I did something at my work (Beacon House Therapeutic Services and Trauma Team) the other day that I initially felt silly about. It wasn’t critical and it wasn’t connected to my therapy work but rather a training proposal. I found myself feeling slightly embarrassed about what I perceived as my poor judgement. It made me think about the mistakes I make and the mistakes that we all make as human beings. It can be so easy to criticise ourselves which can leave us feeling ‘stupid’.As I reflected, I realised that I hadn’t failed in some way, I simply had a blind spot about how to best deliver online training, never having done it before. And the more I thought about many of the ‘mistakes’ we make, the more I realised that many of them are rooted in some kind of blind spot – either we didn’t have enough knowledge or experience, or we were distracted from our knowing, or we haven’t yet developed the emotional skills or capacity to tackle the task being asked of us.
This new thinking enabled me to avoid descending into shame and self-punishment and allowed me instead to think about the gap in my knowledge, experience, skills, capacities, etc and consider how I could put the ‘mistake’ right and learn from it.
Shame is a very human emotion – and it can be hugely damaging to our sense of self and our self-worth. Please take a think about any of your recent ‘mistakes’ and see if you can reframe them as blind spots in the moment and consider what you can do to gain the experience, skills, knowledge etc that may be lacking.
Photo by Duygu Güngör on Unsplash