Turning Mistakes Into Milestones

In this talk, we delve into the inevitable mistakes and poor choices we make throughout life, exploring the valuable lessons hidden within these experiences. Join us as we celebrate the power of resilience, growth, and self-compassion on our journey towards becoming the best versions of ourselves.

Transcript

Welcome to the Happiness Podcast.

I'm Dr.

Robert Puff.

Do you know what one of the hardest challenges for me is as being a clinical psychologist now for over 30 years?

My answer might surprise you.

It isn't the stories that I hear,

Not at all.

I'm rarely,

If ever,

Surprised by any stories that I hear about people's lives anymore.

But the part that can be difficult is when people come in and tell me the mistakes that they've made in life,

Which to me,

Being human,

We all make mistakes.

And sometimes we make really big ones.

But the part that's hard is how incredibly difficult it is to get people to forgive themselves.

Because the truth is,

We really all do make mistakes in our lives.

And the longer that we live,

Our list of mistakes can get pretty long.

And I think we all know that.

We know everyone makes mistakes.

The people that we look up to,

We realize that they make mistakes.

The people that we thought were perfect,

With time,

We realize that they weren't perfect.

And yet we still love them and we care for them.

But when it comes to our own mistakes,

It saddens me how harsh we are towards ourselves,

How unforgiving we can be when we mess up.

Mistakes are just part of life.

We go through life.

We have our teachers,

Mostly our parents and our upbringing,

And they teach us how to interact with the world.

And then when we interact with the world,

That doesn't really work well because what our parents taught us,

And the early experiences that we're exposed to,

Set in motion certain behaviors that most likely will be manifest in our own behavior.

So for example,

Children that have been raised in very violent homes have a tendency when they get older to expose themselves or participate even in more violent behavior in their relationships.

But what I've learned over the years,

When I help people understand you're doing this because of what you were exposed to when you were younger,

And now as an adult you've realized this isn't good behavior to engage in,

But what they tend to do is really beat themselves up for these mistakes that they're engaging in,

Even though they were just conditioned to do that.

They can change the conditioning,

But they're very hard on themselves and sadly,

Sometimes very unforgiving towards their own behavior.

Even though I can explicitly explain to them how they got there and why they did what they did,

Even though it wasn't a good choice,

But why they did it,

They still have a tendency to really want to beat themselves up.

So what happens when we make mistakes and we beat ourselves up over them?

Imagine a child who's raised in a very illiterate community.

Their parents don't know how to read and write and their grandparents don't know how to read and write.

So finally the government sends them to school and when they meet their first teacher,

Their teacher says,

What is wrong with you?

You're an idiot.

You don't know how to read and write.

Get out of here,

You stupid little ignoramus.

Could you imagine someone doing that?

Obviously,

They don't know how to read and write because of what they were exposed to.

Their parents and their grandparents did not know how to read and write,

So how would they learn these skills?

And when they got to school,

The teacher had the expectation that they should know a little bit about reading and writing and when they don't know anything,

He or she blasts them instead of being empathetic and saying,

I get it.

Yes,

You do need to read and write in our world,

But let me teach you the skills of how to do that.

Wouldn't we expect that from a teacher?

And then wouldn't that child learn how to read and write?

But if the teacher blasted that child,

I bet that child would never come back to school and ever learn how to read and write.

I bet that makes sense to everyone listening to this podcast right now,

But the tricky part is when it comes to behaviors that we engage in that hurt other people or that cause ourselves damage,

Then we're much harder on ourselves.

For example,

Let's take it up a little higher notch.

Let's imagine that our parents were drinkers and our uncles and aunts all drank very heavily,

Got drunk regularly,

And that's what we were exposed to.

People would get an altercation when they drank and we were just exposed to pandemonium with the alcoholic behavior being engaged in.

So then we reach a point where we are allowed to legally drink or at least we start engaging in drinking.

What is our behavior going to look like when we drink?

There's a high probability because what we were exposed to,

What was modeled to us,

That we'll do the same.

Well,

Then later on in life,

We meet the person of our dreams that we love so much.

They're such a beautiful soul.

And then we go out drinking with them and we start acting like our family did.

And that person isn't very attracted to us anymore.

They don't like this person who drinks and behaves so inappropriately and their relationship ends,

Or at least it has problems.

So then what we do is we judge ourselves.

We say,

What's wrong with me?

Why am I this way?

Well,

We're this way because of what we were exposed to.

If we want to change the behavior,

We have to first understand where it comes from and then make different choices.

We'll get to that later,

But the first thing we have to do is understand our behavior has been influenced by what we were exposed to throughout our lives.

If we want to change that behavior,

We can't attack ourselves because if we do,

We're going to stay stuck.

We're not even going to try.

We're just going to give up.

Whatever we tell ourselves will be true in the sense of we're going to believe it because we're hearing it.

And if we hear horrible things about ourselves coming from ourselves,

It's not going to encourage us to change our behavior.

We're going to stay stuck in the patterns that we were raised with that now we don't like.

Of course,

None of us like to make mistakes.

I get that.

But we really have to be kind towards ourselves and understand when we make mistakes,

Where is it coming from?

How did we get to this point where we made this really awful mistake?

And then look at it and say,

Okay,

I get it.

I did this because this is what my dad did or this is what my mom did or whatever it may be because of some trauma I had in my childhood or just things I was exposed to.

And now I want to do something different.

Well,

If we're going to do something different,

We have to make changes.

But the first change we have to do is stop beating ourselves up.

That's the path to being stuck.

If I drink poison,

I'm going to get sick.

If I poison my mind with self-criticism,

With loathing,

With attacking myself,

Who I am as a person,

Instead of focusing on the behavior and realizing I need to change this behavior,

If we attack ourselves,

We are going to stay stuck.

Now some of you may be thinking,

Well,

Does that mean I can do what I want and just change my behavior later?

Of course not.

We need to be held responsible for the choices we make.

And sometimes they have consequences that we need to face.

But if we want to change our behavior in the long run,

We need to work towards forgiving ourselves.

And it's a lot easier to forgive ourselves if we understand how did I get here in the first place.

And think of it this way.

If someone harms us and they harm us in a way that's really hurtful,

But if we sense they're remorseful,

They're sorry,

And they really work on changing their behavior,

Maybe it won't completely take away from what they did to us.

We're going to remember that,

But it will soften our hearts towards them because we realize that truly we're sorry for what they did and now we're doing things to get better and not keep doing the behavior.

It's repetition of hurtful events that really are the most harmful.

If we keep doing something that we hate or other people hate,

It's going to make the situation so much more worse.

All of us make mistakes and we can change any behavior,

But if we attack ourselves,

If we beat ourselves up,

Then we're probably going to stay stuck.

And let's ask ourselves,

Can we truly be happy if we don't like who we are?

Of course not.

We do have to do things that we look at and say,

I like that person.

I'm a kind person.

I'm a loving person.

I'm a forgiving person.

But if we stay stuck and we're going to stay stuck if we don't forgive ourselves and learn from it and grow from these opportunities and just see them as opportunities to improve who we are,

Even though sometimes we do some very,

Very silly things,

Nonetheless,

Every mistake we make is a growth opportunity.

We can learn from them,

We can grow from them,

And we can improve ourselves so we don't keep repeating these mistakes.

I want to share a challenging example that I see so often in our world,

But that,

Yeah,

We can still grow from and learn from.

And what it is,

Is families,

When they hurt each other,

Sometimes what happens is they never want to talk to that person ever again.

So if we did something to someone that caused them,

So they would never want to talk to us again,

And whether their behavior is justified or not,

This is the consequences that we get to live with for the rest of our lives.

Do we just hate ourselves?

Do we just hate life?

Or do we just numb ourselves to this pain?

Or do we instead say,

Okay,

What part,

If any,

Did I have in this?

And now I do want to have people in my life that I can call family.

So can I reach out to new people,

Create a new family,

And make them part of my life?

I think we can.

And if we did have any or a significant part in causing our old family not to want to talk to us anymore,

Now we can practice the skills of loving kindness with our new family and love them,

Because that's who God or the universe is giving to us now.

We can't make people forgive us,

But what we can do is love people that God brings to us in our lives and forgive ourselves for the mistakes we've made in the past,

Learn from them,

And say,

Okay,

This is a life I have to lead right now.

And maybe my son,

Maybe my daughter won't talk to me anymore,

But there's a lot of people out there that are lonely,

That have no one in their lives that I can reach out to,

That I can care for,

That I can love and support.

There are almost an infinite number of people on our planet that could use our love.

And if we lost the love of someone else,

Let's find people now with our new skills that we can practice our love with and show them the unconditional love that we've learned.

We can always grow and get better,

And we can overcome our mistakes.

Sometimes our mistakes have consequences.

Maybe we're spending the rest of our life in prison,

But then there are people we're in prison with.

Can we be kind towards them?

Can we perhaps start groups that support other people in the prison and reach out to them with kindness and love?

Once we really get on this path of growth,

We're going to see so many opportunities to make our world a better place to live in for all of us.

There's just so many ways in which we can help others,

Support others,

But it has to start with realizing we are fallible human beings.

We are going to make mistakes,

And sometimes they're big mistakes.

We need to learn from them.

We need to understand them.

We need to grow from them.

But once we've done that,

Then we need to create a world in which we,

As a new person,

As a growth-oriented,

Healthy person,

Reach out to others who are struggling too.

If we all do this,

Imagine what our world would look like in 50 years,

100 years.

It would be such a beautiful place.

But our tendency to be hard on ourselves,

Our tendency to judge others,

Is what keeps us stuck.

Forgiveness of ourselves and forgiveness of others is the key component of healing,

Of getting better,

Of growing.

And the way we do that is through awareness,

Understanding how did we get here,

And then doing something different so we don't repeat the behavior again.

We can all learn to improve.

We need help,

We need support,

And there's so many people out there willing and wanting to help us.

But we have to reach out for that help and say,

Please help me.

I don't know what to do.

I try to make this podcast as practical as possible so that after you listen to it,

You can do things right away to implement change and improve your lives.

What I'm suggesting today is self-forgiveness.

We all make mistakes.

That's just part of being human.

No one has a perfect life,

But what people do that have a happy life is they learn to forgive themselves,

They learn to change their behavior through that forgiveness and through the self-awareness of how they got there,

And then they become a different person.

The only person in the universe that can keep us stuck is ourselves,

But the great news is the only person ultimately that can change us and make us into a better person is ourselves.

It's really in our hands.

We can truly have beautiful lives no matter what we've gone through.

I say it so often,

It does take work.

It does take effort,

But it's so worth it.

I believe in you.

I believe you can have a beautiful,

Wonderful life one day at a time,

And no matter what you feel you've done,

The mistakes you make,

Even if you feel the nefarious,

Wicked deeds that you've done,

Nonetheless,

You can still change your behavior so going forward,

You end up becoming a beautiful,

Wonderful soul on our planet Earth,

Making your life better and everyone around you better too.

I really do believe each and every one of us can do this,

But today when we think about our mistakes instead of attacking ourselves,

Going forward,

We'll see them as growth opportunities that we can truly improve upon,

Changing our lives,

And then potentially helping and improving the lives of people around us.

Thank you for joining me on the Happiness Podcast.

Until next time,

Accept what is,

Love what is.

Reviews

Thank you!

Forgiving myself one-day at a time.

Very powerful & healing. Thank you.

Spot on!! 🩵

Thank you 🙏