Why Do We Beat Ourselves Up?

Hello my friend, happy Sunday to you.

This morning as I was thinking about what to write I remembered my friend who scratched her new car.

Now, the scratch wasn't a big scratch but it was a scratch nonetheless.

When I was a kid, we rarely, if ever, got a new car. But the one time we did, it definitely got scratched, and I remember my dad saying, "well now the first scratch is done, we can relax."

Yep, it was a great reframe tbs (to-be-sure... I hate it when people use acronyms and I don't know what they mean so I spelled it out for you in case you feel like me and had no idea what tbs meant. 😊)

I've messed up a thousand times.

You've messed up a thousand times.

You bump into someone when trying to move past them.

You spill your coffee or god forbid break your favorite coffee mug.

You leave the house and get halfway to work and realize you left your laptop at home.

You look at the time and think you have plenty of time to get where you're going and then realize you were supposed to be there an hour earlier.

You think you're offering a compliment to someone you love, and they take it as something entirely different than that.

I could go on all day long talking about all the ways one messes up.

The real issue here...

It is NOT the messing up part.

You can get the scratch fixed, or not.

You can find a new mug and find that you love the new one better than the old one.

You can apologize.

The real problem often comes after the mess up.

And it's not what has to be fixed, it's what happens inside of your own head.

Yep.

The reason you feel the way you do after messing up is because of what you're afraid it means about you.

Read that again.

It isn't the mess up.

It's what you're THINKING about the mess up.

What YOU are thinking.

And if you paused right then and there and asked yourself this question, "What am I afraid this means about me?"

Well my friend told me what she was thinking and she was thinking, "I'm in trouble. My husband is going to be so mad at me." And she fretted and stewed over it.

And you know what?

When she called her husband and talked with him, he wasn't at all like she thought he would be.

You see...

Her thoughts were creating her fearful reality.

Not his reaction.

Her thoughts.

It's not the circumstance itself that causes the biggest problem.

It's what you make it mean about you, to you.

And if when you mess up, you beat yourself up, try this instead... catch yourself.

Right after you mess up, ask yourself, "What am I afraid this means about me?"

And get curious about the answer.

Because that thought didn't necessarily come out of nowhere.

Maybe somewhere along the way you learned that making a mistake meant you weren't good enough. Or that you'd disappointed someone. Or that you were going to be in trouble.

And without even realizing it, you may have been carrying that belief into your life ever since.

That's how patterns work.

We make a mistake today, but sometimes we're reacting from something we learned a long, long time ago.

And here's the beautiful part...

Just because you learned to believe something about yourself doesn't mean it's true.

So the next time you mess up, instead of beating yourself up, get curious about what's happening inside of you.

Because the real freedom isn't simply learning to think a happier thought.

It's discovering why you believed that painful thought in the first place.

And realizing you don't have to keep living from it.

❤️,

Jack

P.S. If you're harder on yourself than you'd ever be on someone you love, that's usually not a personality flaw. It's a pattern, and patterns can be found. If you're curious which one might be running the show for you, start here: Pattern Finder