First of all, great to be back in the US though Turkey was wonderful. Highly recommend it.
Now onto my thoughts for the past week…How many times do we pay for one mistake?
The answer for the vast majority of humans is THOUSANDS of times.
Now how about this little fact… The human is the only animal on the planet that pays for one mistake multiple times let alone hundreds or thousands of times.
A few days after my readings I had something come up with a client of ours. The numbers were not the way they thought they should be and it most definitely was being blamed on us. After unpacking it all, it was about 10% on us and 90% on the client.
But, even though that was the case, I unpacked just how much I was blaming myself and found myself personally paying for “mistakes” over and over and IT WASN’T EVEN A MISTAKE.
I was searching for how I could be culpable. I do this all the time. There’s looking for ways I can improve, and then there’s looking for ways I’m inadequate, or lazy, or a bad person.
Both are fairly effective, by the way. One of them is caustic, though.
In the book it talks about the agreements we make with ourselves which become essentially a Book of Law. Many of these are made as far back as our childhood and without our knowledge.
To break these laws, these agreements, is possible but the majority of them have been in place for many years.
I spent much of my weekend reading, writing, and looking at how often I caught myself under personal attack for mistakes.
It’s constant, it just changes costumes.
But, as I was writing this, I caught myself actively trying to break an agreement.
Then, just as I started to break it, I reinforced it again.
The book, The Four Agreements, makes it very clear that it’s extremely difficult to break agreements but people are accomplishing it every day.
The key to breaking them? Mindfulness practice daily.
I practiced Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and today.
Hopefully, by next week I’ll have a nice little streak going.
Here is the link to the book in case you would like to buy it for yourself.
Have a nice week.
-SJ