Fucking up

Read time: 5 minutes

Whether we done goofed in our relationships, in our projects, or we simply didn’t meet our promises to ourselves, it never feels good when we fuck up.

It may be extremely uncomfortable, but through that discomfort we shall grow.

As hard as it may be, we need to get a closer look at our mistakes, we need to appreciate the lesson we can take from wronging others or wronging ourselves.

Knowing you fucked up

Someone’s definitely disappointed.

You, your spouse, your team, your friends… Your actions have resulted in less than Steller results and someone is disappointed.

How to know you fucked up?

Simple, but definitely not easy.

Ask yourself:

“What were the expectations?”

“Have the results of my actions met the expectations?”

“How large is the difference between the expectations and my results?”

I know you may not enjoy the idea, or want to look at the difference between your results and your expectations, but that’s the first step towards solving the problem.

After you know you’ve done goofed, it’s time to admit it.

Forgive yourself first

Now that we’ve admitted we’ve done goofed, we need to learn how to go about fixing our mistakes.

It’s important to be able to understand that what we’ve done does not define who we are.

We are not merely our actions.

An inappropriate action is called a mistake and we all make those.

Obviously there’s legal limits to what we can call a mistake, a lack of judgement, or hot headedness, but before we can expect to be able to fix what we broke, we need to forgive ourselves.

We need to understand that feeling sorry for ourselves, hating ourselves, being hateful towards ourselves will not help the least in the process of fixing our fuckups.

The next step after you fuck up

Next comes the hardest part.

Now you need to convey (to someone else, or to yourself) the fact that you are sorry for your actions, the emotions attached to the whole event, your plan of action for solving what you’ve done and your commitment towards making sure you don’t do the same mistake again.

That and attaching actions to your words is all you can do.

There’s limits to how much can be fixed.

As hard as it may be to hear, we can’t fix every mistake we’ve done.

When we drop a vase and it breaks, we can piece it together, but it will never truly be the same.

We can try all we want to glue it together, but there will be leaks.

Not all things that break can be put together.

Not all of our mistakes can be fixed, but that does NOT give us the right not to at least try.