Do What I Say, Not What I Do

I, like many human beings who are prone to mistakes, loathe the fact that I make them. I am extremely hard on myself. I definitely do not get that trait from my father, who has the gift of pirouetting through life over and across the cracks in his own hardwood floor; he just moves on. My mother would tell you that a little more self-awareness wouldn’t hurt, but the point still stands--the man is lucky to keep on keeping on.

For many of us, though, those cracks stand out as crevasses. Speaking for myself, when I make a mistake, it takes me much longer than I’d like to admit to get to a point of forgiveness. I get stuck. I ruminate. The tiniest mistake turns into a cataclysmic event with deep and irreparable consequences. Everyone will know me for that one blunder for the rest of time. It will define me.

In reality, at times it is hard to move from self-criticism to self-compassion. Charlotte Lieberman, in this NY Times article, describes both the Catch 22 of self-criticism as well as three ways in which we can move from rumination to productive acknowledgement.

As educators, we strive to get kids to do just that--to learn from their mistakes and to move on quickly with an improved understanding. In fact, kids are much better able to do that than we are (at times). They feel and feel deeply, but if we are doing our job right, we get down to their level, eye-to-eye, and help them understand the ways in which they wronged someone else so that they build that muscle of compassion over time.

Kids’ physical elasticity is matched by their emotional flexibility.

I, for one, would stand to learn from that--to be able to be upset, to sit with myself eye-to-eye, and to take something from the experience rather than sitting in my sandbox of self-loathing for a few days too long. This is not to say that I am walking around in that sandbox day in and day out. But, there are times where we, as adults, would stand to learn something from our kids. As their life, at least in part, revolves around making mistakes, trying things out, learning how not to do things, it would stand to reason that they are the most well-versed in how to overcome the setbacks.

Next time I aim to impart some of that understanding to a student, I will aim to do what I say and not what I do.