A partial repost, because I’d forgotten about this paradigm I spontaneously invented a couple of years ago until Saturday just past, when I managed to – such fun – lock myself out of my house. Harrumph. $160 for a locksmith is NOT how I wanted to spend money right now, thanks very much. I could have just bunked at my sister’s for the night, and waited until my husband got back from out of town on Sunday evening – but I had cakes I desperately needed to get baked, and marking hard-deadline-due on Monday. If I wanted to sleep on Sunday night at all, I needed to get at my stuff well before husband was due home.
Naturally, he was about as thrilled as I was at the prospect of paying $160 to fix my mistake, but told me to do what I needed to do. My sister volunteered to go up the road and grab some food so at the very least we’d be able to have hot chips in the backyard for dinner – and I was left with the kids, waiting for the locksmith, slowing spiralling down into self hatred because of my stupid, expensive mistake.
That’s when I remembered the post below, that I wrote back in 2017. And I used the techniques I’d come up with. And it worked.
So I’m resharing, because I expect there are quite a few new readers who missed this one the first time around, and I’ve found it useful, and You Might Too.
We all make mistakes. It’s called being human. I know that your humanness often feels like the hardest thing to forgive about yourself; but it’s also your greatest asset. <3 <3 <3
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I’m learning to be kinder to myself. Yes, okay, I still secretly think I’m superwoman and that if I just work hard enough and be more organised and come up with more efficient Ways of Being then I really can have it all, but I’m learning not to beat myself up for mistakes, not to dwell or stew, I’m teaching my thoughts to move on past obsessive cyclical patterns (6 months of cognitive behavioural therapy in 2012, I’m looking at you, thanks), and I’m learning to take a business-minded approach to mistakes.
What do I mean by that?
If you’re into small business (or big business, I guess), or inventing, or creating, or designing especially, or whatever, you know that a lot of the process involves fast prototyping. Fail fast, fail early is one motto I heard that really gets it. Fundamentally, it’s an acknowledgement that, say in design, your first ten, twenty, thirty ideas are basically going suck. So you get through those as fast and as efficiently as possible so you can get to the good stuff. Fail fast, fail early, so then you can succeed.
Looking at mistakes with a business mind also means assessing their effects. Instead of dwelling on ‘oh, I should have done this, I should have done that, what do they think of me, I’m such a fool’, etc, it’s a quick 3, 2, 1:
THREE: Rank the actual, tangible results out of three:
1 = no one got hurt.
2 = maybe someone got hurt moderately, or a few people got hurt a little.
3 = someone got hurt a lot, or a few people got hurt moderately.
(Bonus points for 4 = someone is dead.)
And yes, you have to apply this scale to emotional hurts as well, but you have to apply it accurately. No inflating the number because your anxiety is telling you that you suck and that bad things might happen. (And yes, this can apply to things too, like okay, I dented the cover of my favourite book, that’s a 1; I accidentally lit the kitchen on fire, that’s a 3, possibly a 4 depending on how ‘dead’ the kitchen now is. Ha ha.)
TWO: You have two options now:
1) Decide you don’t care about the people/things that got hurt –> do nothing.
(Which, legitimate! Example: Toddler is being obnoxious and won’t do The Thing. I mean to speak nicely but am tired and cranky, so I snap and demand that The Thing be done. For me, this qualifies as a mistake, albeit a common one Toddler is now hurt, but you know what? Tough freaking luck, because you don’t have to want to do The Thing, you just have to do it. You can’t be an effective parent/boss/teacher/mentor/human if you only care about never making others sad.)
2) Decide you do care, –> 2, do something.
Note that there is no option here that says ‘care, but also do nothing’. You care, you do something. You don’t care, you don’t do something. This is what prevents the spiral. End.
ONE: Move on.
That’s it. No options here. Just, assess the level of damage, either do something towards fixing it or don’t, and move on.
3, 2, 1.