Recently I had the opportunity to share my personal story with the Beyond Type 2 website. It quickly turned into a walk down memory lane for me as the memories of the humble beginnings of Divabetic (selling t-shirts, hosting support meetings at the YMCA, and working in the basement of dLife) came rushing back.
I don’t think I would have been so honest or forthright in my writing if not for Boehringer Ingelheim’s sponsorship of Divabetic’s newest program, Clued Inn: Diabetes & Heart Health Escape Rooms. This new sponsorship helped me push past multiple failed attempts at sponsorship and the never-ending negativity from the greater diabetes community, and get back in the game!
I’m hoping my story can help inspire others because I know that not everyone is able to get past their failures.
“Failure is always a demoralizing and upsetting experience. Failure makes your mind trick you into believing things that aren’t true,” according to the Psychology Today website. “Unless you learn to respond to failures in psychologically adaptive ways, they will paralyze you, demotivate you, and limit your likelihood of success going forward.”
Failure Distorts Your Perceptions of Your Abilities
This is true for me. I haven’t spoken about the ‘makeover’ years in quite awhile because I really thought I failed. My inability to get sponsorship for anything else after Divabetic’s makeover program ended really broke my spirit. I didn’t think I was good at anything involving diabetes outreach. Additionally, several ‘haters’ on social media thought I was strictly ‘fluff’ and not informative or educational. I also was the target of homophobia after presenting a free diabetes outreach program at a well-known African-American Methodist Church which stopped me from ever presenting faith-based outreach again.
The Pressure to Succeed Increases Performance Anxiety and Causes Choking
Everyone from the Divabetic-Makeover Your Diabetes team kept asking me why we weren’t getting sponsored by another pharmaceutical company. What they didn’t know was that my proposals were being rejected on a daily basis! I became frustrated, angry and upset as I tried to rework the program into various formats and different sponsorship levels – all without success.
I remember hosting a Divabetic Zone at the Taking Control of Your Diabetes (TCOYD) Expo. The crowd loved us! Plenty of sponsors saw first-hand how our Divabetic area was packed throughout the day. I hosted portion control games, ‘Single Ladies, Single Servings’ and ‘Dancing In Cars’ workouts all day on Saturday afternoons but still no one returned my calls on Monday mornings.
The Psychologically Healthiest Response to Failure Is to Focus on Variables in Your Control
After what seemed like my millionth failure in achieving sponsorship I chose to go inward. I stopped volunteering to be part of other people’s and organization’s diabetes outreach events and focused solely on Divabetic podcast and videos. I put my head down and focused on the work. I added music to Divabetic’s Diabetes Late Nite podcasts courtesy of SONY Music, created health games and reworked podcast segments with a variety of guests.
Psychology Today advises people facing similar situations to break down the task or goal in question to those aspects that are in your control and those that are not. Then go through the list of aspects that are not in your control and figure out how to take control of them—by improving your skill-set, planning, relationships, knowledge, preparation, etc.
It worked for me! Feeling in control is a literal antidote to feelings of helplessness and demoralization that will motivate you to try again, minimize your chances of another failure, and increase your likelihood of success!
Podcasting allowed me to flex my creativity and explore new ways to educate people about diabetes and diabetes self-care. A chance meeting with Best-Selling Author, Tonya Kappes at a Book Expo in New York led to Divabetic’s annual mystery podcast. Trust me, no one in their right mind was willing to hire me as a ‘mystery writer’ except for me (I couldn’t pay anyone else to do it!). Somehow I managed to convince my Diabetes Late Niteteam and colleagues to participate in a mystery radio podcast. We had so much fun that here we are six years later getting ready for present our sixth annual mystery podcast, ‘Gingerbread Men Prefer Blondes’ in September 2019.
And that’s not all! Our annual mystery podcast was such a healing experience for me that I actually swallowed my pride and submitted a proposal in October for a new diabetes outreach program based on the mystery podcast.
I happy to announce that Divabetic will presenting the first-ever Diabetes & Heart Health Escape Room Experience: Clued Inn on Diabetes Alert Day, Tuesday, March 26, 2019 in New York City. Currently we have over 150 pre-registered for Clued Inn but there’s still room for you and your friends to participate! Register now at CluedInn.org.