This week I’ve been thinking about mistakes. We all make mistakes. We all fall down. We all fail to live up to our own expectations. Setbacks happen, sometimes especially when change is involved. If you’re working towards a new goal or a new habit and you miss a day or miss a target you set for yourself, what happens? Perhaps guilt or recrimination or self-loathing? You may even find that it is harder to get back on track, even though you may desperately want to do so.
No one teaches you how to stumble. Doing it effectively is something that can be learned. When you’ve stumbled, stop and try to assess objectively what happened. Be radically honest with yourself about what actually happened. If you skipped a day because you lost track of time, that is one thing. If you skipped a day because you felt insecure or like a failure and avoided it, that is quite another.
Identifying why it happened is the first step but try framing it as though you were looking at someone else or giving advice to someone else. You’ll likely be more understanding. We are often nicer to total strangers than we are to ourselves. This has to stop. When you stumble, don’t beat yourself up about it. Identify the reason without judgment. Then think about what you can do differently or how you can address the issue. If you ran out of time, maybe the resolution is something small and pragmatic like keeping a calendar, setting an alarm, or putting up a reminder. If you skipped what you were doing because you were feeling insecure, don’t judge yourself. Accept how you felt, acknowledge that you didn’t like the outcome, and make a plan on how to handle it differently in the future. There isn’t any place here to beat yourself up. It’s counterproductive and may make it harder to get back on track. If your new idea on how to handle it differently doesn’t work, that’s okay, it’s new data, new information. Try something else. Remind yourself of your goal and why it matters to you, without pressure, just to touch base, as an alignment. I will try this new approach because this goal is important enough to me. It’s important enough that I will look carefully at my mistakes, not to judge, but to learn from them with compassion.
It’s okay to stumble, to fall, to fail. It’s important to stumble well and fail better. When you treat yourself with compassion and honesty, you have a real shot at addressing the roots that poke up to trip us as we go. No path is ever perfect or smooth. Learning how to pick yourself up with compassion, and brainstorm other ways forward makes the journey (and future stumbles) kinder and gentler.
Short version: Stumbling
• Everyone makes mistakes
• Be radically honest about why it happened
• Accept how you felt and make a plan to handle it differently in the future
• Keep trying new approaches until you find one that works
• Think of how you would treat someone else in this situation or what you would say
•Be kind to yourself.
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