Can you learn to love your mistakes?
BE GENTLE WITH YOURSELF
Don't forget to learn to be gentle with yourself. It's crucial for leadership as well as self-development: you become a role model for others by showing a vulnerable side of yourself. We all make mistakes! It's human.
When you can examine yourself in such an honest way and speak about it—that is real leadership.
Has it been a rough time for you, too? Have you struggled to come to terms with a mistake or mistakes you've made? Was it avoidable?
Maybe your past few weeks have been filled with missteps. Maybe you're struggling to accept a small thing you did wrong. Maybe your actions feel off from your truth.
Big or small, it really hurts. Can you be with this pain?
As a leader, you know the power of owning up to your messes. You can acknowledge the truth and, painfully, admit to others that you've messed up. You know how to take corrective actions to ensure it won't happen again.
But owning up is often the easier part. Let's admit it, it's not easy to look inward and examine exactly what we did wrong. But the hardest part is actually being soft and compassionate with ourselves when we know that we messed up.
We owe it to ourselves to examine our mistakes. We need to look the truth in the eyes, analyze what we did wrong, and grow from the experience.
If you don’t first have compassion for yourself, how can you show true compassion towards others?
Love Yourself in your Mistakes
Loving yourself in your mistakes doesn’t mean loving the mistake itself. It means practicing compassion towards yourself and nurturing yourself through the painful error that really hurts.
When you’re gentle with yourself, your heart softens up. You reach so much deeper, and as a result, you actually find insights into those areas in your life that need healing. And in healing our hearts, we remain in alignment with our core, our soul, our true selves. We become fully present, rather than absent.
As a society, we suffer from so much self-criticism. Let's practice self-compassion instead.
Embrace Your Mistakes to Become Your Best Self
This is a quick exercise you can practice right here, right now, to begin to heal and learn what it feels like to love your mistakes - present or past.
Close your eyes, let your mind quiet down, and settle into yourself. Think of something bright and treasured, something that fills your heart with love. It can be a child, a pet, a loved one, a special place—it doesn’t matter what it is, just find that moment of big, unbelievable love.
Hold onto that moment. Feel it, entirely. Linger. At least 5 minutes.
Now, feel your mistake at the same space.
When we allow this kind of powerful love to fill our hearts, at the same time as we’re feeling the sharp pain of the mistake, we’re able to unfold the lesson which is underneath the pain. Each lesson is there to guide us.
The messy moments in life exist to teach us lessons. You are where you are today because of all the mistakes that brought you to this moment—and that’s not a mistake at all, is it? That’s something to love.