TUESDAY TIPS: April 9, 2014: Celebrate your mistakes.
First of all, yes, I know: today is not Tuesday. I meant to put up my Tuesday Tips on, you know, Tuesday, but this business is on fire, and I spent a very busy day with clients. However, this is my blog, so I decided to walk it off and move on. If you want to be all bent out of shape about this, I would suggest you get out more. Life’s short. Let more interesting issues push your buttons.
We talk a lot about how important it is to make mistakes, and learn from them, but for many people, I think, just the idea of making a mistake is paralyzing. If you’ve been made to feel inadequate or unlovable for a long time, making a mistake can seem like the end of the world. It can appear to be proof positive of all the cruel things ever said to you.
However making mistakes, and learning from your mistakes, is how you move ahead and accomplish anything of value in this world. If you decide that making mistakes is the end of experience, you’re trapping yourself in your misery. You’re essentially saying that since you’re not perfect you don’t deserve to succeed. Read my lips: THAT. IS. HORSESH*T. You absolutely must believe you deserve to succeed and to be happy in order to create a life you love. The voices in your head telling you that you’re a loser or whatever are wrong.
Also, if only perfect people can be successful…where does that leave the rest of us? (I’m looking at you, Congress.) People who have the courage to make mistakes, own them and learn from them are, to my mind, the bravest people in the world. When I started this business, the people who were the most encouraging and helpful were people who had themselves failed in several businesses before they got lucky, or people who had switched careers, or declared bankruptcy, just to name a few. Basically, they were people who themselves had gone through some rough patches and knew how hard it is to make a comeback in one’s own life.
What’s the alternative, right? Spending the rest of your life hating yourself because things haven’t worked out perfectly? Oh dear god. That sounds tedious and boring in the extreme. And, unhelpful. After all, you still have to live your life! Might as well enjoy it.
I get a lot of clients, for example, who have (in my opinion) very manageable goals. But they’re so hung up on the fact that their lives haven’t been perfect, that they don’t have the “right” degrees from the “right” schools… or that they were hospitalized…or were divorced…or have been unemployed…or whatever normal yet painful thing happened in their lives and now, in their own minds, they’re terribly damaged and clearly worthless. Clearly, they can’t write a book, or start a business, or do the thing they really want to, because the bad events proved that they are unworthy.
I would argue that many of these things happened to these people because they made poor choices because they have been consistently made to feel like unlovable, unworthy, miserable schumcks. If you’re made to feel damaged, it can be extremely hard to make positive choices. If you’re made to feel unlovable, it’s extremely difficult, for example, to believe you’re worthy of love, and to look for people who have real love to give you.
So, if you’re in a place of transition in your own life, you must stop pampering your mistakes. Accept them, learn from them–why did you make these choices? What did you hope would happen?– and then understand that every single person on the planet makes mistakes. You are not the worst person ever. You’re human, and you’re doing your best. And forgive yourself. And make it a new day. Hatred is so boring, when you could be enjoying your life.