughout the time I spent training how to hear God’s voice and what it feels like to know He’s using me. There’s no praise I could get from the world that would be a better reward than that.