“You should feel bad.”
Recently, I was in a coaching conversation with someone who made some poor decisions, and it ended up costing him a valuable relationship. It was 1000% his fault, and he was beating himself up about it. During our conversation, he shared that he “felt bad.” My response was a little surprising to him.
“You should feel bad. That was some piss poor decision making man.”
“I thought you were supposed to make me feel better.”
“Nah, my job is to make sure you learned your lesson. That’s my question: have you learned your lesson?”
“Yes”
“What have you learned?”
He shared his answer to that question in great detail. I could tell he was genuinely sorry. He knew how bad he had messed up. The last thing he said was where I knew we had to shift the conversation…
“I’m just not proud of myself right now.”
“Do you mind if I step out of coaching mode and just tell you what I think?”
“Please.”
“Two things. One, what you did was wrong. You know it and I know it. And yet it is a lesson, not a life sentence. I think you’ve learned your lesson, so you don’t have to punish yourself forever. Two, I understand that you aren’t proud of what you did, and yet you can’t change it. There’s no time machine, there’s no going back. So what you’re going to do from this moment forward is make yourself proud with each new decision. This is the moment you are going to allow that lesson to influence your decision making and make yourself proud of who you are again.”
I could tell that landed, and a few weeks later he shared with me that conversation really impacted him.
“I’m making myself proud again. I used what you shared, and it really helped me. I’ve just been repeating to myself ‘I make myself proud with my next decision.'”
Our lessons need to be learned, but they don’t have to become limits. Most aren’t life sentences. Once you know for sure you’ve learned the lesson, move forward by simply making yourself proud with each next decision.
live freed,
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