Hello everyone Today we are going to discuss how to let go of a mistake. A mistake is basically something that upon reflection you wish you would have done differently. Our mistakes can play over and over in our heads, kind of like loop film reels.
They can torment us to the point where we are almost restricted. Sometimes we are so afraid of making future mistakes, that we don't move anywhere at all. For most of us in the western world, our self worth is so tied to performance that when we make a mistake it's an automatic subtraction from our self worth.
This is why mistakes can be so incredibly painful. In a perfect world there would be absolutely no connection whatsoever between mistakes and self worth or performance and self worth, really. This whole dynamic is setup when children were corrected for the mistakes that we make or corrected in ways that are less than self loving.
This set up is created in childhood, when we make mistakes and were corrected by the adults around us in less than loving ways. When we make mistakes, we are often blamed, criticized and chastised for the things that we've done. This causes us to come to the conclusion that we are bad and we are convinced that in order to be loved we have to be good.
So, what we do is we internalize this process of dealing with mistakes. We create an internal corrections officer and this internal corrections officers is now in charge of criticizing and blaming and correcting our behavior. So, the corrections officers is the one that usually comes out anytime you make a mistake.
Your corrections officer is the one that is responsible for subtracting from your self-worth, based on the mistakes that you make. The thing is that, self-worth has nothing to do with perfectionism or with making mistakes. It has to do with recognizing and accepting in the innate value of your being, regardless of performance.
When you are dealing with a mistake that you've made, it is very important that you step back and realize that you made the best decision that you thought you could make at the time. We always chose what's inline with our needs at the time. It's only upon reflection that we can see that the decision that we made is probably not the best one.
This is why we can only ever say that something is a mistake in retrospect. We make our decisions based on a level of awareness. Our level of awareness changes, so, we can only say that something is a mistake after our awareness changes.
Every single person does what they think is right in the moment. When you are dealing with mistakes, it is better not to focus on things in terms of right or wrong. Instead it is best to keep things in terms of whether they are beneficial or detrimental .
The way that we gain more awareness about what is actually beneficial or what is detrimental, is by making mistakes Mistakes are the result of a retrospective interpretation as far as whether the thing you did or said or thought, was right or wrong. So, it makes absolutely no sense for mistakes to be the criteria for which a subtraction is taken from your self-worth. If you subtract from your self-worth based on mistakes, that is the same thing as expecting yourself to see what you didn't see, know which you didn't know.
If we judge our worth upon retrospection, what we are doing is judging yesterdayʼs self based on today's expanded perspective. Talk about unfair! You would never do that to a child.
A child has no idea that they are going to fall if they are not looking where they are going. The way that they discover that they are going to fall if they are not looking where they are going, is by not looking where they are going and then falling. So, if you were to judge a child and decrease the childʼs self-worth, based on the fact that he wasn't looking where he was going, and thus made that mistake and fell, you would be judging something based on your expanded perspective.
It's a perspective which the child does not share. But this is the same kind of thing you are doing when you are looking back at yourself relative to the mistakes you have made, regardless of whether you have made a mistake one second ago or a year ago or very early on in your life. That was a previous you.
It was a whole different perspective which you held. So, it's good to think of that as a previous you. You can't look back at yourself, the previous version of you, in a different way than you would look back at that child.
You can't expect the previous you to know what you know now. It is because of that previous self that you know what you know now. So, if anything you should be extending gratitude towards the wisdom that has come, as a result of the mistakes laid out by the previous you.
Sometimes, self-hate loves to use the excuse, "but I knew better than to do that and I still did it". It's easy to think that you should feel terrible about yourself when it comes to mistakes, if you knew better than to do something that you did. But, if you are beating yourself up for mistakes based on that kind of perspective, it is time to understand motivation.
Motivation is the direct result of a perceived need or desire. And often, we are caught between opposing needs. For example: We may have the desire to lose weight, but in the moment we may eat a doughnut because our desire to eat a doughnut is stronger in the current moment than our desire to lose weight.
When this is the case, our awareness tells us that the best decision is to eat a doughnut because our need and desire at the time tells us that it is so. We make the decision to eat the doughnut from the perspective of our momentary limited awareness. It may not be ultimately beneficial to us, and making the mistake may show us that eating the doughnut is in fact detrimental.
But, it still doesn't change the fact that in the moment you still did what you thought was best at the time. If you didn't think something was the best decision at the time, you wouldn't do it, it's as simple as that. We all make these choices, which we think are best at the time, which turn out in retrospect to be not the best thing at the time.
But the truth still remains; you only make a mistake because you don't think it's a mistake when you are in the middle of doing it. There is always a consequence when it comes to the mistakes, but it is the expanded consciousness of these consequences that help us to make the best decisions in the moment. Unless you are aware of the consequences, there is no way that you could choose the right choice in the moment.
That's why this is more of a trial and error modality of learning in the physical dimension. Accepting and learning from our consequences, allows us to make better choices in the future. But at no point does making a mistake make us a bad person.
At no point does it actually decrease our self-worth. We may have made choices from a very limited level of awareness that were unwise, ineffective, and detrimental, but our worth has absolutely nothing to do with our level of awareness. Our love ability and level of deserving also has nothing to do with our level of awareness.
Think of a mistake that you might have made in the past. Close your eyes and go all the way back and relive that mistake. Try to remember what you were thinking.
Try to remember what you were feeling. Try to remember every single condition that went into making that mistake. And then, ask yourself this question: "If I was to go back to that time not knowing what I know now, but instead knowing only what I knew then with the same needs, desires, perspectives, and lack of awareness of the consequences, would I have done something different or would I have done the exact same thing?
" It is incredibly important that we go back to realize that we made the decision, which we thought was the best decision at the time, before ever going to let ourselves off the hook for our past mistakes. The key to loving yourself, even when you make a mistake, is to change your perspective relative to the mistake. In other words, to refrain the mistake.
In order to refrain a mistake, we must change our point of view, and therefore interpretation about the mistake that we have made. We have to search for the value that is inherent in the mistake. Then, we have to find new thoughts that enable us to let go of the criticizing, condemning, and self blaming, that we are doing based on the mistake that we have made.
In other words, we have to metaphorically look through the bath water for the baby, save the baby, and then throw out the bath water in order to get over our mistakes. When you have made a mistake, the following questions will help you to refrain the mistake and the way that you are looking at it. It will help it to not detract from your self-worth, as it probably is currently.
. "What valuable thing did this experience teach me that I would not have otherwise known about myself, about another person, or about the world? " .
"What did this experience cause me to know that I want? " . "What am I going to do differently in the future?
" . "How will this mistake help me to live a better life in the future? " .
"Is there anything I can do to make preparations for the mistake that I've made? If so, what are they? " .
"How can I move forward from here? " When you are done answering these questions, make a list of all the positive aspects about this mistake that you have made. Don't worry, embracing mistakes is not the same thing as condoning the pain that you caused yourself and others.
It's also not going to cause you to make the mistakes again and again. Instead, it's going to help you to stop using it as an excuse to beat yourself up and hate yourself. Stop and think about it.
Beating yourself up for a mistake serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. It doesn't solve anything. You canʼt take back the mistake that you have made.
No amount of recrimination or condemnation, is ever going to change the fact that a mistake was already made. And if you take back the mistake, even if you could, you would also be relinquishing the lesson that you learned. When you can let yourself off the hook for the mistakes you have made, it becomes ten times easier to move forward, make preparations, make different choices, and make a better life for yourself based on what you have learned from the mistake.
There is no right or wrong ways to refrain a mistake. Just remember that when you are refraining a mistake, you are looking to give the mistake positive meaning instead of negative meaning. Perfection is defined as freedom from fault of defect, which is especially ironic, because by this definition, imperfection is perfection.
Mistakes are what makes perfect. It is only by virtue of the feedback that we are getting by making mistakes, that we get closer and closer to success. Every mistake tells you what you need to correct and therefore brings you closer to the likelihood of success.
They call this process "successive approximation". To understand what I mean, think back to a time when you were learning how to walk. These imperfect steps which you made, which you could call a fall, is what taught you to keep your balance to walk in the first place.
So, these imperfect steps, which we could call a mistake, are every bit as responsible for you being able to walk today as the perfect steps which you took. So, it's easy to see how there is perfection even in these mistakes that you are calling imperfect. There is no such thing as success without knowing failure.
There is no such thing as perfection, absent of mistakes. Mistakes are what is causing you to go in the direction of everything that you want. Mistakes are telling you what the perfect performance actually is.
I can sit here and tell you today, that perfection doesn't exist. I don't think it's particularly beneficial, because nobody knows whether perfection exist or doesn't exist. It might exist.
The point is you can't keep using perfection as the criteria by which to hate yourself. You can't keep using it as an excuse to keep yourself in a state of resistance. You can't keep using perfection as the bar which you measure yourself against.
If you want to live a happy life, you have to let go of the idea of perfection. I hope you have a good week and I will see you next week.
