Stop letting yourself down.
It’s the second full week of January, and the start of a new calendar year, which means chances are, you are starting to let yourself down.
Maybe you made resolutions for yourself: You were going to stop eating meat, or start meditating every day. You were going to exercise outside no matter what the weather is, or give up caffeine (or alcohol, or smoking).
Maybe you didn’t call them resolutions, You were just going to change something at the start of the year.
But then you were traveling and the only thing that sounded good for dinner was a burger (or a chicken sandwich). Or you got super busy or didn’t feel good, so that meditating didn’t happen. Or it turned out that the weather was so awful that “no matter what the weather is” seemed foolish. Or you went cold turkey on the caffeine and got such a miserable headache that you decided it was a mistake.
Or maybe you just . . . forgot. Or lapsed.
At that point, it is highly likely that you decided that you had let yourself down.
Your inner critic, which is (as we’ve established) an asshole, likely jumped in with their usual sorts of comments. These could range from versions of “it’s pointless” to “you are a failure”.
Usually it’s a combination of those two ideas, only delivered in far more florid, insulting language.
Here’s the thing: you have only let yourself down if you decide that you have, in fact, let yourself down.
You have another option available to you on any given day, and that is to recommit to whatever goal or decision you made. To grant yourself grace for your lapse.
To remind yourself that when it comes to this new course of action you’ve chosen, you are, in fact, a beginner. And just as babies who are beginning to walk fall down a lot, the same is true of all beginners at any age.
Maybe it would help you to remember that a baby who falls down while learning to walk doesn’t appear to form negative opinions of itself for having plopped on its backside. It also doesn’t throw its hands up and decide that walking just isn’t its thing. Instead, it regroups and gets back up and tries again.
Maybe not right away. Maybe not until later today, or tomorrow. But it continues to pull itself up again and again, and to practice finding its balance and taking steps.
Due to the way that human brains develop, a baby that is learning to walk doesn’t judge itself negatively or decide that it must be too clumsy, uncoordinated, stupid or feeble to walk. That particular sort of narrative doesn’t start until a few years later, as the ego develops more.
I am willing to bet that if you have ever watched a baby learning to walk, you cheered its efforts and encouraged it to get back up and keep trying. Because that’s what we do with babies: grant them grace, offer them encouragement as they develop, and celebrate their efforts as much as their wins.
You can do this for yourself, too.
If you are a beginner at something, why would you think you should be as good at is as someone with a lot of practice?
If you are trying to become vegetarian, for instance, but you’ve always had meat at least six nights of the week, and occasionally for lunch and breakfast as well, why should you decide that you can’t be vegetarian just because you can’t commit to the same exact meal plan as your friend who has been vegetarian for twenty years? Of course she makes it seem easy, because she has had two decades of practice!
Or, if you are trying to meditate each day, and you inadvertently skip a day or three, why does that mean that you “aren’t a meditator”? Can’t you start again now? Or tomorrow? Or next Wednesday? And does it have to be done in a certain way at a certain time in a certain place to “count”, or can you mix it up?
What I am proposing is that you stop setting the bar so high in the first place. And then that you grant yourself grace as you try to establish a new behavior, and celebrate what it is that you have done.
There’s a fantastic quote in Othello about reputation, in which Iago says that “you have lost no reputation at all unless you repute yourself such a loser.” The same goes with any expectation of you have of yourself.
The title of this post was “stop letting yourself down,” and I do mean it. But I don’t mean “stop making mistakes” or “stop being inexperienced at a new thing so that you can’t get expert results.” What I mean is STOP EXPECTING YOURSELF TO BE AN OVERNIGHT SUCCESS.
Hell, in the real world, most of the people we think of as “overnight successes” (in business, the arts, or otherwise) put in years and even decades of work before their “sudden breakthrough”, so it rarely applies to anyone in life. But I digress, and maybe that’s a post for another day.
If you were to adopt what my husband and his martial arts crowd call “beginner mind,” then you would remain open when studying something or trying something new. You would accept that you don’t know it all (even if you are at an advanced level), and would remain curious about what you could learn. And you would celebrate your efforts to advance, whether they were immediately successful or not.
It is impossible to let yourself down when it comes to a behavioral goal if you don’t expect to “flip a switch” and make an immediate, permanent change.
So do yourself a favor, and do this instead:
Celebrate your efforts. Seriously. Whether you give yourself an actual reward or just an atta girl in the mirror, make sure you notice that you are trying, and that’s a good thing.
Grant yourself the grace you’d give to an infant that is learning to walk, or to any other beginner. Remind yourself that it’s both natural and normal not to excel immediately at something that is new to you.
Remember that you can recommit to your goal, and start a new “streak” tomorrow. Whether it’s Jorts the cat and his trashcan mishaps or changing what/how you eat or drink, exercise, meditate or anything else, you get to try again.
And again. As many times as you want.
