Monday Morning Motivation – Self-Forgiveness
(Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially)
Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement — along with a good cup of coffee! — to start the day.
Hopefully the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week. Please feel free to forward the newsletter on to others that you think would benefit from the content.
Self-Forgiveness
Last month I decided to change things up and move away from Zig Ziglar for inspiration. This month I opened up my list of “Ziglarisms” and the first word on the list was “forgiveness”. This started my mind turning and led me to decide on Mistakes, Self-Forgiveness, Consequences and Reconciliation as my next four topics. To me these all plug into what I’d call the “relationship process”. That process where we relate to our self, our kids, our spouses, our friends, and all of the other people we encounter in our lives. We all go through this cycle repeatedly. We make mistakes, we deal with the issue of self-forgiveness, we face the consequences of the mistake/deal with how to embrace self-forgiveness, and eventually come to a point of reconciliation. For the next four weeks, I’ll be taking on the topics of mistakes, self-forgiveness, consequences, and reconciliation.
Last week we took on the topic of un-acknowledged mistakes. This week we are going to take on the topic of self-forgiveness.
When I make a mistake, I am brutal on myself. I beat myself up. I tell myself what an idiot I am. I fret. I worry. I make myself miserable. Well actually, I USED to do all of these things. Then I came to terms with self-forgiveness.
I am human. So are you. We all make mistakes. And we need to consciously decide to let them go. That is easy to say, but hard to do. That’s because our minds are wired for survival and we are programmed to avoid danger. The mistakes we make are often harmful and/or dangerous to our physical or emotional health; and, therefore we KNOW we should avoid them. Unfortunately when it comes to making mistakes we can’t avoid ourselves. This dissonance between what we know is right and what we do, can – and does – create chaos in our mind. We can literally get ourselves in a “crazy cycle” of repeating the same mistake and not being able to figure out how to get out of the cycle as we keep reconnecting and reliving the past.
Here’s a secret:
- You cannot undo the past
What we can do is learn from our mistakes, accept that we are fallible (e.g. human), and move on with our lives.
You see when we suffer from the inability to exercise self-forgiveness what we are really saying is that we expect ourselves to be infallible. There is only one man that was infallible. And you ain’t Him! So quit beating yourself up for the past. It’s pointless. Accept it and move on.
That brings me to this week’s question:
- What do you need to forgive yourself for?
Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning and I wish you all the best for the week.
Curt
(Note: Each week I publish “Monday Morning Motivation” in the hopes that one person will find a bit of inspiration and that inspiration will have a positive impact on their life. My motivation comes from experiences, reading, sermons, and discussions.)
Blog posts from this past week:
At F5 Financial Planning we focus on helping individuals and families find balance between faith, friends and family, fitness and finance. We make sure that they have the financial freedom to enjoy those things in life that are important to them. And while we believe the left-brain facts and data are critical; we work with our clients to get them in the right state of mind to focus on the goals they want to achieve.
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