6-30-21 How often do you take something that went wrong or at the least didn’t go the way you wanted or hoped and then turn around and make yourself wrong? I used to do that a lot. It seems to be so human but I don’t believe it’s natural. For whatever reason, most of us learned to make ourselves wrong very early in the game. So many of us didn’t hear encouragement at home or at school. In fact, we were called stupid or clumsy or laughed at, and we took that to be the truth of us. It’s bad enough that, in the past, when other people have called me names, I didn’t have the tools then to put up a barrier against them, and I let that hurt me. It was a whole lot worse when I kept identifying with those names, when I looked in the mirror and called myself those names, too. It took me a long time to get over those childhood hurts because…well, they hurt - we’re pretty vulnerable at a young age and they go deep.

So, what if we didn’t do that anymore? What if we didn’t give a mistake any meaning and just held ourselves in compassion for the sadness we feel for it not going the way we wanted? I know I felt a lot different about myself when I learned to do that, rather than call myself names.

And if it’s something I could do differently, rather than calling myself stupid or bad or wrong because of that, now I start by telling myself “I wish I had done it this way”. Simply that, no false meaning attached to it which would certainly sabotage me from ever doing it any differently in the future. I then take it a step further and visualize myself doing it differently, the way I wish I’d done it. That becomes just as real to me as the original way, I’m able to stay more positive about myself, and now I’ve just created a new pathway for future success.

What matters the most to me is that I learn from what I did today and make a choice to be better the next time or do what I did differently. Then I can be proud of myself as well. Don’t we all deserve that courtesy?! So, next time, make the choice to be gentle with yourself. Let’s all accept ourselves more when we do less than 100% our best-hey, it feels good, too. Today  is a good day...and I make it so!