When talking to clients so far this year, the subject of backing ourselves has come up time and again. So many of us just don’t – we second-guess ourselves, question our own abilities, our judgment, our decisions. But we have reasons we do (or don’t do) what we do (or don’t do)…and this second guessing and questioning and undermining is cruel and counter-productive.
There is no benefit to it. It’s harmful to our self-confidence and our self-esteem, it makes us question our motives for everything and leads to self-flagellation and lack of self-trust. Neither are good. The positive intention is probably to ‘make ourselves do better’. But how does questioning your every thought make you do better? It doesn’t. Instead, it makes you do worse…making decisions from fearfulness, stress and underconfidence rather than inner knowing and self-assurance; or worse still you do nothing because you fear doing the wrong thing.
So just imagine for a second if you backed yourself 100% for EVERY decision you ever made. For every choice you ever made. Imagine what that would be like. Imagine accepting that you had reasons for what you did (or didn’t do), and honouring that you made the best decision you could in the circumstances.
Usually, whatever decision we make seems like a good idea at the time. But then hindsight will kick us in the arse, and we judge our decisions and choices as stupid, bad or wrong. But given what we knew at that moment, we made the best decision we could. Just because next time we’ll make a new choice doesn’t mean the first choice was worthless.
For example, at the end of 2014, I recorded the “Create a Life Worth Falling in Love With E-Workshop” off the top of my head. I made notes, but then I trusted myself to just talk about each module without a script. In 2015, I created the transcripts of these audios which was a painfully long-winded process, and highlighted some issues with the material – a missing thought here, a poorly constructed sentence there. And I decided to redo a couple of the audios off the back of that process.
(This actually led to me re-doing all the audios, because I kept thinking of ways to make the material better!)
The original decision to record it all off the cuff, it turns out, wasn’t the best way to do it. But here’s the thing: without that original ‘bad’ decision, I would not have found the best way (for me) to create products. In hindsight, there is a better way, but at the time I made the best decision I could given the time I had given myself (3 weeks!). I was doing my best…and I back myself for that decision.
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It meant I could release the product in January 2015, a year earlier than the revised edition…where it could benefit all the gorgeous people who bought it in that year (who also get the revised material…how lucky are they?!)
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It meant I learned a huge lesson about me and deadlines…they cause so much stress for me, they’re not worth working to.
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It meant I learned to crack on without pausing for fearful moments and self-doubt because I didn’t have the time (an incredibly valuable lesson that’s helped me to breeze past all self-doubt when creating anything for the last year).
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It meant that an idea I’d had for 5+ years wasn’t put off for yet another year.
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It meant I learned the best way for me to create audio products – something which will serve me well for the next 10, 20, 50 years.
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It meant that I was able to listen back and refine the material into something even better.
It was a ‘bad’ decision that led to many valuable and significant lessons that will make my life better. Poor decisions and judgements lead to better decisions later. Getting it wrong teaches you more about getting it right than breezing through life without ever making a mistake. (And who ever did that anyway?!) Failure gives you a huge amount of useful feedback. And often, given the exact same circumstances and information, you’d make the same choice – so why beat yourself up for doing your best?
If you try to get through life without needing to back a poor decision you made, you’ll find you never do anything worth regretting…nor will you do the many fabulous things that follow the failures and fuckups. And when you back yourself anyway, it is so reassuring. It allows you to make more mistakes – to learn more, to progress more, to fly even higher – and to succeed.
Ok, so that guy you went out with was a jackass…a bad decision. But you can either beat yourself up, make yourself feel worthless and doom yourself to repeating that mistake over and over again; or you can reassure yourself that you took a chance, you had some fun…and next time you’ll trust that inner voice saying “don’t go there”!
Ok, so last year you didn’t make time to write the book you’ve always wanted to write…a decision you made unconsciously. So now make a new choice. You had your reasons for not taking the time. They made sense then. (They may even make sense as you look back and realise that working 50 hours and bringing up your family didn’t leave you much writing time!) Back yourself. Accept that’s the decision you made, even if it was unconscious. Make a new decision this year, a better decision, or at least a conscious, thought-through decision.
You deserve your backing and support. You deserve to have your own back. You deserve you in your corner. You deserve the best from you…and that means that you stand by yourself, especially when you’ve made a mistake. Nobody’s perfect. Nobody’s immune from poor decision making. But if you want to make better decisions and choices, start by standing behind the decisions and choices you’re making now. That way, instead of using those choices to weaken and sabotage yourself, you can use them to do better next time.
And you’ll start to see that you are doing your best at all times, you are making the best decisions you can with the information you have, and you can stand by the decisions you made because they seemed like a good idea at the time!
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