Teachers or Judges? What do your mistakes do for living?

Posted on March 10, 2021 by Danny Buccilli, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

How much time have we spent judging ourselves for the mistakes we’ve made?
“I shouldn’t have…, only if I didn’t… why was I so naive?… I wish I could go back…”
Well… what if our mistakes were just meant to be? What if they were exactly what we had to do in order to become who we are?
We tend to judge our actions as a failures or successes because we make the “mistake” of comparing their outcomes to an imaginary expectation that we pictured in our head.
Well, that expectation was never real in the first place, it was “just” in our head. What is real, instead, is the behavioral pattern that we set in action when at a crossroad we decide which way to go: left or right?
In that moment, we are literally assaulted by our emotions telling us to go either way or even both ways, thus keeping us in a never ending loop until the strongest feeling takes a decision for us. Sometimes we even believe we are taking “logical” decisions, thus leaving emotions aside… unfortunately, even this is an illusion as that decision is also driven by an emotion that underlies a wish for not dealing with difficult or painful topics, thus trying to escape from them.

Our emotions create expectations in our head, our emotions make us feel good or bad as a result of any decision we take, our emotions in the end also take decisions for us…

Doesn’t it feel like we are just spectators of our emotions’ show?

At times it might, and this is also what I work on with my clients: learning how to strengthen our emotional intelligence competences to be more effective and more in control of our behavioral patterns, thus holding on to our own sense of direction and acting with compassion towards our own so-called “mistakes”, which we should honor and appreciate like we do with our best teachers.