mistakes

Confidence and humility are not opposites: they are the same thing.

When I am feeling proud, I want to be better than everyone else. I want to pull people down in order to lift myself up. I can place a lot enmity between myself and other people: Sometimes I want what another person has. Sometimes I compare myself to others. I think I’m better than I really am. This brings a huge amount of insecurity, because I’m not actually better than everyone else. I am imperfect, and the work I do is imperfect.

I can’t be confident when I really want to be the best at something. Because I’ll never be the best, so I’ll drown in insecurities.

When I am more humble, on the other hand, I recognize that other people have a lot of worth. I can learn from them. I want to celebrate their accomplishments and support them. I’m looking outwards and seeking to connect instead of compare.

When I am humble, I am okay when I don’t know the answers. I am aware that I can always keep improving. And I want to improve more, because I see my capacity for growth.

In humility, I find confidence. Because confidence is when you are okay with being bad at something.

Confidence is when you are okay with being bad at something.

Think about going and talking in front of a group: if you are worried about having every word right, you are going to be terrified, because you know that it is very likely you will get some words wrong. But if you know you’re going to stumble sometimes, and say “um” way too much, and that you’re going to press onward no matter what, then you can walk up to the front of the group with confidence. You are confidence not that you will be perfect, but that whatever you attempt is good enough.

Don’t worry about confidence: it will come once you are comfortable making mistakes. And you become more comfortable with making mistakes when you increase in humility.

We all make mistakes. But we keep trying anyway.

Another post about humility. And another.

I’m not very good at making mistakes. I hate making mistakes, which means I find myself falling into a pit of despair. Sometimes I become unable to function as I think that I’ve irrevocably fallen off my (completely imaginary) pedestal of perfection.

Here’s the truth: everyone makes mistakes on a daily basis. It’s part of life. We are all very far away from perfection and we all do horrible things.

But still, one small mistake can ruin my day. I fall into my abyss of guilt because I want to go back and change what happened (which is impossible). I feel deep discouragement because I think there is no way to fix it.

And sometimes we make mistakes that we can’t really fix. We might hurt someone’s feeling so badly that it changes our relationship forever. We might wreck our car. We might wreck part of our life.

We can’t change the past. Mistakes happen, and the consequences can last a very long time. That hurts.

But I’ve been learning how to avoid the pit of despair and move forward. Here are ways to deal with mistakes better:

1. Accept what happened.

Not too long ago, I learned about “radical acceptance.” This means accepting life how it is, totally and completely. It means we accept that things happened and we can’t change them. Acceptance can be very difficult. We might think life is unfair. We might want something different.

But reality is what it is–and it’s a lot easier to accept it (possible) than to fight against it (impossible). It can take practice and patience, but we can accept that we made mistakes and we can’t change what we did.

2. Fix what you can.

Instead of dwelling on what we did, we can take some time to think about what we can do to make right. When I yell at my children, I can’t take back that yelling. But I can apologize. I can start speaking kindly to them. I can give them hugs and cuddles. I can work harder to not yell as much in the future.

Fixing things doesn’t always make the mistake go away completely–there are often scars. But people can forgive–and we can forgive ourselves, knowing that we’re trying.

3. Laugh at yourself.

Often, many mistakes we make are small and unimportant. And they can be hilarious, if we have the right perspective. We may slip and fall, but we can also laugh at how silly it all was. We can laugh at botched recipes, bad haircuts, forgotten information, fumbled words, and awkward encounters. We can laugh when our mistakes don’t define us, when we realize everyone makes mistakes, and that we don’t have to be perfect (or even close to it).

4. Learn from mistakes.

If we do something wrong, we don’t have to keep doing it over and over again. We can learn. We can know that we can do better. We can change. That offers a lot of hope to keep at it and to keep climbing towards being a better version of ourselves.

5. Repent.

The Atonement of Jesus Christ makes it so that we can be completely forgiven and change for the better. It means that even those scars can be healed and there is almost nothing we can do to completely ruin our lives. We can be saved from our mistakes, not matter how small or how big. There is always hope.

Tag: mistakes

On Confidence and Humility