“Show yourself grace” means to treat yourself with kindness, understanding, and forgiveness. You are compassionate towards yourself and accept that you are not perfect, no one is.
Kindness – the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.
Understanding – sympathetically aware of other people’s feelings; tolerant and forgiving.
Forgiveness – to Forgive – stop feeling angry or resentful toward someone for an offense, flaw, or mistake.
The definitions above help shed light on what it looks like when we show others grace.
So many people are kind, loving, caring, understanding, and forgiving towards everyone but themselves. We are our worst critics. We can make the same mistake as Sally, and we treat Sally better than we do ourselves. We chastise ourselves and talk down to US while questioning our thought process in a negative light. Yet Sally made a mistake; and it was not on purpose, nor did she mean to hurt anyone’s feelings. Sally has received more grace than we even showed ourselves. It happens more than you realize.
Why is that? Why can we show someone else kindness for their misfortune, but we turn into heavy negative Nancy’s towards ourselves. We hold ourselves to such a higher standard than our counterparts, both friends and strangers. Now, excepting the best of yourself is different than never allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Mistakes teach us, they help us grow, and they mold us into the better people we are to become. Mistakes allow us to learn amid being misguided in certain aspects of our lives. We learn what can trigger us, how we react to different situations, as well as what our future selves should do if we come across this again.
Taking the time to feel the emotions that come with mistakes is key to learning from them. Sitting in those emotions (which can sometimes feel like a roller coaster) forces you to evaluate where you are not only in that moment but also in life.
Acknowledging where you are in life and the emotions you have surrounding your reality can be eye-opening. For instance, you may not be at a place in life where you thought you’d be 3 years ago, and that is okay. You’d be surprised with how many people are not in line with the vision they had for themselves, me included.
To truly see where I currently am financially, physically, mentally, and spiritually I had to stop and sit with myself. The truth is; things happen, life gets hard, and sometimes what you WANT just isn’t what you NEED at that time. That is okay.
We have acknowledged where we are and realize there are tools available to teach us. Grace for ourselves is not something we learned overnight. It takes practice and you may slip up from time to time. But you have to allow yourself room to learn and grow in every aspect of your life especially when facing challenges or making mistakes.
There are some key points that come with showing yourself grace. I had someone ask if I would speak to a friend how I speak to myself. That hit home, and hard. Because the answer was NO. You HAVE to acknowledge your emotions and respond to them with empathy, just like you would comfort a friend. In responding with empathy, you come to recognize that everyone makes mistakes and it’s okay to not be perfect all the time. And because you don’t have to be perfect all the time, you can stop holding on to past errors and focus on moving forward in life.
You cannot fix the past, but you can change how you speak and react to yourself for a better future. All of this takes work and time, you didn’t get to where you are overnight. And like I said you may slip up from time to time. Just remember to show yourself grace and keep going through life one day at a time.
-Adele-
Leave a Reply