Fellow members of the human race, I speak to you as a recovering perfectionist about the value of making mistakes.
We would all agree that mistakes are an inevitable part of life. When a baby learns how to walk, it must fall.
There is no shame in this, yet when we grow up, we often judge ourselves and others, hiding our missteps. There is a high cost to this.
The other day I made an unintentional error at work. You know that moment you realize you’ve made a mistake? It can hit you like an epiphany or a punch in the gut. This was a punch in the gut.
I felt incompetent, and this was impossible to reconcile with my perception of myself as a capable person.
Mistakes feel bad because they mess with our identities. Seeing myself as capable, there is no space to be incapable. I had to be one or the other.
The antidote: enlarge my self-image so that it could include all of me.
Try this exercise
Think back to a time when you made a mistake that made you feel bad. What part of you couldn’t co-exist with it? Do you see yourself as kind but did something unkind? Do you see yourself as smart but did something stupid?
Mistakes are inevitable; they are built into the design of life for a reason. When we own them, we own more of ourselves, both the dark and the light.
Although we often want to hide them, sharing them helps us connect with others. We are sharing more of ourselves which makes us more real.
We can also learn from them and not make those same mistakes in the future because there are so many other mistakes to make!
So yes, we can blame bad parenting for giving us false messages about mistakes. Yes, we can blame the advertising industry for giving us false images of perfection. But, we can learn to love our mistakes for the teachers they are and for how they grow us.
In the process, we can learn to more fully love our imperfect selves and all the imperfect souls who populate our lives.
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This post was previously published on Susie Arnett’s blog.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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