Saturday, 31 March 2018
Jim Rohn - The Ultimate Guide to Success (Personal Development)
This video is good if you want to learn new habits of wealth! Please let me know if you like it or not!
Within is the person we really are. Within lies our very existence. And only from within can we make it happen. This is where our very all subsists. Within you is the ability, the "what it takes" to make it all happen for you, just the way you want it. WITHIN! WITHIN!! WITHIN!!! Oh what a place! This is the only place that will ever always and fully be yours. The only domain where you are king indeed. Not even the future or the past holds a stake high enough to be compared to that within you. The renowned jurist, Oliver Wendell Homes couldn't have said it better when he remarked, "What lies ahead of us and what lies behind us are nothing compared to what LIES WITHIN US". The past haven gone and the future waiting beyond, you are left with but one great option - That which is within you. Your very bird in hand. I want you to realize that your best bet is in all that you are potentially endowed with within, though it may not appear, as it ought to be at present.
You cannot afford to plan on the past cos it's gone. It is in the tomb. Neither can you build on the future because it is pending in the womb. But you can work on what you've got within you at present. You can if you choose to. Because your endowments within is all you've got. This, you will always have. So, take to Theodore Roosevelt's advise, "Do what you can, with what you have (within), where you are".
Within you is your true story untold. The best person to tell that story is you. And that can only be when you decide and indeed begin to blow your own trumpet. You are your best autobiographer because only you are fully aware of all the good things within you. Take a thoughtful look at yourself. Look inwards and be amazed at the Creator's generosity in lodging inside you those awesome deposits that make for nothing short of success, victory and achievement. Philo Farnsworth was a little peasant farm boy who later became an orphan -at least that was all there appeared to be. But how wrong this turned out to be for within him - all along - existed Farnsworth the electronic TV inventor.
Truly, within you lies the key to your destiny, I dare say. Simply put; WITHIN YOU IS IT!" Within you is contained all the possibilities you could ever hope for in life. So, why exist and die a mirage when there is actual reality inside of you. To die a failure -apart from doing one's self a gross disservice- is to do injustice to God's thoughtful investment in one. I remember the story of the stone that was rejected by a sculptor, Antonio as no good for any sculpting in medieval Italy. Agreed it was an awkwardly shaped piece of marble with no form of goodly appearance. But another Sculptor came - who understood the WITHIN CONCEPT- picked the rejected block and extracted one of the greatest masterpiece `of all times -The Statue Of David. When asked how he performed the feat, the fellow simply responded; "I learned very early in life to see things primarily from within. My job is to 'take away' by unveiling the reality present within. I start working form inside out." That fellow was Michelangelo of Caprice, one of the greatest artists to don the earth's surface.
There actually is something worth bringing out from inside you. Maybe you've never considered what's within you as worth anything to bring out. Perhaps that's the reason you're so far from really succeeding and achieving your goals or dreams. Now begin to place value on that which is within you. Then let's have a proper and adequate showcase of the actual person you are. For within you is all you could ever ask for. So let's have you, the REAL you from WITHIN come out.
By the way, have you ever given thought to what the greatest tragedy in life could be? Well, T. L. Osborn says, "It is for people (like you and I) to live and die and never come out of themselves - to never realize the possibilities hidden WITHIN themselves". This is the greatest of all tragedies in life.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7324
Friday, 30 March 2018
ATTENTION! One Of The Most Motivational Speeches 2018 [ MOTIVATION ]
This video is amazing, you need to watch it because you will not have any excuses on why you can't succeed! Please let me know if you like it or not!
POWER OF MONEY - Motivational Speech for Success [ MOTIVATION 2017 ]
This video is powerful if you want to change your life from now onwards! Please let me know if you like it or not!
What do You Want to do in Your Life ? Define Your Purpose - Video Motiva...
This video is very good if you want to change your life! Please let me know if you like it!
Thursday, 29 March 2018
Tyrese Gibson speech that gave me goosebumps.
This video will help you to get out of your comfort zone and not to listen to people who doubt you! Please let me know if you like it or not by leaving a comment!
HOW BAD DO YOU WANT IT? (SUCCESS) - New Motivational Video Compilation
This is a motivational video which you need to listen to time after time. It will truly motivate you! Please let me know if you like it or not!
THE MAGIC OF CHANGING YOUR THINKING! Positive Morning Motivation
This is a video you should listen to every morning to motivate you before you start the day! Please let me know if you like it!
Wednesday, 28 March 2018
Jim Rohn - Ways to Build Your Best Future (Personal Development)
This video is very good if you want to build a bright future! Please let me know if you like it!
A RUNNER WITHOUT LEGS - One of The Most Motivational Life Stories by Bla...
This video is motivational if someone without legs can achieve so much, that means we can all achieve anything we want! Please let me know what you think about this video!
Law of Attraction simplified by Sadhguru
This video is a simplification of The Law of Attraction (the Secret). I feel that it is very good if you want to understand how the Law of Attraction works! Please let me know if you like it!
You Only Get 24 Hours Motivational Video
This video is powerful because it teaches you to use your 24 hours to your advantage, please let me know if you like it!
Tuesday, 27 March 2018
Best Self-Improvement Books – 7 Best Self-Help Books
This video is great because it will advise you on what best books to read if you want to be successful! Please let me know if like this video!
Oprah's POWERFUL Secret to SUCCESS Using The Law Of Attraction - Oprah W...
This is a fabulous video on The Law of Attraction. Wow! this is amazing you need to view it and let me know what you think!
The Importance of a Personal Growth Plan
This video is very good if you are ready to change your life! Please let me know if you like it or not by leaving a comment!
Monday, 26 March 2018
Greatest Secret to Success Short | Og Mandino | Dave Blanchard | Persona...
This video will open your eyes to the secrets of success. The best video I have ever listened to. Please let me know if you like it!
Personal Growth - Essence of Success by Earl Nightingale
This is an excellent audio on personal growth if you don't mind just listening to an audio. This audio is fascinating and extremely very informative! Please let me know if you like it or not by leaving a comment!
Sunday, 25 March 2018
PURSUIT OF THE IMPOSSIBLE - Best Motivational video
This video is important if you want to achieve what you might think impossible. You need this video if you are struggling to push yourself forward. Please leave a comment if you either like it or not!
This Is Why Not Reaching Your Goals May Help You Fulfil Your Destiny
Unexpected Twists and Turns
To a woman who complained about her destiny, the Master said: "It is you who makes your destiny."
"But surely I am not responsible for being born a woman?"
"Being born a woman isn't destiny. That is fate. Destiny is how you accept your womanhood and what you make of it."
Anthony de Mello evokes the essence of your destiny coinciding with fate when you are attentive to it.
We are born with the seed of potential within us. Some are called to awaken their potential through fate or destiny while others have it thrust upon them.
I'm reminded of the tale depicting the unending search for wisdom outside of us when it waits to be discovered within.
The Creator of the universe gathered all of creation and asked: "I want to hide something from the humans until they are ready for it. It is the realisation they create their own reality."
"Tell me where I can hide this wisdom so they will never find it."
The eagle replied: "Hide it beyond the furthest star. They will not find it there."
"Not so, said the buffalo. One day man will learn to fly and find his wisdom in the furthest galaxies. Hide it on the floor of the sea and they will never find it."
"Not so, said the wise bear. One day humans will learn to swim to the bottom of the ocean and find their wisdom there. Hide it deep within man, for he will never think to search for it there."
So the Creator did precisely that. He hid the wisdom of life deep within mankind.
The quest to fulfil one's goals and dreams is a journey many go in search of. Whilst there is no roadmap marking the route, you must take a leap of faith and trust your journey is following in the right direction.
However, along the path, you may encounter unexpected twists and turns that look like you have lost your way, when in fact you are exactly where you need to be.
Your Destiny Calling
I revealed in earlier articles how I studied to become a menswear designer at university and spent time in Italy before my course was transformed.
Within the years that followed, I went from fashioning fabrics to writing and speaking about self-empowerment because I felt a pull to explore this path. I had little experience as a writer and speaker, yet everything fell into place as I moved forward.
What I experienced at the time is best depicted in the quote by the American novelist Wendell Berry who said: "It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey."
What I thought was my ambition to be a successful designer soon became a distant fantasy.
I was asked in the years that followed whether I missed working in design. Frankly no, because my time as a designer had run its course and I was excited about my exploring life as a writer and speaker.
Does that mean you shouldn't chase your goals and dreams? Certainly not. My goal was to become a designer working in Europe and by that account, I fulfilled my ambition until life had other plans.
Author Alan Cohen said: "Every choice before you represents the universe inviting you to remember who you are and what you want."
In pursuing your goals, you may encounter adversity and hardship. However, challenges may be your destiny calling.
I don't know and neither will you until you step into it.
One thing is for certain, if your world is falling apart, it may be a sign your previous life is collapsing to give way for the new life to develop.
Embrace the Journey
There's a Japanese Haiku that reads: "I have always known that at last, I would take this road, but yesterday I did not know that it would be today."
There is no certainty in life when faced with these intersections and the sole guidance to draw on will be hope and faith. Hope you will overcome the pain and faith your new life will fall into place better than expected.
It was the French author André Gide who wrote: "You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore."
You must go forth in the direction you are called, for that is the greatest act of courage you can undertake. It signifies your willingness to trust in the unfolding of your life's narrative.
You are never presented with circumstances you cannot overcome because the seed of potential has been implanted within you.
Whilst it may not appear that way when you move forward with conviction, the path will reveal itself, but not a moment sooner.
If it seems your goals are out of reach, you may be progressing more than you realise, but not in a linear direction.
The universe comprises many moving parts. What looks untenable now is nothing more than life orchestrating the pieces of the puzzle so your life comes together as it should.
However, if you look intently at the chaos, you are likely to think circumstances are not unfolding in your favour. They are, but not in the way you think.
For now, follow the trail and embrace the journey while making the most of it.
Take the road less travelled and follow it with openness, knowing it might lead you to fulfil your destiny sooner than you realise.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9810606
3 Signs From The Universe That What You Want To Attract Is On Its Way | ...
This video is so good because it gives you hope when you are about to give up. I love it because sometimes, you might feel that nothing is not happening, therefore, you might think of quitting! Do not quit because you could be just a few steps away from your success! keep going and please let me know if you like this video!
A True Story of a Carpenter - Inspirational | Motivation | Personality D...
This video is a short true story of a Carpenter and you can learn a lot from it! Please let me know if you liked it!
Saturday, 24 March 2018
Best Version Of Yourself - Motivational Video
This video had over 4 million views, that is a record on its own! it's short and powerful. Please let me know if you like it by living a comment. Have a great day!
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Practice is a powerful tool for developing and sustaining skills. But for many people, the word has negative connotations.
Why? Well, how many of you remember being called inside to practice the piano when you wanted to be playing with your friends? Definitely not fun.
In addition, the practice can feel boring and/or painful at times. Think about the bumps and bruises involved in learning a new gymnastics skill. Or how about learning the basics of writing code or of speaking Chinese or French or German? Practice usually involves a lot of time and a lot of repetition. It's not something you'd often call fun.
And then there's that expression: "Practice makes perfect."
I can't think of a more daunting and discouraging way to frame this pursuit. If 'perfect' is the goal of your practice, you are going to feel perennially disappointed in yourself. And that's a set-up for stepping away from practice entirely.
Focus on Progress
Practice is a step-by-step process. The benefits are incremental, and at times, it may be difficult to know whether you are making progress.
Practice is a step-by-step process. The benefits are incremental, and at times, it may be difficult to know whether you are making progress.
Continuing a practice when you're not seeing the benefit is challenging. So that's why I suggest that you keep a brief learning log. Take a moment after each practice session and make note of what you learned.
This gives you, over time, a clear record of your progress. You may be surprised at some of the things you learn. Sometimes you'll be noting gains that have to do with the skill you're practising. And sometimes you'll be learning about yourself.
The more you work with this log, the better you'll get at recognizing your gains. And as you improve your ability to see and acknowledge your progress, just watch your motivation soar. This keeps you practising, which can't help but build your skills -- a win-win.
Let go of perfectionism...
And remember, what's vital here are the practice and the process. Your goal is not an endpoint but an ongoing process of continual improvement. And getting to 'perfect' is, quite simply, impossible.
And remember, what's vital here are the practice and the process. Your goal is not an endpoint but an ongoing process of continual improvement. And getting to 'perfect' is, quite simply, impossible.
Perfectionism eats up the energy and undermines the confidence of countless bright, energetic, and talented people. Are you one of them?
Well, my hope for you, as we start a new year, is that you embrace practice as an empowering tool for yourself. And at the same time, I hope you'll let go of the unattainable goal of perfectionism.
And to move toward your Heart-Based Time Success, sign up for our free gift, The Finding Time Success Kit, which includes "The Finding Time Boundary Template: 9 Simple, Sequential Steps to Find More Time and Recharge Your Energy!" Using a workbook format this powerful and practical time template helps you progress beyond disappointment and frustration. Discover that 24 hours really are enough!
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9866011
Important advice on life that will change your life (MUST WATCH) - 2018 ...
This video is overwhelming, it's so rich with motivation, I like the fact that the voices are calm and clear. So if you are not familiar with loud powerful voices and background music. Then this one if for you! Please let me know if you like it by leaving a comment!
Friday, 23 March 2018
STOP WISHING , START DOING - Powerful Motivation
This video is easy to listen to, it's very clear and it's soothing at some parts but very powerful. Please let me know if you like it!
Never Doubt Yourself (Motivational Video) The Enemy Within
This video will motivate you to start believing in yourself. This will help you to redirect your mind towards achieving your goals by quietening the negative thoughts and the negative external environments. Please let me know if you like it!
MORNING MOTIVATION - WAKE UP - 1 Hour Motivation Video
This video will definitely wake you up early in the morning and you will want to listen to it every morning, I promise! Please let me know if you like it!
Thursday, 22 March 2018
Be a Dreamer and Never Give Up | Make Your Dream Possible | Stewart Hugh...
This video teaches you to be a dreamer. I love it because we all dream night after night but nothing comes out of it. This video is teaching you to dream and to dream big because your dreams will come true, not by magic but by listening to this video and implement! Please let me know if you like this video!!
SELF MOTIVATION
Self-Motivation is a very important activity in our day to day life as we don't know what surprise will come and at what time.
We have to motivate ourselves to ensure that the surprise is being handled appropriately and WE SHOULD NEVER GIVE UP. Even though the surprises are common to everyone lives and every one motivates them to handle their surprises and take it forward.
We have to motivate ourselves to ensure that the surprise is being handled efficiently and functionally. We attempt through our article, to share ancient ideas and techniques to walk you through this journey of life surprises.
Hence, we have to understand that some of the important surprises & techniques to self-motivate in handling the surprises.
GENERAL SURPRISES:
1) Financial Surprises: Generally, the companies or individuals will have a budget, unfortunately, the days may not go with the same budget planning. There may be a surprise in increase or decrease in the budget. This, in turn, disturbs the financials. For projects in a company, the financial surprises can be corrected through appropriate contracts & claims management and for individuals it can be corrected through self-motivation techniques.
2) Health Surprises: Health issues may come up at any time which we cannot anticipate. We always should maintain discipline in our food habits, do daily exercises and drink appropriate water, which may avoid the health surprises.
SELF-MOTIVATION TECHNIQUES:
Any surprise or any issue can be corrected through self-motivation techniques as mentioned below:
1) Firstly, we should analyze in depth about the surprise or the issue. We have to make a note point on WHAT, HOW & WHY. By answering these simple three words we can understand the reason for the surprise or the issue.
a. WHAT: What happened?
b. HOW: How it happened? How it went wrong.
c. WHY: Why this happened? What are the corrections?
2) Secondly, doing meditation and thinking on the solution for the surprise or the issue. In this way, we can get the solution and go forward.
3) Once we answer the What, How & Why, and for corrections, we should do meditation by taking a deep breath and concentrating on the breath and thinking on the corrections.
4) We have to continue the meditation till we find out the solution. Depending on the surprise, sometimes, we will find the solution in 2 - 3 times and sometimes it may take days.
5) We should NEVER GIVE UP and we should continue the meditation till we get the solution and certainly, we will get the solution through meditation for any issue/surprise/problem.
6) After having a solution, we have to make a clear roadmap for solving the surprise or issue with a contingency plan.
7) Finally, we should always follow another 3-word principle, Plan, Check and Act, this 3-word principle can ensure to resolve the surprise or issue.
CONCLUSION:
1) Generally, we face several problems in our day to day activities and we get panic or scared on an occurrence of such problems.
2) If we follow the techniques as mentioned above without getting panic or getting scared, we can easily resolve such problems by finding solutions and we can go forward in our lives and achieve success.
3) This article is to support the reader in addressing their problems/issues/surprises in an appropriate manner without getting panic or getting scared.
4) We request you to share this article after going through as this may help your friends to overcome their problems/issues/surprises.
5) All views or opinions or statements given in this Article are personal, which are in our knowledge/ information and do not signify any professional advice.
Handling the challenges in the appropriate manner. We know how to face the challenges, but, when the time of real challenge comes, we will be blank. Hence, get prepared by going through this Article which may help at the time of challenges.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Vijaya_Krishna_Boddu/2517547
MASTER SELF MOTIVATION - Les Brown Motivational Speech
This video is so powerful, it will motivate you to get up and do something positive with your life because you might not be happy where you are! Please let me know what you think about this video!
Wednesday, 21 March 2018
Tony Robbins - How To Believe In Yourself | 2018 Motivation
This video is another one by Tony that will make you think about believing in yourself. Please let me know if you like it or not!
Tony Robbins: Creating Unstoppable Self-Confidence
Wow! This video is really great! Tony has nailed it in this one, "self-sabotage". This is a new word I have learnt in the past few months because I always blamed everything else but myself. Now if you feel the same, this video will help you out! Please let me know if you like it or not!
WE LIVE IN DIFFERENT TIMES
We live in different times than our parents did when they were our age. The need for inspiration, motivation, and encouragement is at an all-time high.
According to recently conducted surveys in the United States, the American people are facing serious all around difficulties. Many people I have spoken to personally are scared to death about their future.
Many people live under a misconception that ordinary people like you and I can't become millionaires or live comfortable everyday lives like the elite 5% of the world. The reason most of us feel this way is due to being mentally conditioned from childhood that only "those people" can live a lifestyle that we all at one time dreamed of.
The truth of the matter is that when we were children we use to dream of doing big things, becoming doctors, astronauts, basketball players, presidents, and/or teachers. The sky was the limit. There were no boundaries to what we could or could not accomplish. We set the tone and the outcome of every dream we ever dreamed when we were young. Our dreams were endless. So what happened?
Let me tell you what happened. Somewhere in time, a person that we respected very much told us that we were crazy and that dreaming was foolish and we believed them. They told us that dreaming was for the mentally ill. That we needed to live in reality, the here and now and that only "those people" were allowed to dream and live the good life.
I always wondered what made "those people" better than me. "Those people" looked like me. They acted like me. They wore the same clothes as me. They eat the same food as me. They were no smarter than me. They were no faster or stronger than I was. So why was I not allowed to be like "those people." Was there a law that I didn't know about? And if there was such a law, who was enforcing it? Why was I not chosen to be one of "those people?"
Well, let me be the first to tell you that all of us that choose so can become one of "those people." There are numerous principles and disciplines, that if implemented and applied on a daily basis, not only will your life exponentially change, it will have far more positive implications than you ever thought possible.
You must understand that the number one reason for the disparity in one's life is due solely to procrastination and ignorance. Your height, skin colour, race, and/or nationality has nothing to do with congruence in your life. Now that the cat is out the bag and there are no more excuses that you can use, begin today to move in a more productive direction to obtain a beneficial outcome.
I know that without a doubt that if you read this article that you agree that you once dreamed of being something more than who you are today. Ask yourself what happened. Why did you give up on your dreams?
Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Mark_Huddleston/2499373
Tuesday, 20 March 2018
THIS IS HOW YOU WILL ACHIEVE ANYTHING YOU WANT IN LIFE ! Motivational Vi...
This video is so powerful and it will change your life. It really pushes you to look at yourself deeply and do something about your situation. Please let me know if you like it or not!
FUNNY INSPIRATION QUOTES
I hope you have enjoyed these quotes! Please let me know if you liked them!
A COMMON MISTAKE FOR PERSONAL GROWTH NEWBIES
A common mistake for personal growth newbies is to wrap one’s self-esteem into short-term results. This often leads to self-blame and excess worry when results are below expectations.
If we use the lenses of truth, love, and power (our fundamental growth principles), we can see why beating yourself up for mistakes and failure is an ineffective approach that doesn’t actually help you grow.
The Truth Lens
When viewed through the truth lens, we can readily see why beating ourselves up for mistakes will only make things worse. Since all input serves as a form of programming for our brains, it’s predictable that negative self-talk, especially when it becomes habitual, will serve to lower our future performance. We’re essentially programming ourselves to perform poorly when we use negative self-talk. We behave like a computer that installs a virus to slow itself down.
When you make mistakes, blaming yourself as an individual isn’t a very useful way to address problems. Problems could have been caused by circumstances outside of your control. Even if you made a mistake due to ignorance or poor performance, it’s more intelligent to view such a mistake as a software problem. Something in your thinking or behavior caused the problem, and therefore your best bet is to work on improving your thoughts and behaviors (i.e. your mental software), so you can avoid similar problems in the future.
As a human being with a human brain, you’re a learning machine. There isn’t much value in a learning machine that programs itself to lower its own performance. Trying to avoid mistakes would indeed prevent some mistakes, but mistakes are essential to the learning process. A learning machine that cuts off its ability to make mistakes would eventually become a static machine that’s incapable of further growth.
To continue learning and growing, it’s important to accept that mistakes are going to happen and that this is how you learn. You may have been taught or conditioned to believe from a young age that mistakes are bad and must always be avoided… or that if you make mistakes, it means you’re a lesser human being somehow. As you become more conscious and self-aware, however, you’ll recognize that these were foolish lessons that are out of alignment with reality, and you can consciously choose to discard such unhelpful beliefs. These beliefs are throwbacks to outdated thinking. Today we live in a knowledge-rich age where continuous learning and growth are more important than avoiding mistakes.
The Love Lens
Consider the consequences to your overall happiness if you fall into the habit of beating yourself up for mistakes. Does it make you any happier to wrap negative results into your self-image? What does thinking of yourself as a failure do for your emotional life? More often than not, such thinking will invite negative emotions like fear, worry, and stress.
If you wrap failures into your self-esteem, then you didn’t just fail. You’ve become the failure. You are the mistake. And this means you can no longer trust yourself to make intelligent decisions going forward. You have to expect further failure and therefore further negative impact to your self-esteem. This is a stressful proposition, and it’s going to encourage you to hold back from stretching yourself. You’re probably not going to risk further damage to your self-esteem. The more you try, the more you risk failure, and therefore the more you invite further degradation of your self-image. This will most likely lead you to tighten up when it comes to taking otherwise worthwhile risks. Your rate of learning and growth will slow down, and you’ll plateau.
The lens of love reveals that people grow fastest when their lives are aligned with their desires. Do you want to plateau and live a largely static life for your remaining decades? Is this prospect in alignment with how you’d ideally like to experience this existence? Do you want to play it safe and basically remain stuck till you die?
Also consider the impact on your relationships with other people. If you get into the habit of allowing failure to downgrade your self-esteem, then it will be much harder to take social risks. Socializing is rife with failures big and small. Sometimes you’ll be rejected. Sometimes you’ll behave in a socially awkward manner, and people will notice. Such failure experiences help you to socially calibrate your behaviors, but if you can’t handle failure, then you’ll prevent yourself from achieving social savvy. You’ll remain stuck in that socially awkward phase, and that’s likely to lead to some degree of loneliness and a feeling of disconnection from others. If you aren’t so resistant to mistakes and failure, you can skill-build faster in this area, and you can enjoy the fruits of a rich and abundant social life.
Furthermore, growth-oriented people tend to cluster together, so they can encourage each other and grow faster. In such social networks, people don’t often make room for those who beat themselves up. It’s similar to nonsmokers avoiding smokers, largely because the former can’t stand the smell of the latter. Likewise those who drop into the downward spiral of low self-esteem will tend to attract social connections that resonate with such patterns, such as abusers and other negative minded folks. Your social network will eventually reflect your neural network.
Like it or not, the social and emotional consequences of beating yourself up for failure can be severe. And overcoming such behavior can feel like digging yourself out of a pit when you’ve attracted a social situation that reinforces your current plateau or downward spiral.
The Power Lens
Beating yourself up for mistakes is disempowering as well. Imagine if Siri behaved this way. What if each time you asked her for help and she made a mistake, she beat herself up, and over time she began updating her programming to try to avoid making more mistakes? Eventually Siri would start to sound like the character Sadness from the Pixar movie Inside Out.
Do you know that Siri will sometimes defend her self-esteem if you try to harshly criticize her?
Do you forgive yourself so easily? Do you accept that mistakes are okay since they’re a natural part of the learning process?
Isn’t it more empowering to believe that you’re always doing your best? You can continue to learn, grow, and improve, but for right now, why not just accept that you’re doing the best you can? If you could have done better, you would have.
There’s no point in beating yourself up for mistakes. There is, however, much to be gained by extracting lessons from your mistakes and applying those lessons to improve your future thinking and behaviors.
Consider life’s challenges as a form of strength training. You wouldn’t bemoan the weights for being heavy. Heavy weights help you get stronger. They’re supposed to be challenging; otherwise you wouldn’t grow as much.
Growth vs. Self-Blame
Since self-blame is out of alignment with truth, love, and power, the practice will only slow you down. At best you’ll plateau, and at worst you’ll succumb to a downward spiral. To avoid such a pit of despair – or to dig yourself out of one – the solution is to regard yourself as programmable and to realize that your programming can be changed. Stop identifying yourself with the software that’s been programmed into your head. Recognize that just like Siri, you’re capable of learning and growing. You can upgrade your software.
Given the state of your current software, you’re already doing the best you can, and you can’t expect to do any better. Your mental and emotional software is performing as it was programmed. If you want to see better performance, then you’ll need to upgrade your software, and for human beings, this means training yourself with new experiences. This also means inviting more mistakes and failures as part of the learning process.
Can you make some grand mistakes with no loss to your self-esteem? This is a key challenge of conscious growth.
I’ve endured some grand failure experiences in my time. I’ve gone through a bankruptcy and a divorce. I was expelled from college. I was arrested multiple times as a teenager. I was kicked out of my apartment for falling behind on rent. I can come up with plenty of reasons to beat myself up. Yet my self-esteem is still rock solid positive, and I feel terrific about my path of growth. I learned a lot from those experiences, and without them I wouldn’t have the resilient mental software I now have. I understand that if I want to learn and grow, I have to allow room for mistakes and failure experiences.
In the years ahead, I expect to make even more mistakes. I’ll learn and grow from those mistakes too. I have to maintain this attitude in order to keep improving my mental software. What sense would it make to inject a low self-esteem virus into the mix by beating myself up? How could that possibly improve my performance? It could only improve my performance in the same way that being infected by a virus could. I’d learn to overcome the virus and become stronger as a result. This is an excellent way to frame self-esteem challenges – they show up to help you build even greater resilience.
Is this type of growth mindset normal in your life? Do most of your friends think this way? Most of mine do. Otherwise why would I want them as friends? What would be the point of having friends who will make me think that I’m somehow damaged or defective just because I fail now and then? In my life people with such negative attitudes are called “not friends.” 😉
Growth-Oriented Accountability
An important part of personal growth is accountability. When you pursue challenging goals, it can be especially helpful to have people holding you accountable – people who are keeping tabs on your progress. This form of accountability works well for many people. The extra social pressure can make success more likely. But sometimes we fall short. We miss a day. We don’t get as much done as we intended to.
In such cases there’s still no point in beating ourselves up. As we saw above, that isn’t going to help. Instead we need to look for ways we can adjust our programming to improve our performance. We want to analyze our assumptions and behaviors while avoiding the unhelpful practice of self-blame. Beating ourselves up isn’t the answer.
Accountability is a powerful tool, but we must wield it carefully. We need to avoid using it to give ourselves lashings when we fall short of our intentions. I think the proper use of accountability is to add positive pressure to get ourselves into the sweet spot of challenge and to feel strongly motivated to take action. Additionally, when we make mistakes or experience failure, we can leverage the accountability group as our personal brain trust to help us diagnose problems and make adjustments, so we can increase our chances of success going forward.
Accountability isn’t meant to be an additional threat to our self-esteem. The purpose of accountability is to help us learn and grow faster and more effectively than we could without it. It’s a performance tool.
Positive Reframes That Allow Room for Mistakes
When I was learning public speaking, one of the biggest shifts that helped me overcome nervousness was to adopt the belief that the audience is always on my side. The audience doesn’t want me to fail. How would that benefit them? Of course they want me to do well. I’m there to support the audience, and they’re there to support me. We all want the best for each other. If I make a mistake, it’s okay. People make mistakes, and sometimes mistakes are interesting to watch – even entertaining. As long as I recognize that we’re all on the same side, I’m free to relax and do my best.
Another reframe that helped tremendously was to think of myself as an explorer instead of an expert or guru. A guru sounds too perfect. An explorer is going to make mistakes because that’s part of the exploration process. What an explorer shares is always a work in progress because there’s always more exploring to do.
I also see an explorer as being capable of deeper honesty. The label of expert can be challenged, and therefore some might see a need to defend it. Can an expert still fail and make mistakes? It seems harder to create space for failure with this label. If you’re such an expert, then why did you fail? With this label there may be a tendency to cover up mistakes to protect one’s branding (or your own self-image if you start to believe the label yourself). Behind the scenes, experts are just as human as everyone else. They make a lot of mistakes. They procrastinate. They fall short again and again.
I like the explorer label because it feels more aligned with reality. Feel free to adopt it if you like it too. With this sort of label, we’re free to learn and grow, and we can screw up as much as we need to. You can fall off a cliff and still be an explorer. The label doesn’t need to be defended by the pretense of perfectionism. Even young kids can be explorers.
Going a bit deeper, I think it’s especially helpful to adopt the belief that the universe is always on your side. This is a very empowering lens for processing mistakes and failures. Why did life do this to you? Why did you have to go through tough times? It’s all just training to help you learn and grow. It’s strength training for your consciousness.
One of the most powerful reframes you can use is to apply gratitude where you might otherwise have a tendency to think poorly of yourself. Instead of beating yourself up when you fail, try saying “thank you” instead. Thank the universe for bringing you a meaningful growth challenge. Look at the weight that’s right in front of you, and feel some excitement that it’s going to help you grow stronger.
The more mistakes and failure you can handle without loss of self-esteem, the faster you can grow, and the grander and more expansive your growth experiences can be.
A common mistake for personal growth newbies is to wrap one’s self-esteem into short-term results. This often leads to self-blame and excess worry when results are below expectations.
If we use the lenses of truth, love, and power (our fundamental growth principles), we can see why beating yourself up for mistakes and failure is an ineffective approach that doesn’t actually help you grow.
The Truth Lens
When viewed through the truth lens, we can readily see why beating ourselves up for mistakes will only make things worse. Since all input serves as a form of programming for our brains, it’s predictable that negative self-talk, especially when it becomes habitual, will serve to lower our future performance. We’re essentially programming ourselves to perform poorly when we use negative self-talk. We behave like a computer that installs a virus to slow itself down.
When you make mistakes, blaming yourself as an individual isn’t a very useful way to address problems. Problems could have been caused by circumstances outside of your control. Even if you made a mistake due to ignorance or poor performance, it’s more intelligent to view such a mistake as a software problem. Something in your thinking or behavior caused the problem, and therefore your best bet is to work on improving your thoughts and behaviors (i.e. your mental software), so you can avoid similar problems in the future.
As a human being with a human brain, you’re a learning machine. There isn’t much value in a learning machine that programs itself to lower its own performance. Trying to avoid mistakes would indeed prevent some mistakes, but mistakes are essential to the learning process. A learning machine that cuts off its ability to make mistakes would eventually become a static machine that’s incapable of further growth.
To continue learning and growing, it’s important to accept that mistakes are going to happen and that this is how you learn. You may have been taught or conditioned to believe from a young age that mistakes are bad and must always be avoided… or that if you make mistakes, it means you’re a lesser human being somehow. As you become more conscious and self-aware, however, you’ll recognize that these were foolish lessons that are out of alignment with reality, and you can consciously choose to discard such unhelpful beliefs. These beliefs are throwbacks to outdated thinking. Today we live in a knowledge-rich age where continuous learning and growth are more important than avoiding mistakes.
The Love Lens
Consider the consequences to your overall happiness if you fall into the habit of beating yourself up for mistakes. Does it make you any happier to wrap negative results into your self-image? What does thinking of yourself as a failure do for your emotional life? More often than not, such thinking will invite negative emotions like fear, worry, and stress.
If you wrap failures into your self-esteem, then you didn’t just fail. You’ve become the failure. You are the mistake. And this means you can no longer trust yourself to make intelligent decisions going forward. You have to expect further failure and therefore further negative impact to your self-esteem. This is a stressful proposition, and it’s going to encourage you to hold back from stretching yourself. You’re probably not going to risk further damage to your self-esteem. The more you try, the more you risk failure, and therefore the more you invite further degradation of your self-image. This will most likely lead you to tighten up when it comes to taking otherwise worthwhile risks. Your rate of learning and growth will slow down, and you’ll plateau.
The lens of love reveals that people grow fastest when their lives are aligned with their desires. Do you want to plateau and live a largely static life for your remaining decades? Is this prospect in alignment with how you’d ideally like to experience this existence? Do you want to play it safe and basically remain stuck till you die?
Also consider the impact on your relationships with other people. If you get into the habit of allowing failure to downgrade your self-esteem, then it will be much harder to take social risks. Socializing is rife with failures big and small. Sometimes you’ll be rejected. Sometimes you’ll behave in a socially awkward manner, and people will notice. Such failure experiences help you to socially calibrate your behaviors, but if you can’t handle failure, then you’ll prevent yourself from achieving social savvy. You’ll remain stuck in that socially awkward phase, and that’s likely to lead to some degree of loneliness and a feeling of disconnection from others. If you aren’t so resistant to mistakes and failure, you can skill-build faster in this area, and you can enjoy the fruits of a rich and abundant social life.
Furthermore, growth-oriented people tend to cluster together, so they can encourage each other and grow faster. In such social networks, people don’t often make room for those who beat themselves up. It’s similar to nonsmokers avoiding smokers, largely because the former can’t stand the smell of the latter. Likewise those who drop into the downward spiral of low self-esteem will tend to attract social connections that resonate with such patterns, such as abusers and other negative minded folks. Your social network will eventually reflect your neural network.
Like it or not, the social and emotional consequences of beating yourself up for failure can be severe. And overcoming such behavior can feel like digging yourself out of a pit when you’ve attracted a social situation that reinforces your current plateau or downward spiral.
The Power Lens
Beating yourself up for mistakes is disempowering as well. Imagine if Siri behaved this way. What if each time you asked her for help and she made a mistake, she beat herself up, and over time she began updating her programming to try to avoid making more mistakes? Eventually Siri would start to sound like the character Sadness from the Pixar movie Inside Out. Do you know that Siri will sometimes defend her self-esteem if you try to harshly criticize her? Do you forgive yourself so easily? Do you accept that mistakes are okay since they’re a natural part of the learning process?
Isn’t it more empowering to believe that you’re always doing your best? You can continue to learn, grow, and improve, but for right now, why not just accept that you’re doing the best you can? If you could have done better, you would have.
There’s no point in beating yourself up for mistakes. There is, however, much to be gained by extracting lessons from your mistakes and applying those lessons to improve your future thinking and behaviors.
Consider life’s challenges as a form of strength training. You wouldn’t bemoan the weights for being heavy. Heavy weights help you get stronger. They’re supposed to be challenging; otherwise you wouldn’t grow as much.
Growth vs. Self-Blame
Since self-blame is out of alignment with truth, love, and power, the practice will only slow you down. At best you’ll plateau, and at worst you’ll succumb to a downward spiral. To avoid such a pit of despair – or to dig yourself out of one – the solution is to regar yourself as programmable and to realize that your programming can be changed. Stop identifying yourself with the software that’s been programmed into your head. Recognize that just like Siri, you’re capable of learning and growing. You can upgrade your software.
Given the state of your current software, you’re already doing the best you can, and you can’t expect to do any better. Your mental and emotional software is performing as it was programmed. If you want to see better performance, then you’ll need to upgrade your software, and for human beings, this means training yourself with new experiences. This also means inviting more mistakes and failures as part of the learning process.
Can you make some grand mistakes with no loss to your self-esteem? This is a key challenge of conscious growth.
I’ve endured some grand failure experiences in my time. I’ve gone through a bankruptcy and a divorce. I was expelled from college. I was arrested multiple times as a teenager. I was kicked out of my apartment for falling behind on rent. I can come up with plenty of reasons to beat myself up. Yet my self-esteem is still rock solid positive, and I feel terrific about my path of growth. I learned a lot from those experiences, and without them I wouldn’t have the resilient mental software I now have. I understand that if I want to learn and grow, I have to allow room for mistakes and failure experiences.
In the years ahead, I expect to make even more mistakes. I’ll learn and grow from those mistakes too. I have to maintain this attitude in order to keep improving my mental software. What sense would it make to inject a low self-esteem virus into the mix by beating myself up? How could that possibly improve my performance? It could only improve my performance in the same way that being infected by a virus could. I’d learn to overcome the virus and become stronger as a result. This is an excellent way to frame self-esteem challenges – they show up to help you build even greater resilience.
Is this type of growth mindset normal in your life? Do most of your friends think this way? Most of mine do. Otherwise why would I want them as friends? What would be the point of having friends who will make me think that I’m somehow damaged or defective just because I fail now and then? In my life people with such negative attitudes are called “not friends.” 😉
Growth-Oriented Accountability
Accountability is a powerful tool, but we must wield it carefully. We need to avoid using it to give ourselves lashings when we fall short of our intentions. I think the proper use of accountability is to add positive pressure to get ourselves into the sweet spot of challenge and to feel strongly motivated to take action. Additionally, when we make mistakes or experience failure, we can leverage the accountability group as our personal brain trust to help us diagnose problems and make adjustments, so we can increase our chances of success going forward.
Accountability isn’t meant to be an additional threat to our self-esteem. The purpose of accountability is to help us learn and grow faster and more effectively than we could without it. It’s a performance tool.
Positive Reframes That Allow Room for Mistakes
When I was learning public speaking, one of the biggest shifts that helped me overcome nervousness was to adopt the belief that the audience is always on my side. The audience doesn’t want me to fail. How would that benefit them? Of course they want me to do well. I’m there to support the audience, and they’re there to support me. We all want the best for each other. If I make a mistake, it’s okay. People make mistakes, and sometimes mistakes are interesting to watch – even entertaining. As long as I recognize that we’re all on the same side, I’m free to relax and do my best.
Another reframe that helped tremendously was to think of myself as an explorer instead of an expert or guru. A guru sounds too perfect. An explorer is going to make mistakes because that’s part of the exploration process. What an explorer shares is always a work in progress because there’s always more exploring to do.
I also see an explorer as being capable of deeper honesty. The label of expert can be challenged, and therefore some might see a need to defend it. Can an expert still fail and make mistakes? It seems harder to create space for failure with this label. If you’re such an expert, then why did you fail? With this label there may be a tendency to cover up mistakes to protect one’s branding (or your own self-image if you start to believe the label yourself). Behind the scenes, experts are just as human as everyone else. They make a lot of mistakes. They procrastinate. They fall short again and again.
I like the explorer label because it feels more aligned with reality. Feel free to adopt it if you like it too. With this sort of label, we’re free to learn and grow, and we can screw up as much as we need to. You can fall off a cliff and still be an explorer. The label doesn’t need to be defended by the pretense of perfectionism. Even young kids can be explorers.
Going a bit deeper, I think it’s especially helpful to adopt the belief that the universe is always on your side. This is a very empowering lens for processing mistakes and failures. Why did life do this to you? Why did you have to go through tough times? It’s all just training to help you learn and grow. It’s strength training for your consciousness.
One of the most powerful reframes you can use is to apply gratitude where you might otherwise have a tendency to think poorly of yourself. Instead of beating yourself up when you fail, try saying “thank you” instead. Thank the universe for bringing you a meaningful growth challenge. Look at the weight that’s right in front of you, and feel some excitement that it’s going to help you grow stronger.
The more mistakes and failure you can handle without loss of self-esteem, the faster you can grow, and the grander and more expansive your growth experiences can be.
A common mistake for personal growth newbies is to wrap one’s self-esteem into short-term results. This often leads to self-blame and excess worry when results are below expectations.
If we use the lenses of truth, love, and power (our fundamental growth principles), we can see why beating yourself up for mistakes and failure is an ineffective approach that doesn’t actually help you grow.
The Truth Lens
When viewed through the truth lens, we can readily see why beating ourselves up for mistakes will only make things worse. Since all input serves as a form of programming for our brains, it’s predictable that negative self-talk, especially when it becomes habitual, will serve to lower our future performance. We’re essentially programming ourselves to perform poorly when we use negative self-talk. We behave like a computer that installs a virus to slow itself down.
When you make mistakes, blaming yourself as an individual isn’t a very useful way to address problems. Problems could have been caused by circumstances outside of your control. Even if you made a mistake due to ignorance or poor performance, it’s more intelligent to view such a mistake as a software problem. Something in your thinking or behavior caused the problem, and therefore your best bet is to work on improving your thoughts and behaviors (i.e. your mental software), so you can avoid similar problems in the future.
As a human being with a human brain, you’re a learning machine. There isn’t much value in a learning machine that programs itself to lower its own performance. Trying to avoid mistakes would indeed prevent some mistakes, but mistakes are essential to the learning process. A learning machine that cuts off its ability to make mistakes would eventually become a static machine that’s incapable of further growth.
To continue learning and growing, it’s important to accept that mistakes are going to happen and that this is how you learn. You may have been taught or conditioned to believe from a young age that mistakes are bad and must always be avoided… or that if you make mistakes, it means you’re a lesser human being somehow. As you become more conscious and self-aware, however, you’ll recognize that these were foolish lessons that are out of alignment with reality, and you can consciously choose to discard such unhelpful beliefs. These beliefs are throwbacks to outdated thinking. Today we live in a knowledge-rich age where continuous learning and growth are more important than avoiding mistakes.
The Love Lens
Consider the consequences to your overall happiness if you fall into the habit of beating yourself up for mistakes. Does it make you any happier to wrap negative results into your self-image? What does thinking of yourself as a failure do for your emotional life? More often than not, such thinking will invite negative emotions like fear, worry, and stress.
If you wrap failures into your self-esteem, then you didn’t just fail. You’ve become the failure. You are the mistake. And this means you can no longer trust yourself to make intelligent decisions going forward. You have to expect further failure and therefore further negative impact to your self-esteem. This is a stressful proposition, and it’s going to encourage you to hold back from stretching yourself. You’re probably not going to risk further damage to your self-esteem. The more you try, the more you risk failure, and therefore the more you invite further degradation of your self-image. This will most likely lead you to tighten up when it comes to taking otherwise worthwhile risks. Your rate of learning and growth will slow down, and you’ll plateau.
The lens of love reveals that people grow fastest when their lives are aligned with their desires. Do you want to plateau and live a largely static life for your remaining decades? Is this prospect in alignment with how you’d ideally like to experience this existence? Do you want to play it safe and basically remain stuck till you die?
Also consider the impact on your relationships with other people. If you get into the habit of allowing failure to downgrade your self-esteem, then it will be much harder to take social risks. Socializing is rife with failures big and small. Sometimes you’ll be rejected. Sometimes you’ll behave in a socially awkward manner, and people will notice. Such failure experiences help you to socially calibrate your behaviors, but if you can’t handle failure, then you’ll prevent yourself from achieving social savvy. You’ll remain stuck in that socially awkward phase, and that’s likely to lead to some degree of loneliness and a feeling of disconnection from others. If you aren’t so resistant to mistakes and failure, you can skill-build faster in this area, and you can enjoy the fruits of a rich and abundant social life.
Furthermore, growth-oriented people tend to cluster together, so they can encourage each other and grow faster. In such social networks, people don’t often make room for those who beat themselves up. It’s similar to nonsmokers avoiding smokers, largely because the former can’t stand the smell of the latter. Likewise those who drop into the downward spiral of low self-esteem will tend to attract social connections that resonate with such patterns, such as abusers and other negative minded folks. Your social network will eventually reflect your neural network.
Like it or not, the social and emotional consequences of beating yourself up for failure can be severe. And overcoming such behavior can feel like digging yourself out of a pit when you’ve attracted a social situation that reinforces your current plateau or downward spiral.
The Power Lens
Beating yourself up for mistakes is disempowering as well. Imagine if Siri behaved this way. What if each time you asked her for help and she made a mistake, she beat herself up, and over time she began updating her programming to try to avoid making more mistakes? Eventually Siri would start to sound like the character Sadness from the Pixar movie Inside Out. Do you know that Siri will sometimes defend her self-esteem if you try to harshly criticize her? Do you forgive yourself so easily? Do you accept that mistakes are okay since they’re a natural part of the learning process?
Isn’t it more empowering to believe that you’re always doing your best? You can continue to learn, grow, and improve, but for right now, why not just accept that you’re doing the best you can? If you could have done better, you would have.
There’s no point in beating yourself up for mistakes. There is, however, much to be gained by extracting lessons from your mistakes and applying those lessons to improve your future thinking and behaviors.
Consider life’s challenges as a form of strength training. You wouldn’t bemoan the weights for being heavy. Heavy weights help you get stronger. They’re supposed to be challenging; otherwise you wouldn’t grow as much.
Growth vs. Self-Blame
Since self-blame is out of alignment with truth, love, and power, the practice will only slow you down. At best you’ll plateau, and at worst you’ll succumb to a downward spiral. To avoid such a pit of despair – or to dig yourself out of one – the solution is to regard yourself as programmable and to realize that your programming can be changed. Stop identifying yourself with the software that’s been programmed into your head. Recognize that just like Siri, you’re capable of learning and growing. You can upgrade your software.
Given the state of your current software, you’re already doing the best you can, and you can’t expect to do any better. Your mental and emotional software is performing as it was programmed. If you want to see better performance, then you’ll need to upgrade your software, and for human beings, this means training yourself with new experiences. This also means inviting more mistakes and failures as part of the learning process.
Can you make some grand mistakes with no loss to your self-esteem? This is a key challenge of conscious growth.
I’ve endured some grand failure experiences in my time. I’ve gone through a bankruptcy and a divorce. I was expelled from college. I was arrested multiple times as a teenager. I was kicked out of my apartment for falling behind on rent. I can come up with plenty of reasons to beat myself up. Yet my self-esteem is still rock solid positive, and I feel terrific about my path of growth. I learned a lot from those experiences, and without them I wouldn’t have the resilient mental software I now have. I understand that if I want to learn and grow, I have to allow room for mistakes and failure experiences.
In the years ahead, I expect to make even more mistakes. I’ll learn and grow from those mistakes too. I have to maintain this attitude in order to keep improving my mental software. What sense would it make to inject a low self-esteem virus into the mix by beating myself up? How could that possibly improve my performance? It could only improve my performance in the same way that being infected by a virus could. I’d learn to overcome the virus and become stronger as a result. This is an excellent way to frame self-esteem challenges – they show up to help you build even greater resilience.
Is this type of growth mindset normal in your life? Do most of your friends think this way? Most of mine do. Otherwise why would I want them as friends? What would be the point of having friends who will make me think that I’m somehow damaged or defective just because I fail now and then? In my life people with such negative attitudes are called “not friends.” 😉
Growth-Oriented Accountability
An important part of personal growth is accountability. When you pursue challenging goals, it can be especially helpful to have people holding you accountable – people who are keeping tabs on your progress. This form of accountability works well for many people. The extra social pressure can make success more likely. But sometimes we fall short. We miss a day. We don’t get as much done as we intended to.
In such cases there’s still no point in beating ourselves up. As we saw above, that isn’t going to help. Instead we need to look for ways we can adjust our programming to improve our performance. We want to analyze our assumptions and behaviors while avoiding the unhelpful practice of self-blame. Beating ourselves up isn’t the answer.
Accountability is a powerful tool, but we must wield it carefully. We need to avoid using it to give ourselves lashings when we fall short of our intentions. I think the proper use of accountability is to add positive pressure to get ourselves into the sweet spot of challenge and to feel strongly motivated to take action. Additionally, when we make mistakes or experience failure, we can leverage the accountability group as our personal brain trust to help us diagnose problems and make adjustments, so we can increase our chances of success going forward.
Accountability isn’t meant to be an additional threat to our self-esteem. The purpose of accountability is to help us learn and grow faster and more effectively than we could without it. It’s a performance tool.
Positive Reframes That Allow Room for Mistakes
When I was learning public speaking, one of the biggest shifts that helped me overcome nervousness was to adopt the belief that the audience is always on my side. The audience doesn’t want me to fail. How would that benefit them? Of course they want me to do well. I’m there to support the audience, and they’re there to support me. We all want the best for each other. If I make a mistake, it’s okay. People make mistakes, and sometimes mistakes are interesting to watch – even entertaining. As long as I recognize that we’re all on the same side, I’m free to relax and do my best.
Another reframe that helped tremendously was to think of myself as an explorer instead of an expert or guru. A guru sounds too perfect. An explorer is going to make mistakes because that’s part of the exploration process. What an explorer shares is always a work in progress because there’s always more exploring to do.
I also see an explorer as being capable of deeper honesty. The label of expert can be challenged, and therefore some might see a need to defend it. Can an expert still fail and make mistakes? It seems harder to create space for failure with this label. If you’re such an expert, then why did you fail? With this label there may be a tendency to cover up mistakes to protect one’s branding (or your own self-image if you start to believe the label yourself). Behind the scenes, experts are just as human as everyone else. They make a lot of mistakes. They procrastinate. They fall short again and again.
I like the explorer label because it feels more aligned with reality. Feel free to adopt it if you like it too. With this sort of label, we’re free to learn and grow, and we can screw up as much as we need to. You can fall off a cliff and still be an explorer. The label doesn’t need to be defended by the pretense of perfectionism. Even young kids can be explorers.
Going a bit deeper, I think it’s especially helpful to adopt the belief that the universe is always on your side. This is a very empowering lens for processing mistakes and failures. Why did life do this to you? Why did you have to go through tough times? It’s all just training to help you learn and grow. It’s strength training for your consciousness.
One of the most powerful reframes you can use is to apply gratitude where you might otherwise have a tendency to think poorly of yourself. Instead of beating yourself up when you fail, try saying “thank you” instead. Thank the universe for bringing you a meaningful growth challenge. Look at the weight that’s right in front of you, and feel some excitement that it’s going to help you grow stronger.
The more mistakes and failure you can handle without loss of self-esteem, the faster you can grow, and the grander and more expansive your growth experiences can be.
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