mistakes were made

on self compassion & learning

an automatic drawing that brought me so much joy to make this week.

“Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts.”
- Nikki Giovanni

This week I got so engrossed in a project, that I made a scheduling error and I didn’t show up to a client appointment at the right time. Ahhhh! How did this happen? The me of even a year ago would have gone right into a shame spiral. 

And she certainly would not have shared this story publicly while also promoting herself as a coach!

And / but I didn’t go into beating myself up this time. Instead I noticed that my first thought was, “How can you have compassion for yourself here?”  The answer came clearly right away, “Make it right with the client and then don’t beat yourself up.”

After letting this settle in my body with a short walk around the block, and a call to my husband who also encouraged me to be self compassionate, I started to think about what I could learn from the mistake. 

For me, sometimes the digital calendar feels like it’s not real, I can’t explain this very well except to say it sometimes doesn’t stick well in my brain, and then I remembered there is research that shows that our brain gets wired differently when we write things by hand.

Writing things down is an embodied experience, after all.

So I decided to make a system at the end of the day, where I review my digital calendar and then write down (by hand on paper) the plan for the next day. I am also working on assigning time blocks to tasks the night before. I know that simplifying or eliminating (when possible) in the moment decision making is for me, a very powerful tool.

Maybe I am the last person on earth to figure this out, but maybe not. 

Later that evening I realized that if I had gone into beating myself up, I would have missed the opportunity to learn from my mistake. Self compassion, I realized, actually opens the door to the curiosity & the learning. It might have taken me months to make this system, which came to me in a flash, after making this mistake.

Where in your own life could you offer yourself compassion?

Much love,

Anna Marie 

P.S. If you want to watch a delightful and heartwarming film about mistakes check out one of my family’s favorites: Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made.

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