How to Not Beat Yourself Up Over Mistakes

Do you beat yourself up over mistakes? Have you counted how much time you have spent doing that?

Yes and yes for me!

I have recently started playing a new sport, ultimate frisbee and this came with making plenty of mistakes on my learning journey.

There was one game a couple of weeks ago that I played really badly. I have dropped the disc so many times and when I had the disc, I threw to no body. This resulted in turnovers after turnovers. I felt so awful during and after the game because I let my team down and I felt like I was back to square one again.

I could see that during the game, after each mistake, my confidence level would drop down making me more hesitant to throw and catch. And after the game, I went into this overanalysing mode, replaying back over and over again and trying to figure out what went wrong and how I could have fixed it. I was so engrossed in this negative self-talk until the next morning when I felt compelled to send my team an apology! That really wasn’t a fun time.

This got me thinking is this negative self talk at all useful or is there another way to get over mistakes?

We all know this the reason we beat ourselves up is we want to learn from the mistakes. Those mistakes are so painful because they were important to us and we want to figure out the root cause to prevent it from happening again. We also know full well that failures are a necessary part of learning and succeeding. However, as much as we give ourselves this pep talk, it doesn’t seem to stop that voice in our head.

I have found these 3 steps to be effective and have definitely kept me playing and playing better:

1) Identify when you are starting to go down that negative self-talk loop. Awareness is the first step to any change, without it we cannot change our course of actions.
2) Ask yourself this question: “Is there any part of this at all useful or am I purely beating myself up?” This question is intended to help you realise the ineffectiveness of beating yourself up.
3) Make a firm commitment to yourself that you will only take the useful part forward and trust that you have learnt the lesson.

Step 3 is the most difficult but necessary step and I have personally struggled with it for a long time, It is not until I realised I cannot do anything more, I am better off trusting myself that I have learnt and spend my energy on moving forward and improving.

Let me know how you go with this technique, I will be keen to hear your progress. Flick me an email at hello@asyou.org for a FREE 30 minute discovery coaching chat!