3 Keys to Moving Beyond a Yucky Mistake

Feeling like you made a yucky mistake can be debilitating. Often you can get stuck in a vicious cycle. One where you continually look back on a decision you made or an action you took (or failed to take) and repeatedly beat yourself up for it.

When this happens it can paralyze you. You can end up stuck in the past, regretting something that happened and find yourself unable to move forward.

This can be painful for you and for those around you, as they watch you struggle to overcome feelings of regret and shame.

As difficult as it may be to overcome these feelings, it can be tremendously freeing to figure out a way through. In my experience, there are three keys to moving forward from a yucky mistake:

1. Remember, you have been doing your best
2. You only get one (messy) trip
3. You have the power to forgive within yourself

Remember, you have been doing your best

You know the saying, hindsight is 20/20. When we look back on something that happened, our insights and the way that we view the situation is like having perfect eyesight. We couldn’t see as it was happening, but looking back we feel like we should have made different decisions.

Listen…your decisions are a reflection of you doing your best at the time. Each of us is doing our best:

• to get through our lives
• to meet our needs
• be good to our loved ones
• to juggle our own expectations and
• to meet the expectations of others while living imperfectly.

It’s easy to look back on a yucky mistake and judge it to have been incorrect or shameful but in reality, we were all doing our best at the time.

We all encounter difficult, frustrating, and stressful situations. In these situations, we have to consider all the other variables that add stress, plus the deficiencies in each of our skill sets. Add to these the distortions that our perspectives and experiences bring.and invariably we will make mistakes.

I have decided to believe that we each do our best and that our best is good enough.

Be compassionate with yourself as you make up for what you see as a past mistake. Make the decision to treat yourself with compassion.

You only get one (messy) trip

Remember that an important part of life is to realize that we only get this one lifetime. Time only moves in one direction, and lamentation is an activity that brings limited solace. Our lives are our own messy masterpieces and we cannot completely start over. Many of us tend to look to others to forgive our mistakes, but looking at the past through a lens of acceptance and self forgiveness will instantly help you to ease your own burden.

It’s helpful to realize that the most judgmental person on earth is ourselves in terms of our past decisions. It’s crucial for us to remind ourselves regularly that we are still here, we are still alive, we still have the opportunity to enjoy the smiling faces of our loved ones, and the joy and laughter the world offers. Our positive relationships are many and every day we have opportunities to build them.

In fact, in my experience, making yourself your own best friend can really help you to be more gracious towards and forgiving of yourself.

Fellow human, you are much loved.

I encourage you to be generous to your own self with your own love.

You have the power to forgive within yourself

Forgiving ourselves for past mistakes is freeing. We won’t ever find the forgiveness we’re looking for if we persist in looking externally for something that is within ourselves. Realizing that we each have the ability and responsibility to change our own thinking is powerful. In fact, we each need to forgive ourselves to allow ourselves to move forward unburdened.

Figuring out how to forgive can be very difficult. It’s a topic that various TED Talks presenters have tackled, each from their own experience and perspectives, and there is a curated series of TED Talks on forgiveness that may be useful.

If I could convey a single thing to you dear reader, it is that we ourselves hold the key to our own forgiveness – we must choose to forgive ourselves for our past mistakes while feeling gratitude for the lessons our mistakes brought. We must muster our infinite compassion for our own selves. We must release the pain that we are perpetuating in our own lives and give ourselves permission and take responsibility for our own happiness.

So remember, do your best and forgive yourself for you only get one messy trip.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

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