Ken MacGray
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On Making Mistakes: Self-Forgiveness Can Be The Hardest Part

December 7, 2024

Making mistakes can be difficult if you tend to be the kind of person who always tries their absolute best to accomplish a given task. A lot of emotions can rise out of making a mistake: fear, shame, anxiety, catastrophic thinking, and regret, among others.

What we sometimes tend to forget is that making a mistake can also be empowering. Mistakes are opportunities to learn from what went wrong and to work on the skills to prevent it from happening again. It's hard to always remember this when we are in a swirling maelstrom of thoughts and feelings but we must try.

Included in those skills must be self-forgiveness. Remember that we did the best job we could with the knowledge and information that we had at the time. And now that we have new knowledge and information we can do better next time. Self-improvement is a never-ending process.