Loving Monday: Forgiving Yourself Creates a Way Forward
We are often our own biggest barrier to getting off to a good start each week.
I am not referring to our foibles, mistakes, flaws, errors, shortcomings, or crimes.
I am referring to our unwillingness to forgive ourselves for those foibles, mistakes, flaws, errors, shortcomings, and crimes.
Sure, mistakes are costly. No doubt about it.
But mistakes can be corrected and serve as a learning opportunity. In other words, there is a future worth pursuing on the other side of most problems we cause.
If we beat up on ourselves for being less than perfect, feel we need to punish ourselves, or—worst of all—attribute negative or derogatory judgments about our characters, then we make it almost impossible to move forward, get going again, or jump back into the game with energy, determination and poise.
The key is to notice whether we focus on the error and its solution, or we focus on ourselves and our deficiencies.
In one case we participate powerfully in the creation of a constructive learning opportunity out of which we can adjust, experiment, and grow. In the other case we spin helplessly in a self-imposed quagmire of self-condemnation, perpetual second-guessing, and plummeting self-esteem.
If you have messed up recently, even if in a big way, the way forward will not be found in beating up on yourself.
The way forward lies in forgiving yourself. Only then will you be free enough inside to shift your focus constructively to the learning, adjusting and changes that will result in a new way forward.
On your side.
- Karl Edwards
