Forgive Yourself
Posted by Gail | Filed under Life Lessons
We all make mistakes. I’ve made some doozies, and I’ve spent some time trying to figure out what the hell I was thinking. It’s amazing how the mistakes we’ve made can take on a life of their own, growing to unbelievable sizes in our minds, weighing us down with “if-only’s” and “I-wish-I-hadda’s.”
Whether you’ve made an investment and subsequently watched you money evaporate, or you’ve borrowed money and than wanted to kick yourself because of the amount of interest you’re paying, everyone makes mistakes.
Some people just can’t forgive themselves. They feel so stupid, so guilty, so riddled with remorse, they refuse to cut themselves any slack. They must pay by being miserable. And every future achievement is over-shadowed by the mistake they made 2, 10, 30 years ago.
One of the problems with never forgiving ourselves for our mistakes is our tendency to swing in the opposite direction. Having bitten into one bad apple, all apples suck! Or having had a bad experience with a roommate, we swear off roommates forever. Or having watch 40% of our equity investments go into the crapper, we swear off equity investments in perpetuity. Or worse, to make up for our “ignorance and stupidity” we throw everything we have into the market to try and catch up.
Making a smart investment is tough enough. Trying to do it with residual misery from a past mistakes it almost impossible. And that holds true for just about everything else in money and in life. If you don’t find a way to let go of the mistakes and the emotions attached – not forget them; we want to learn from them after all – we can’t move forward.
Perhaps you should have taken the disability insurance the lender offered because that would have paid off the loan you’re now stuck with on a reduced income. Maybe you should have started putting money away for the kids for school 10 years ago so you wouldn’t have to watch them get into debt up to their eyebrows with student loans. Retirement with no money set aside can feel like a nightmare about to happen… if only you’d started to save even a little bit when you first started working. Taking on so much debt you can’t figure out how to buy food for the family was a dopey thing to do. And gambling away thousands of dollars, and then thousands more as you tried to come out even… oy!
But where you are now is not where you must stay. And not every mistake we make is as big as it appears to us: with a front-and-centre view of what we’ve done wrong, and unlimited repeats running in our minds, it’s easy to forget the things that are right in our lives and focus only on the messes we may have made.
We are all human. We all make mistakes. If we learn from them, then those mistakes are worth something. If we walk around with our bag of mistakes – ever growing – hung from our necks, we become so weighed down our energy and passion is sapped.
So today is the day you come to terms with whatever mistakes you may have made that feel like a millstone around your neck. Today is the day you say, “So, I messed up. I’m not going to do that again.”
Whether you blew a bundle on your credit card, bought a car without doing enough research and now have a payment you can’t afford, or lent money to your sister believing she’d pay you back, this is where you get off the Mistake Treadmill and move on.
Perhaps the biggest step is to stop chasing the feelings of self-loathing around our heads by acknowledging the mistake and its implication. Say it out loud to another body or write it out where you can see it in black and white so that you’re holding yourself accountable. “When I bought Nortel at $70, I had not done enough research and was operating on the assumption that what goes down must go up. I was wrong. I won’t buy any more investments on speculation.” Never mind how it looks to the person to whom you are “confessing” or how hard it is to admit the mistake you made. What is important is that you own up to the mistake, acknowledge what you did wrong, and say what’s going to be different.
Now the tough part. Say it out loud: I forgive myself. I made a mistake. I’ll make more. But I’m also getting smarter by the day. And for that I am very proud.
Give yourself a hug to celebrate your new freedom. Today is the day you take control and step back into the light so you can see where you’re going, rather than being mired in the misery and darkness of your “mistake.” Off you go now…
May 29, 2009 at 9:53 am
Thanks for this post Gail. I’m a professional self-beaterup (500 liftime KOs) so have to remind myself that it’s very hard to predict the future and sometimes you just have to do what your gut tells you and live with the consequences. I also like the Aboriginal poem that has the line “These small fears I thought so big” – so often the fear of something is far worse than the reality of it.
May 29, 2009 at 11:44 am
Sally Hogshead – careerist and writer – says “mistakes are tuition”. Sometimes the biggest mistakes are the best learning experiences. The problem is not the making of the mistake. The problem is making the same mistake over and over.
May 29, 2009 at 12:09 pm
A fabulous quote from a small book by Joe Calloway:
“With [a] failure, you get a whole new batch of information that sets you on the right course. When you pick a cat up by the tail, you learn a lot about cats. You get scratched up but you learn a tremendous amount about cats.”
I love that analogy, it may have seemed like a stupid mistake to grab the cat by the tail, but it’s the knowledge you get from the unpleasant experiences that can help you grow.
May 29, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Making mistakes is all part of the learning curve. I used to beat myself black and blue over every mistake. Now I know that in life you sometimes make the right decision but other times you just have to make the decision right.
May 29, 2009 at 12:49 pm
I once lost $1000 on a job. I decided to art direct a photo shoot when I’d never done that before. I thought I’d educated myself properly by asking the photographer every question I could possibly imagine. I also asked her if she thought there was anything else we were missing. I got as much out of the client as I (thought I) possibly could.
In the end, she turned out to be just a high maintenance client who found an opportunity to get out of paying for a whole job by claiming it was only half a job. Being photography, it was entirely subjective.
I still paid my photographer in full. I ate the $1000 because I and two other studios I consulted agreed, the photographer did a fantastic job. There was no reason not to pay her. That $1000 lesson was so worth it. I learned that when your spidey sense goes off, listen to it! Gut! All about the gut! I knew the client was going to be difficult when she started grinding me on the price right from the get go but somehow I wished it away; probably because she’d been referred by someone who was wonderful to work with and because the project sounded exciting.
Moral: live and learn
And if you are dabbling in something you’ve never done before, get and give as much information as you can, and then just when you think you can’t get or give any more, look harder. Or, to ease up on the stress, let someone else do the job and stick to what you do best.
May 29, 2009 at 2:22 pm
One of my favourite mentors used to tell me “learning experiences are those which you wish you weren’t having at the time”. I have also found myself saying over the years “as long as you learn something from it, there’s no reason to regret it”. Same sentiment as this post I think. A good reminder for all.
May 29, 2009 at 3:27 pm
As usual Gail, you are bang on!
It will be interesting to see how children of the so-called “helicopter parents” turn out, when they are never allowed to make decisions on their own therefore they never make any mistakes.
I have sure made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I have also made a lot of good decisions from the lessons learned by “grabbing that cat by the tail”!
May 29, 2009 at 4:10 pm
What a timely post! And this applies to well to not just finances, but life and work in general. I’ve made myself sick the past couple of days over something at work (thinking up scenarios that are most likely much worse than the real thing will end up being…I hope!), but spoke with someone I really respect about it and was told “what was, was.” Let it go, learn from it and move on; do your new job the best you can and for heaven’s sake don’t let it make you sick! I really like what you have to say about this sort of thing, PsychSarah! I am going to write that down and remember it and USE it.
May 29, 2009 at 5:08 pm
I am glad to have strong people in my life to get great advice on life and finances. I strongly believe that your network of people in your life is important. The advice you can get from people is invaluable.
May 29, 2009 at 6:09 pm
One of my favorite quotes is: “Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.”
Live, learn and move on!
May 29, 2009 at 11:42 pm
I think this is the hardest part for me. Instead of fixing the past mistakes, I would just dwell on them and make myself feel horrible for those mistakes, and used shopping to feel better. Its a vicious cycle, for sure.
Instead of dwelling on these mistakes, I’m now concentrating on fixing them and not making them again. EVER!
May 30, 2009 at 8:11 am
Hindsight is a wonderful thing…..I hear my Mom’s voice saying ‘this too shall pass’.
May 30, 2009 at 7:24 pm
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May 30, 2009 at 8:19 pm
talk about timely. after doing so well for so long i totally fell off the wagon this month.
my husband is away (military) and i’ve been shopping to fill my time and the void. i now have to dip into our emergency fund to pay off the VISA bill.
i’m hating myself for it but the damage is done – time to buck up, smarten up and move on.