When I was living in the darkness, the moment I felt I was down, which was most of the time, I would kick myself even lower. That’s exactly where my disease wanted me, as low as I could go, and even as low as I got, I would still kick myself lower. I often held unrealistic expectations for myself and if I didn’t reach them exactly how I set them I would beat myself up. I also set them so high that I was not likely ever going to reach them so each time I failed it became a self-fulfilling prophecy that I was not good enough and was a failure. That cycle only brought me lower and lower, and, if, by chance, something good did come, my fear immediately kicked up that it would be taken away or that everyone would know I really didn’t deserve it. It took me some time to learn to love myself more when I was down, or feeling down, that it was during those time that self-love was most important.
When I got onto a path of recovery I was at an all-time low. I could not have been lower. I was emotionally and spiritually bankrupt. I felt dead inside. I guess I was at ground zero in terms of my mental state, so I had only up to go, but each step of that incline was going to take work on my part, and rewiring my brain to stop looking for opportunities to kick myself when I thought I had failed. I was going to fail a lot on this new path, that was all part of learning, and I had to learn that those fails where going to teach the most, they would teach me to love myself through them. The thing is, nothing really is a fail if you learn from it. In fact, life is built-in with fails along the way so we learn, I don’t know about you, but I learn the most from failing, and then, have the opportunity to grow from that perceived fail. Realizing this also helped me changed my perception of my failures, not that I wasn’t disappointed by them, but I could look for the benefit of them and the places where I could make changes for the next time. Or, maybe look where I could have done a little more work that may have resulted in a better outcome. Failures, like other things in my life, were only failures if I let them be, if I did nothing to change what didn’t work, or I didn’t grow and learn from them, they really were failures, but, most of them were in my power to do something positive with even when I hadn’t received the desired result, and that was a positive. So instead of kicking myself I could be thankful for the lesson and move on, a much more productive and healthier place to operate from.
We have goals and expectations for ourselves, but are we setting ourselves up for failure even before we start? And what are those failures really telling us? The answers may be pointing you in the right direction that you will never see if you’re too busy kicking yourself while you’re down. SLAY on!
SLAY OF THE DAY: Do you kick yourself when you’re down? Why do you do this? Do you think you deserve to be punished for your failures? Do you believe you deserve to fail? Why? Thinking back to a recent failure, what could you use from it for next time? How can you turn that perceived failure into something positive? Have you done this in the past? How have you done it? Do you see how important it is to love yourself during times of failure, to focus on the good that could come out of it? If not, why not? If you do and don’t love yourself during those times, what stops you? SLAYER, we have the power to turn our failures into positives, it’s all in what we choose to do when we don’t get what we want or expect, that’s pretty powerful, so next time, when you might be feeling down and things don’t seem to be going your way, look to see if maybe you’re going the wrong way, perhaps that failure is showing the way you should be going.
S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you
State Of Slay™ 