One of the comments that was posted on Instagram actually mirrored, pretty much word for word, one that I got privately. "It depends where I fail..." So my question to you, and I really would like to know the answer is "Why?"
Why are we so hard on ourselves that the moment we don't "get something perfectly" the first time we are a "failure"...not what we did, mind you, but us as people? Where did that start and how do we stop it?
One of the uplifting comments I got from someone I coach was that she wasn't afraid to tell me when she hadn't hit her goals for the week because instead of agreeing with her gut reaction of "I failed, I am a failure", I help her understand that the things she didn't achieve this week can be achieved next and that sometimes we need to look at why we failed.* Was the goal reasonable in the first place? Did a factor you hadn't accounted for prevent you from reaching that goal?
I have yet to coach someone who failed at a goal because they didn't try and I have yet to coach something through viewing that failure as an opportunity, who hadn't already done a seriously good job of beating themselves up over the failure. Creative types especially seem prone to this, our work is never "good enough" for ourselves and all it takes is one little affirmation of that to start the never ending cycle of "it wasn't good enough, I wasn't good enough, so I shouldn't try so hard because it isn't good enough and I am not good enough..."
Challenge for you, if you are creative....Just once today, or this week, tell yourself that your work was good enough! And if you need a second opinion leave me a link to something you have done so I can tell you what I see! :)
Which brings us to my failure for the week.....
You might notice that there was not a WIP Wednesday Post. I wrote the post, but I hadn't uploaded the photos from my camera, so I saved it as a draft and....got distracted and never came back to it!
A controllable failure, yes! Absolutely. I closed the browser window I post from and went on to doing other things. Does it make me a bad person? Well, not really. Did I beat myself up for it? You better believe it! Which is why I posted to Instagram what I did!
On a less preachy note.....
I held a quick vote on Instagram about what colors would cheer up a dreary, cloudy, grey winter. Green won and the pattern that I wrote using some "every so spring like" green yarn will be going live on Ravelry next week!
Teaser photo:
If you subscribed to my newsletter you have already seen the finished object in one view, follow me on Instagram and there will be more!
One of the test knitters used a gradient that is to die for and when she was finished her husband commented that he thought it was his favorite thing of all the things she had knitted!
~M
*Ok, if you failed because you didn't try that is a whole different conversation! But, in this case that wasn't the reason for failure
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