Recently I had a week where I had all kinds of hiccups – I missed a conference call for a marriage class I was taking for no good reason. I was late to my Toastmasters meeting that I woke up extra early for, because I severely miscalculated what it would take to prepare for it and then my printer went kerpluee. I went to a time management class where the teacher was late. (Seriously. That happened.)
Then I noticed a pattern emerging.
I got very upset with other people when they messed up, but I also got severely upset with myself when I messed up.
Messed up = not doing what was planned or expected, missing the mark, deadline, start time, etc.
Then I wrote down,
Have compassion for imperfection.
Then I thought, hmmmm
I am so hard on myself, I wonder if I am this hard on other people.
I pondered.
I deliberated.
I analyzed.
And damn I can be a b*tch sometimes.
Disappoint me and it might get ugly.
Yes I practice forgiveness and empathy.
I can usually step over to the other side and see reason and compassion and love.
But the first 5 minutes – thermonuclear mental war. Explosions, accusations, BLAME.
This is not good and this is not bad.
This is just the game we call life.
And in the game of life, it’s good to know where we stand, so we can move our marker to where we want to be – whether it’s a board game or a real life situation.
I am sharing this today as an invitation to take a look at how hard you might be being on yourself.
Sometimes it extends to other people.
Sometimes we are toughest with ourselves and the gentlest with others.
Sometimes we can forgive anything and have huge blindspots about our own mistakes.
The Blame Game is sooooooo easy to play.
This went wrong because someone else did or did not do something.
ACK.
How about –
This went wrong.
That sucks.
Let’s take a minute.
Okay, good.
Now, where do we go from here?
Sometimes my “let’s take a minute” has taken YEARS of workshops, exercises, forgiveness mantras, looking in the mirror, asking questions, not liking the answers, asking more questions.
And sometimes my, “let’s take a minute” really is a minute, because I have internalized all those processes and can bounce back to love and empathy faster.
It just depends on which button of pain is being pushed.
Some go deeper than others and some take longer than others to recover from.
So my question remains, “Are you too hard on others because you are too hard on yourself?”
What do you want to do about that?
POWER ACTION – Name one thing you judged yourself about this week. Forgive yourself for it.
BONUS POINTS – name one thing you judged someone else about this week. Forgive them too.
You don’t have to write this down. Do it mentally. Right now. No, I am not watching you and YES you will feel so much better once you do. Yes. Now.
Then let me know what comes up for you once you do.
