S2 EP282 – The Freedom to Make Mistakes

Hi everyone, Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. I recently had a session with a client, Jennifer, who was very stuck in her life because she was so afraid of making a mistake.

Jennifer is a physical therapist, and she loves her job and does well, but in the rest of her life she is stuck. She’s a clutterer and is afraid to throw anything out due to the fear of making a mistake. What if she throws something out and at some later time she needs it?

So her place is constantly cluttered, which then makes her very embarrassed to have friends over, and so she ends up being isolated because she’s so afraid of making a mistake. When I asked her about, well, if she throws something out, she could buy it again, there’s something about that that she doesn’t like. She wants to make sure that she never throws something out that at some later time she needs.

And so her place gets more and more cluttered, her inner child feels more and more unhappy because her inner child likes cleanliness, but she’s stuck over her fear of making a mistake. Also, she wants a relationship, but she doesn’t date for fear of making a mistake, and she doesn’t want her date to see her cluttered apartment.

She’s constantly judging herself in the hope of stopping herself from making mistakes, but her fear of being judged by others overwhelms her. She is so afraid of making a mistake for fear of being judged by others, and as a result of all this, she is quite depressed. Yet she has a hard time connecting her depression with her fear of making a mistake.

Lots of times people get anxious or they get depressed and they think it’s coming from outside themselves, from some way others are treating them, but it’s very obvious that she’s depressed because she’s not taking loving care of herself, she’s not listening to her inner child who wants a clean apartment, and her wounded self, who’s terrified of making a mistake and being judged by others, is obviously in charge.

This level of self-abandonment will always cause our inner child to be depressed because we’re not listening and we’re not taking action on what is loving to us. Jennifer certainly isn’t listening to her inner child or taking action on what’s loving to herself.

And she doesn’t ask her higher guidance what is loving to her for fear of making a mistake. Instead, she listens to the fears and false beliefs of her wounded self. Staying stuck makes her feel safe from making mistakes, and it’s more important to her to avoid mistakes than to be loving to herself. As long as this is true, Jennifer will stay stuck.

Is this true for you? You might want to take a look at whether or not of fear of making mistakes or being wrong is keeping you stuck in some area of your life.

Most people when they make a mistake, they’re pretty harsh on themselves with self-judgments. They’re not allowed to make a mistake, and of course, judging yourself will lead to more mistakes. We do better when we’re listening to our higher guidance about what’s loving to us than when we’re coming from the fear of making mistakes and staying stuck.

Another client, Maggie is a mother of three young children. When I work with her, it’s very easy for her to access her guidance, but she never does what her guidance tells her to do for fear of being wrong and making a mistake. She, like so many people, has more trust in her wounded self who has no access to the truth, than to her higher self who can tell her what is in her highest good.

As a result, she’s often stressed, which is affecting her physical health, which stress certainly can do. Research about stress indicates that it is a major cause of physical illness and so coming from the fear of being wrong and the fear of making mistake and keeping yourself stressed and keeping yourself stuck can certainly affect your physical health. Over and over, my clients tell me they don’t take loving care of themselves because they’re afraid of being wrong or making a mistake.

You might want to explore what happened as you grew up that led to the fear of being wrong and making mistakes, if that is one of your issues. Now, I also used to be very, very fearful of making mistakes. I was so scared of being judged by others that I was very careful about what I did, and if I made a mistake, I was just mortified.

I remember one time we needed a new front door, and so I was the one to order the new front door, and I ordered it, and had it put in, and it turned out to be not a good front door for us at all. There were some major problems with it, and I was just so mortified that I had made a mistake. I had no room in my life for mistakes.

I had to be on my game, I had to be right about things, and of course, I would argue at that time out of my need to be right because I would be so scared of being wrong and making a mistake. But now, I don’t do that at all.

I realized at some point that the fear of making mistakes was really holding me back, was holding me back in my creativity, it was holding me back in my ability to flow with other people in conversation. I was always stressed, watching what I said, and watching what I did, and it was contributing to my being ill, and I realized that the fear of making a mistake was really getting in the way of my life.

And so now what I do is completely different. I have made it a hundred percent okay to make mistakes. I have made it a hundred percent to be wrong and to learn from being wrong and to learn from making mistakes. I have accepted that being wrong and making mistakes is a part of life. It doesn’t say anything about me regarding my worth or my lovability.

And so I’ve given myself complete permission to make mistakes and here’s what I do on the inner level. Let’s say that I’m going to do a presentation. It used to be when I would do a presentation, I would be terrified, “Oh my God, what if I forgot what I was going to say? What if I said it wrong? What if I made all kinds of mistakes?”

What I do now, is I say to my inner child, “Honey, you can make all the mistakes you want. You can fall on your face, you can make a fool of yourself, and I’m still going to love you anyway because your worth is not in whether or not you make mistakes, it’s not in whether or not you’re wrong.”

“Your worth is in your kindness, it’s in your caring, it’s in your creativity, it’s in your laughter, it’s in our joy, it’s in so many things, it’s in your gifts that you’ve been given and making mistakes doesn’t take away from that at all.”

And so I reassure my little girl over and over in many, many different situations, whether it’s a situation where I am in my studio and I’m painting or I’m doing pottery, sometimes the pot will collapse, that’s okay. I say to my little girl, “It’s okay, honey, we made a mistake. We got it too thin, and no big deal. This does not reflect on you as a human being.”

But this is mostly when it’s involved with other people, like in my work with people. Obviously I’ve been working with people now for 56 years. And of course when I first started, I was terrified of making mistakes until I learned to make it okay. Yes, I make mistakes. We all make mistakes, we’re all wrong at times.

But if I stay open to learning with my mistakes, if I stay open to learning from them, if I stay open to learning about being wrong about something, then it’s no big deal, and then it allows me to access my guidance. When I’m not coming from the fear of making a mistake, then I’m not coming from my wounded self.

And so when let’s say that I’m working on a book and I say to my little girl, “It’s okay to make mistakes, let’s just open and let our guidance come through.” And that is how I write, I let my guidance come through. That’s how I do anything creative, I let my guidance come through, and when I work with clients, that’s what I’m doing.

I’m letting my guidance come through, and I’m also listening for their guidance, which I’ve learned to do after many years of doing this. But I can only do that if I’m not worried about being wrong or making a mistake. And so like with a client, I might put something out and say, I’m wondering if this relates to you, and they may say, no, I don’t relate to that at all, and that’s perfectly fine.

I don’t beat myself up at all. I just move on to something else that might be helpful, but I can only do that if it’s okay to be wrong, and it’s okay to make a mistake. I can only be that present and connected with my guidance if I’m not worried about making a fool out of myself, falling on my face, making a mistake or being wrong.

And so the fact that I’ve given myself permission to make mistakes and be wrong raises my frequency and allows me to connect with my guidance along, of course, with eating clean, organic food that keeps the frequency of my body high enough. So this is really important, if you want to be connected to your guidance, you can’t connect to your guidance from your wounded self.

You can’t connect to your guidance when you’re coming from fear of being wrong, being judged, making a mistake. You can only connect with your guidance when your intention is to be loving to yourself. That raises your frequency high enough to connect to your guidance and let your guidance come through you. But I hope you can see that there’s no way that your frequency can be high enough when you’re afraid of being wrong or afraid of making mistakes.

Now, this decision that it’s okay to make mistakes and it’s okay to be wrong has given me a lot of freedom. Not judging myself for making mistakes or being wrong has given me a tremendous freedom to flow with life. I now treat myself the way I wish my parents had treated me when I made a mistake. I let my inner child know all the things I love about her and then let’s learn from this mistake.

And this is such an important part of Inner Bonding, is learning to be the loving mom and dad to your inner child that you didn’t have as you were growing up. Now, most of us did have a lot of judgment. I did. My parents were extremely judgmental towards me. I had to toe the line, and so of course, I absorbed all of those judgments and leveled them at myself for many, many years, which of course created a lot of stress and contributed to my being so ill when I was 45 years old.

But it was in letting up on those judgments, it was in allowing myself to be human, humans make mistakes, humans are wrong. Can you allow yourself to be human? This is such an important thing to allow ourselves to be human. I work with so many people who say, “Oh, I have to be perfect, I have to do this perfectly, even do Inner Bonding perfectly.”

Somebody just said this to me the other day, “Well, I’m not perfect at it yet, I’m doing Inner Bonding, but I’m not perfect at it yet.” Well, neither am I. I don’t know what perfect is. I don’t know what it means to be perfect. Everybody’s got their own idea of what perfect is, but when your wounded self says “You’ve got to be perfect.” they’re really saying, “This is the way that you can control other people. If you don’t make mistakes and you’re never wrong and you’re perfect, then everybody will love you.”

Well, anybody who’s ever tried that knows that that doesn’t work at all. People don’t connect to you when you’re trying to be perfect in order to control how they feel about you. They feel manipulated by you trying to do everything right and be perfect.

We need to allow ourselves to be vulnerable in order to connect to each other, and we’re certainly not going to be vulnerable if we’re not allowed to be wrong, and we’re not allowed to make mistakes, we’re not allowed to make a fool out of ourselves. And so it’s so important to be taking these judgments off yourself, take off the perfectionism.

I used to be such a perfectionist. Everything had to be right, everything had to be perfect, and of course, the judgments I leveled on myself were harsh when I wasn’t right or I was wrong or I made a mistake. I really want to encourage you to let go of that. Let yourself be human. As humans, we learn from our mistakes. Why not let go of seeing yourself as bad or wrong or something wrong with you if you make a mistake, and let yourself be human?

Let yourself make mistakes and learn from them rather than judge them. Too many of us we’re brought up with many, many judgments, and I’ll never forget the day that I connected my self-judgments with my anxiety and my depression. It’s like a light bulb went on where I recognized that the anxiety that I actually thought was coming from the situation in my marriage was coming from my own self-judgments.

Having to do everything right, having to be perfect, never making a mistake, tap dancing around and trying to please everybody and being so harsh on myself if I made a mistake. I’ll never forget realizing that connection between my self-judgments and particularly my anxiety because I used to be a very, very anxious person, which I’m not now thankfully.

But at that time, I had to go through a process of every time I felt anxious, I would go in and see what the judgment was. Now that I knew that my anxiety was coming from my judgment of not being perfect, of having made a mistake, of having been wrong about something, not doing something right, so every time I was anxious, I would go inside and what the judgment was.

And doing that over a period of time, being more aware of abandoning myself, that deep level of self-abandonment when I was judging myself, after about a year of doing this – yeah, it took that long of becoming aware of the connection between my anxiety and my self-judgments – I actually stopped judging myself. I can’t remember the last time I judged myself. I was so amazed that making that connection between my anxiety and my self-judgments led to almost a complete lack of anxiety.

I’m not saying that I never get anxious about things. I am a human after all, but I don’t have anywhere near the level of anxiety that I had before I realized that I wasn’t allowing myself to make mistakes, wasn’t allowing myself to be wrong, I had to be perfect and judging myself harshly. There’s so much freedom when you realize this.

There’s so much freedom when you are able to let go of that deep level of self-abandonment, which is your self-judgments. Of course, my judgments were the same as my parents, I had absorbed them into my wounded self and my wounded self was very harsh.

I really want to encourage you to start to connect some of your feelings such as anxiety, depression, guilt, and shame, and anger with your self-judgment. start to pay attention to what the judgments are. Start to see whether or not you’re pushing yourself to be perfect, whether or not you are saying that it’s not okay to be anything less than perfect, to always say the right thing, always do the right thing, always be giving to somebody who is pulling on you for something.

Always trying to tap dance and be perfect around people so that they won’t judge you but notice that you might be the one who’s judging yourself and realize, as I’ve said so often, that people often treat us the way we treat ourselves. While I was so harsh and judgmental on myself, I was getting a lot of judgments from other people.

And I was stunned that after that year of becoming aware of my self-judgments and no longer judging myself, I was quite stunned that I rarely was experiencing judgments from other people. It’s so true that others tend to pick up how we treat ourselves and tend to judge us and treat us the way we’ve been treating ourselves. And so if you feel like you’re not being treated well by other people, you might want to go inside and see how are you treating yourself.

How are you abandoning yourself? Are you judging yourself harshly? Are you pushing yourself to do everything right and be perfect, and are you ignoring the anxiety or depression or guilt or shame or anger of your inner child at you treating yourself this way? Because as I’ve said, anger is often a projection onto others of how we’re treating ourselves.

So your inner child might be very angry at you for putting your wounded self in charge, abandoning yourself with all the self-judgments, with ignoring your feelings, with maybe numbing your feelings out with various addictions, with maybe blaming other people. As I’ve mentioned so often, these very common ways of abandoning ourselves, when you’re blaming other people, you’re being a victim.

You’re not taking responsibility for the fact that you’re abandoning yourself, that you’re judging yourself, that you’re ignoring your feelings, that you’re numbing out in various ways. And so I really want to encourage you to try this exercise of giving yourself permission to make mistakes, to be wrong, to not be perfect, and to notice the connection between your painful feelings of anxiety or depression or guilt or shame with your self-judgments.

See if you can make that connection that was life changing for me, and it’s possible that it will be life changing for you. I let my inner child know all the things I love about her over and over, and I just learn from my mistakes. That’s what I encourage you to do.

And I want to invite you to join me for my bimonthly masterclass, which we’re changing to Master Circle and receive my live help, which you can learn about at innerbondinghub.com/membership. This is a really powerful experience where I’ll take you through an Inner Bonding process. I’ll talk on a topic, and then I’ll work with people who want to work with me with laser sessions.

These are very, very powerful sessions where we do a whole Inner Bonding process in 15 or 20 minutes, and you get to see the power of Inner Bonding no matter what the topic is that the person is needing help with.

Over and over, people come with something that they’re struggling with, and over and over, after 15 or 20 minutes, I see the smile come out on their face, I see the relief that comes from having done the Inner Bonding process and tuning in to what’s true and what’s loving to themselves. So I really encourage you to join me in my masterclass.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.