Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.
This is what I learned from Dave Hollis‘ book, Get Out of Your Own Way.
Today’s highlights and declaration come from the book’s second chapter, titled “The Lie: I Did Something Wrong, So I Am Something Wrong.” Let’s jump in:
- Doing something wrong doesn’t make you wrong at your core; it makes you human.
- You are good and enough just as you are, flaws and all. I can hold that notion of you being fundamentally good and enough as you are today and simultaneously hope that you will learn from your humanity to become something more. The learning you can take from those missteps that didn’t serve you or your relationships? Those learnings will light the way for where you need to go. Learning from those times when you were wrong is what ultimately builds character.
- We are the result of the life we’ve lived, but we only become prisoners of our mistakes if we allow it. You get to write the story of how your flaws have made you stronger today. You get to decide how you’ll use the narrative of what’s happened to you to create what happens to you next.
- Good people do dumb things. Dumb people are the ones who don’t find a way to learn from those things.
THINGS THAT CAN HELP YOU
- Counter shame with sharing: We all suffer from things we are ashamed of, having done things we know we should not have done. Holding on to that shame, drowning in that shame, letting that shame become part of our identity—that does not serve us in any way. The anti-dote to shame? Empathy. When you’re struggling, find someone to work through your struggle with can help you evict the shame you carry.
- Find examples of others who struggled and learn from how they turned their pain into power: When you’re going through a hard time, it’s easy to feel like you and you alone are dealing with these hard circumstances, and even easier to feel like these choices are happening to you rather than for you.. What if you saw a model of someone else who made the same set of bad decisions but learned from their journey and came to a stronger place on the other side? When you are able to see how universal and common your struggles are by reading books and listening to podcasts from people who’d gone through similar seasons, it will change the way you think about the possibilities of what might come from your mistakes . . . in a good way.
- Change the way you think about asking for help: In a strange way, some aspects of masculinity make you think even needing help is an indication of weakness. If you can’t do something on your own, fix it yourself, take care of your own issues, what kind of a man are you anyway? The reality is, you take help from people all the time and it does not undercut your manhood: letting a doctor or contractor or chef or one of a number of experts do their thing in my life. When you think differently about what it might mean to reach out to and use the expertise of people who could help you with your mental health, overcome the mistakes you’ve made, understand why you do the things you do, you will be better for having put yourself in their qualified hands—and maybe more a man for having allowed it to happen rather than trying to fix it on your own.
That leads us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
The sooner you can shift the way your mind interprets the indiscretions of the past—from a lifetime indictment of you as a person to a lapse in judgment that you can learn from—the sooner you can apply the lessons to achieving your goals.
For some of us, our identity and significance have become anchored to our past failures as we allow these things to define us and, in doing so, create limitations for what we consider possible. This becomes the narrative we believe, and we hold tight to the excuses that narrative affords us because of how comfortable we’ve become in identifying that way.
Let go of that identity. Let go of those excuses.
