Mon, 2 March 2015
Click To Apply For A FREE Leadership Breakthrough Session with Kirsten Today! We often have a tendency to be so hard on ourselves. Many of my clients begin sessions lamenting a failure or missed deadline. And time and time again my request to them is, “Give yourself grace!” If there is something to be learned, a change you are working towards, or a repeating pattern certainly feel the pain for a bit, muster some of that motivation to do what you must. Beyond that, however, you are just wasting time and energy that could be used to strategize a solution or create a new game plan. First, perfection is rarely achievable. They celebrate the perfect bowling score for a reason. It doesn’t happen that often – or does it? I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a bowling expert. I know I celebrate when I hit a score over 100. But I digress. Waiting to celebrate only when you’ve achieved perfection is a tough way to live. Give yourself grace! Sometimes our wiring gets in the way. You can’t change how you are wired you can only create work arounds when how you are wired doesn’t’ serve you. Give yourself grace! For instance, if you are a type A personality, this probably serves you well in many situations. You get things done, you are on time for meetings, you have lots of bandwidth so can handle lots of projects at once. Your energy can seem endless at times. Great! Now, what if you are a Type A personality who has to wait to make a big deal happen. You have to wait through the process of due diligence, wait through the process of negotiation……….all while your desire for instant gratification gnaws at you. Your Type A wiring can make things difficult under this circumstance. Don’t beat yourself up, Give Yourself Grace! You can’t change how you are wired. And you don’t want to drive yourself crazy. You’ll have to come up with some creative work arounds to keep your mind off things while you wait for the process to unfold. Sometimes things happen that are out of our control and can cause us to miss the goal of perfection. If you are a regular listener to my podcast you may have noticed that I did not publish episodes on my normal schedule recently. I missed one……..Yep, I did! Recently, many things happened that were out of my control. One on top of the other. Hard drive crashed causing lost time taking it to the Apple store. Lost productivity from being without it for a few days Time to re-load everything and get re-organized Searching for a lost file that I will talk about in a minute About the time I got it back up and running my son got sick. He had a temperature over 104. This took lots of my time as I dropped everything else to care for him, created worry and lost sleep as the spike happened late in the evening, as they always seem to. I did hate to miss. But I am giving myself grace! I made choices that led to this outcome but I wouldn’t change them. I could do nothing about the lap top and I would never put publishing a podcast ahead of taking care of my sick son. So here I am. The reality is I can beat myself up or I can be okay with it. Neither changes the reality. Either way, the time has past and I didn’t get it done. Nothing I can do about it now. Time to move on. And speaking of that crashed hard drive. It contributed to a flurry of activity that served to shift my focus. During the crash I lost a very important file. I am normally so careful about where I save things. I backup and double back up. Especially when it’s a very big project. And this one was. I’m working on a new book, my third. I used to constantly email myself the file so that I’d have it saved on my computer, backed up on an external hard drive and alive and well in the cloud as an email attachment. I’ve been using Google Drive for a few years now and that has made things much easier. The file lives in the cloud, on my laptop and my PC. That’s still not enough, though! I also periodically copy and paste the entire drive to the desktop of my PC which also backs up to Mozy every night. And then, just for good measure, about once a month I back up my Macbook Pro to an external hard drive. My files are quadruple backed up. And yet, somehow, this file, this very important file, is lost. Thankfully, not totally. However, the most recent version I could find is months old. Somehow, I must have inadvertently saved that important file directly to my laptop rather than to Google Drive. Something I have not done with anything else, to my knowledge. I must admit, I am not totally there yet. It is still really fresh. But I’m about to stop wracking my brain trying to figure out how it could happen, about to stop beating myself up for a foolish, foolish error, fully give myself grace and move on. I need to muster all of my creative energy to re-construct what I’ve lost and move on to completion. Click To Apply For A FREE Leadership Breakthrough Session with Kirsten Today!
Direct download: DTD_085__You_Failed_to_be_Perfect____Give_Yourself_Grace.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:00am EST |