It’s Time To Stop Being So Hard On Ourselves! How To Fight The Self-Doubt When You Make Mistakes
A little while ago I was reviewing an old document I had written and found a bunch of typos. You know the kind of typos that spellcheck doesn’t catch because they are real words, but when you read the sentence it’s obviously not the word you meant to write?
It drives me bonkers when I find these mistakes. I double and triple check before I finalize something, but reliably when I read them through months later I find errors!
Like I said when this happens it drives me batty. I start thinking all these negative things about myself. I’m frustrated that I didn’t catch my mistakes, and mad at myself for making the mistake in the first place, and I start to feel like a giant failure.
Sound irrational? Yep, it totally is. And I know it doesn’t make sense to beat myself up like that.
Everyone makes mistakes. It’s not just my own experience telling me mistakes are normal, but my years of neuroscience training where I know how easy it is for our brains to make these small mistakes.
But I know I am the type of person that puts crazy high expectations on myself. Especially when I’m under stress or under pressure these small errors really bug me.
I think this is something a lot of us struggle with. We set these goals or expectations for ourselves that we should be perfect.
We should be the perfect writer and never make mistakes.
We should be the perfect mom and be able to do everything all of the time.
We should be the perfect wife, chef, housekeeper, and be in top physically shape...
Basically we expect ourselves to be magic robots capable of doing everything perfect all the time.
But that’s impossible. It is impossible for us to go through life without making mistakes. And really, if we did go through life with everything being easy and totally perfect that would get pretty boring after a while wouldn’t it?
The trouble with setting this need to be perfect can be really hard on our minds and our bodies.
We beat ourselves up for mistakes, and we feel really bad about ourselves.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve done 400 other things right that day, that one typo bugs me for the rest of the day.
What works for me when I start being hard on myself is to ask myself what would I say to my daughter she was in this situation. If 15 years from now she made a typo and dwelled on it all day because she felt like a failure! I know what I would tell her. I would tell her it’s normal to make mistakes. It’s okay to not be perfect all the time (who wants to be a robot anyway). And that beating ourselves up for not being perfect just gets in the way of our lives.
If I’m spending all day thinking about how I made a mistake or a typo, I’m not enjoying the time I spend with my family, and I’m not appreciating all the positive things that are going on around me.
Ladies (and gents) it’s time to stop holding ourselves to these crazy unrealistic standards. It’s time to stop beating ourselves up when we fail to reach unattainable goals. And it’s time to focus on all the things were doing great!
Do this right now. Take out a piece of paper and write down five things that you’re proud you did today. Five things you did well. This practice can train our brains to focus more on the positive and focus less on the small errors that we all make.