“The terrible thing was I just froze. I didn’t know what to do. Now I feel so ashamed.”
If you’re a high performer like me, not knowing what to do is one of your worst nightmares. It feels pretty scary to be standing there without a reasonable plan in the face of uncertain circumstances.
Many people I work with have built their sense of safety and identity on being extremely competent. So what happens when you’re in completely unfamiliar territory?
It tends to bring up fear, mostly because it reminds us of times when we were young and making mistakes when supposedly “we should have known better.” The way we learned to feel safe was by being in control and having it all together.
Art Credit: stipop
But you can’t always know better. In situations you’ve never experienced, how could you be expected to already know what to do?
You didn’t know what to do back then because you’d never experienced those things before, and you made a choice out of an ignorance that wasn’t your fault.
The bad things that happened when you were younger and didn’t know the right choice to make (like the time I used Pledge on my mom’s hardwood floor to clean a sticky mess I’d made and she almost broke her ankle) are what have CREATED the knowledge you have now.
As much as I hate to say it, wisdom is something we can only acquire through experience, both positive and negative.
Rather than beating ourselves up for not knowing yet what we cannot know, instead we can look inward using compassion and logic to forgive ourselves.
That looks like asking yourself this:
Is it reasonable to expect myself to know the right choice in this brand new situation I’ve never experienced?
When we are confronted with new situations where we don’t know yet what to do, we can give ourselves and our inner children the grace of being allowed to make mistakes without further punishing ourselves as we learn to do better.
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