Are You Beating Yourself Up?

Stop it!

Give me a break. No, really, that's what you should be saying to yourself. Give me a break. Hello, everyone. It's Mark Balch here, president of Shift Mastery. Today I want to talk about giving yourself a break.

 You know we always make mistakes. That's really how we learn a lot of things in life is by making mistakes. Yet, for some reason, I know I was the king of this, we just beat ourselves up. “Why did I do this? I should have done that. Man, if I'd only seen this. If I'd have only done this a little differently”. All these reasons that we think we should have done at the time, yet we're looking back and using information we have currently to judge a situation that happened in the past.

Of course we do not see it that way in the moment.

 Well, I don't know about you, but we can't really go back in time to do things like that. So, why do we do this? We just beat ourselves up. I think a lot of it is, I know it did for me because I consider myself a recovering perfectionist, we think things should be done perfectly. We should always do everything just right.

 Yet that's just not reality. It's just not possible. First of all, we're not perfect and there's no way that we can do things perfectly. So, right there, we're setting ourselves up for failure, if you want to use the word failure. I don't really particularly care for the term failure, and we'll go into that in another week or so. Yet, we still beat ourselves up.

 If you really think about it, why do we do that? Because we want to do something better. We want to be better, and we want the best from ourselves. That's a good thing. Yet, we tend to look at it a little differently than we should.

 Instead of beating yourself up. Stop saying, I woulda, I shoulda, and all of these things that are nothing more than just berating yourself and making yourself feel bad. Why don't we look at it a different way and say, what can I learn from this situation? What is the lesson here? Because that's all life is. Life is just a bunch of lessons. Some of them are really great lessons, and some of them are really difficult lessons, but they're all lessons. If you will turn your mind a little bit more in that direction and start looking at things as lessons, you will really free up a lot of good energy within yourself and you'll feel a lot better about yourself.

 So the next time you do something and you think, ah, I could have done it better, or I should have done this or that, stop and think what's the lesson here? What can I learn from this? Okay, I see, I didn't see this and I'll look for that next time, or maybe I'll try it a different way the next time, or whatever the case may be.

 No more of;”Man, I should have done this. I should have done that. What's wrong with me?” and all these negative things. It serves no purpose except to make you feel bad. Then you tend to just feel bad instead of actually learning the lesson you should have learned so you can improve. Then that opens you up to repeating it. So, change the way you think and start responding instead of reacting. Look at it as a lesson. Stop the self grudge because it just serves no purpose except to make you feel bad.

 As I mentioned above, I considered myself a perfectionist and actually boasted about that for most of my life. Then I heard something that really made an impact on me. So any of you out there that are struggling with that as well, maybe this will help you.

 “Being a perfectionist is the height of arrogance.”

 I thought about that. It's absolutely correct. I'm thinking that somehow I can be perfect and I can do perfect things and that really is the height of arrogance. That really changed my thinking. Thus I am a recovering perfectionist. I hope this helps.

 And remember, you shift your mind, you will shift your life. Until next time, have a good one.