Photo by Inzmam Khan: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-black-shirt-and-gray-denim-pants-sitting-on-gray-padded-bench-1134204/
Some years ago, I was a cable guy, and one day I found myself in an attic troubleshooting some glitchy cable signal. I didn’t know how home construction worked and that you had to step on the rafters in an attic. I put my foot, purposely, next to a rafter and promptly felt the sheetrock ceiling start to give way. I stopped immediately, but the damage was done. I made my way downstairs to a livid homeowner staring at a jagged cracked ceiling. Needless to say, we lost a customer that day. Thankfully, I didn’t lose my job.
But I’ve had a few more foot-through-the-ceiling moments since then. My wife laughs at me because they’re more regular than they should be, and they’re particularly painful on Sunday mornings when the ball has been dropped and I was supposed to be the one catching it.
If you’re like me, you’re particularly hard on yourself. It turns out that a healthy spoonful of self-loathing is good for memory, keeping me from repeating mistakes. But that healthy spoonful is actually an unhealthy solution, a pattern that I’m still working to halt fairly often when I make painful mistakes, gaffs, or just dumb luck oversights.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been to therapy off and on through the years. That’s where I learned about my unhealthy mistake-shame-self loathing cycle. However, it’s one thing to understand a bad cycle; it’s another thing to break it. Here’s what I’ve been working on to break that cycle—
Failing Forward
That’s from a John Maxwell book of the same title. It’s a quick read about how we all fail, but it’s how we respond to our failures that really matters. We shouldn’t see failure as a setback or a not-so-subtle sign that Providence wants us to find a new line of work; rather, failure is an opportunity to learn. Analyze the situation with honest self-assessment and bring in the advice of peers and mentors. You might still make the same mistake twice because patterns can be hard to break, but it shouldn’t take more than once or twice to sort out the issue for the long run.
Being Kind to Myself
This is where I struggle the most. John Maxwell’s ideas make a lot of sense, but that doesn’t mean I have to like myself. I’d dare say there’s a lot of other people reading this who feel the same way about themselves. But the truth is that we can’t be truly kind or gracious to others if we are not first kind and gracious to ourselves. That self-hate will leak out eventually and spew onto others no matter how hard we try to keep it down. So how do I work to be kind to myself, then?
I’m Praying
I keep a widget on my home screen that links to a notes folder called “Prayer.” The top one is titled “For When I Mess Up.” Working truth into the deep recessed wounds of our soul and smoothing over the worn-down ruts of self-hatred with the goodness of God is spiritual work as much as it is mental and emotional work. I’ve started praying the following prayer in those moments when I know I’m going to spiral into unhealthy thought patterns. Here’s the prayer in its entirety. A liturgy for failure, if you will:
Father, you are the God of peace and gracious mercy, whose long-suffering love does not hold our sins against us. Holy Spirit, your wisdom and foresight keep me, not my performance. I set my intention on improvement, not perfection. I owe no one my peace. I am perfectly loved and accepted by my Father, my Brother and Lord Jesus, and my Comforter Holy Spirit. I forgive those who love me imperfectly as I have loved imperfectly.
I’ve found this prayer especially helpful when I pray it with prayer beads.
Perhaps you’ve never heard of prayer beads, but it’s simply a time-tested prayer tool adapted from the familiar Catholic rosary that we can use for times of meditative or formative prayer, touching each bead for certain phrases. This helps bring your whole body into a place of prayer. You can simply assign each phrase of the above prayer to part of the rosary like this:
The Cross: Father, you are the God of peace and gracious mercy, whose long-suffering love does not hold our sins against us.
The Invitatory: Holy Spirit, your wisdom and foresight keep me, not my performance. I set my intention on improvement, not perfection.
The Cruciforms: I owe no one my peace.
The Weeks: I am perfectly loved and accepted by my Father God, my Brother and Lord Jesus, and my Comforter Holy Spirit. I forgive those who love me imperfectly as I have loved imperfectly.
