We are all just in this human experience, trying to figure things out as we go.
And sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we get it REALLY wrong. And when that happens, we can be hard on ourselves.
And when the coin is flipped, and it’s about other people, we can be really hard on them! We throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say. We judge the whole by some of its parts.
And we do this all the time, in big ways and small.
Someone cuts us off in traffic, and we yell (internally, if not out loud), “A-$h*le!”
Someone makes a mistake, or says something, or does something, thoughtless, or unkind, or even maybe racist, and we peg them as “an idiot”, “a jerk”, like that’s their whole being.
We’ve created this binary, where we expect all or nothing - you’re either a good person, or bad, you’re either batting a thousand, or striking out. There’s no middle ground.
We’ve created this impossible standard of perfection where anything less than perfection means you’re a bad person.
We need to move away from the idea that being a good person is a fixed characteristic, and shift toward seeing being good as a practice that we carry out by engaging with our imperfections.
If an apple has a bruise, we don’t throw the whole thing out, we just cut out the bruise, or eat around it.
We can hate something someone did, and still love them as a person.
Everybody makes mistakes.
Even monkeys fall from trees.
LINKS
Coaching with Sarah Nykoruk