You're spending all of your time agonizing over what went wrong and burning memories of the bad experience into your mind with lots of negative energy.
Reliving painful experiences reinforces them and allows them to grow in your mind, raising the probability they will reoccur. This damages your self esteem, confidence and makes you feel anxious and bad.
Instead, channel anger and anguish over errors toward identifying, developing and strengthening skills that will help you to succeed and be happy in the future.
Use Mistakes And Errors To
Enhance And Improve Future Performance
This is SO IMPORTANT we'll say it again to make sure it sinks in!
Beating yourself up, criticizing or condemning yourself makes you miserable and burns mistakes into memory with lots of negative energy.
It demoralizes and distracts you from correcting the error and developing skills that will help you to be more successful.
You are not spending time practicing and perfecting skills that will help you avoid the same problem in the future.
Why Do We Beat Ourselves Up?
When we are little, adults punish us to protect us from wrongdoing. It's a simple, Pavlovian response:
Punishment Causes Pain and Pain Prompts Avoidance
Some of us mistakenly turn this process against ourselves. It doesn't work, here's an example...
As a child, if we run into a busy street without looking we may get whacked on the bottom to stop us from running out again, getting hit by a car and hurt.
Punishment causes pain and pain prompts anxiety and avoidance of the punished activity.
If we repeatedly run into the street without looking, we may get whacked again and again and develop a fear or aversion for busy streets, but this doesn't solve the real problem.
We need to learn to recognize there's danger, stop and carefully look both ways before we cross a busy street. That's a successful skill we want to make a habit as adults.
Beating yourself up does NOT improve performance. It creates avoidance and anxiety, it does not identify and strengthen skills that will help you to be safe and happy in the future.
Six Causes of Mistakes
There are six general causes of mistakes. Which of these will be helped by beating ourselves up?
- We Don't Know What To Do - This is a training or educational gap that is solved by learning successful skills and responses.
- We Know What To Do But We Don't Apply It - This is also a training gap where we need to learn how to apply what we already know and do well to new situations.
- We Know What To Do But We Don't Follow Through - This is either a motivation or a priorities problem, the two are often closely related. If we don't value something, we don't make it a priority and we are not motivated to address it eagerly.
The key is to strengthen our motivation by emphasizing the dangers of dereliction and the benefits of excelling and doing well. Beating yourself up makes you feel bad, it doesn't necessarily change priorities or build motivation.
- Errors of Judgment - Often involve failing to assess reality accurately or failing to identify and deal with real dangers and difficulties effectively. Judgment, wisdom and decision making abilities need to be strengthened and enhanced. Beating yourself up won't help here either!
- Lapses of Concentration or Attention - Are often caused by distractions, fatigue or drops in motivation. Reemphasize the importance of careful attention and redouble your determination to excel and do well helps address these lapses. Beating yourself up distracts you from what you want to do and deflates your confidence.
- Circumstances Beyond Our Control Cause Errors - Learning to anticipate and protect ourselves from similar situations helps reduce chances of repeating the errors in the future.
Which of these are helped by beating ourselves up? None of them!
Don't Beat Yourself Up! Reliving The Error Reinforces It In Your Mind!
Use Mistakes To Improve Performance And Prevent Future Errors - identify, develop and practice skills that will allow you to be successful in the future.
Redirect Anger and Anguish Toward Strengthening Skills That Will Help You To Be Happy And Successful
Copyright 1999- , Michele Moore. All Rights Reserved. Explore HappinessHabit.com and HappinessBlog.com for more happiness quotes. Our materials may NOT be published, broadcast, redistributed or rewritten without written permission from the authors.