In life, you will make mistakes and you will experience setbacks. Our feelings about mistakes shift a great deal in our youth. In the process of learning to walk, you fell down…a lot. And it was fine. No one pointed and laughed.
As we grow older, though, we tend to assign judgment to mistakes. Fear of being judged can then cause you to live a narrow, low-risk life that pales in comparison to all that you might have done and become. So, I’d like to make you aware of some tools: self-compassion and forgiveness.
Self-compassion can be described as a gentle concern for your own suffering.
I think of self-compassion as giving myself a big, long hug. Being self-compassionate means that I let myself feel my feelings rather than find a way to avoid them, like eating, drinking, watching tv, etc. Once you allow yourself to really feel your feelings, you’ll find that they can change quite a bit, even in the course of one day, much like the weather. We need self-compassion and forgiveness when something has not gone the way we wanted it to and there’s no one else that we can blame without it feeling like a real stretch.
Perhaps we struggled with a task that people around us found easy. Perhaps there is a whole history of disappointment in this area and this latest effort seems to confirm that we are, in fact, flawed in exactly the way we feared. All kinds of setbacks happen, and when they do, you need a way to renew and restore the tender parts of yourself that feel bruised.
Forgiveness is a process of change in which you consciously choose to redirect your attention from the negative circumstance to more positive aspects of your life. The negative thing still happened and is still not ok, but you’ve learned what you could learn and you’re ready to move on. My forgiveness self-talk usually includes these words “I could have handled that better. Next time I’ll…” I acknowledge the difficulty and decide what learning is worth carrying forward as part of my more nuanced, more accurate, more human identity.
“There is a saying in some circles: “Have your feelings or your feelings will have you.”
Without self-compassion, you will tend to beat yourself up…until the energy it takes to do that starts to crowd out your energy to be fully present to the love and connection in your life. A lack of self-compassion will diminish your energy to fully express yourself. Challenges and setbacks will happen, and when things go downhill, your self-compassion and forgiveness can capture that momentum and launch you toward your next success.
This piece was written by Lauren Moses, an MBA Professional Development Coach with MLT. Her post is the second in our Health and Wellness Series. Click here to read the first post in our Health & Wellness Series.
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