How Failure can be Transformative with Amy Shoenthal

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (0:10)
Hey, welcome to the podcast, everybody. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting us. We will support the pod. We appreciate it very much. We're trying to select those people carefully. And don't forget the streaming show, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at three o'clock Pacific time.
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And sometimes it's on Monday, so do check it out, and then subscribe at the Rumble channel, or go to Dr.TV and we'll send you a blast. My guest today is Amy Shoenthal, journalist, author, marketing consultant, top contributor to Forbes Women, Harbor Business Review, highlighting leaders dedicated to solving today's greatest problems. And her forthcoming book, is it out yet now? The Setback Cycle, is it out?

**Amy Shoenthal** (0:50)
It's out, it's out in the world.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (0:51)
Congratulations, okay, March 19th it came out, yeah. There you go. And I loved the thinking on this for a billion reasons. And the one glaring thing is, let me just frame it this way for me, and I'll let you just go with it. Change is hard, right? Change is hard. People don't appreciate how hard change is. You have to prepare for change, you have to think about it, you have to execute it, you have to sustain it. People don't, the maintenance part, people leave out all the time. But getting that moment, whether it's a diet or stopping cigarettes or getting a new career, that moment of change, in my world, people either need to have sort of three different but overlapping experiences. I mean, you can have one of three, or all three together, whatever it is, some sort of bottom, some sort of like, I can't do this anymore and I see it with clarity and I see the direction I want to go with clarity.
Some sort of awakening, some sort of spiritual, something steps in from the outside as the way it feels like.
What was my third going to be? So it's spiritual awakening, bottom.
Oh, and really a moment, all these, it's because these two are so related, just plain old clarity, some sort of moment of clarity. Sometimes I've seen it with people just walking past a mirror and they go, oh, I see myself and I don't like it. I'm going to change that. So you tell me about The Setback Cycle.

**Amy Shoenthal** (2:12)
I think you kind of nailed it with that moment of clarity. We all want to reach that moment of clarity, but for many of us, it doesn't happen that easily by walking by the mirror. Like that would be great if we could just answer everything by the split second moment. I find that-

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (2:28)
And Amy, and I will tell you, those are usually extreme moments.
Like for me, it's in my drug addict patients world where they're walking by the mirror with their IV pole with their hepatitis and all the horrible things happening, and they go and they just see it. They break through the denial for a second, and that's enough to get them to change it.

**Amy Shoenthal** (2:47)
Exactly. With a setback, there's the more dramatic end of the spectrum, like the ones that you're describing, and then there's the really subtle setbacks, the ones that you could be walking through unconsciously for weeks, months, years, decades. And if you don't wake yourself up, if you remain, like you said, in denial, or you ignore it, like you said, people don't like change, what people don't like is discomfort.
And if you move forward in life avoiding discomfort, you're gonna miss all these opportunities for transformation. And that's really what The Setback Cycle is based on.
There's four phases of The Setback Cycle. Number one is established. Because so many of us, yes, unless you have this big dramatic moment, whether it's a trauma or like you said, an awakening, a spiritual awakening, a wake up call for any reason, if you don't have that big dramatic moment, your motivation to avoid discomfort might make you avoid some like really, really, really big opportunities. If you never establish that you're in a setback and you would be better served if you worked your way out of it.

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (4:05)
That's number one.

**Amy Shoenthal** (4:06)
Yep, and number two is-

**Dr. Drew Pinsky** (4:07)
You want me to ask questions about that one? Because I do have questions about all of these, but I'm so curious about, I want to see the whole.

**Amy Shoenthal** (4:12)
All right, I'll give you the whole setback cycle overview and then we can dig into each phase. So I call it the four E's. Phase one is establish, like we said. Phase two is embrace. So that's the moment where you get that, aha, okay, I'm in a setback. I'm here, whether I was propelled into it by some situation out of my control, whether I put myself in this position and I realize now I need to work my way out of it or whatever reason, this is the moment where you digest the information so that you can really move forward. It's where you have to reframe your relationship with discomfort because that's where you get to the other side. Phase three is explore.