We’ve all done it sometime. And we’ve probably all done it sometime this past year. You are in the middle of a pattern, or even showing on the rail, and you make a mistake. A stupid mistake. No big deal, you’ll do better next time. As the day goes on, all you can think about is your blunder, and by the time you get home, you are mentally black and blue from beating yourself up. You try to let it go, but like a bulldog on a sofa, it won’t budge.
From the brain’s perspective, it is important that we learn from our mistakes, after all, our ability to survive and evolve depended on it. However, when we are unable to forgive ourselves and move on, our emotional terrain starts resembling the Alps, because we have created so many mountains out of molehills. However, armed with some insight, you may find yourself able to forgive, forget and free yourself from unpleasant memories in the past.
When we find ourselves reliving the same incident over it may be that there is still more for us to learn and therefore, we are not complete with the situation. The first step is to spend a little time soul searching and ask yourself the following questions:
Is there something I need to learn from this in order to move on?
You may want to do a mental brain dump by writing down whatever comes to mind without interrupting the flow of thoughts. It will feel as if you are watching your hand move across the paper and you are just automatically writing things down. There is no right or wrong, and things don’t have to be logical. Once you have your list, you may find a hidden nugget in there that gives you that “AH HA” moment and a feeling of completion.
How could I have done things differently in that situation?
What if there was an option to purchase a ‘do-over’ in a pattern class? Seriously, how cool would it be for you to have a yellow flag that you buy in the show office and carry it into the arena. If you make a mistake, you just throw the flag and get to start over. The thing is, memory is an active, synthetic process, meaning that memory is not fixed and static. It is changeable and flexible. In essence, you can have a mental do-over by seeing yourself execute your pattern correctly and the way you wanted it to be. Not only will this make you feel better about the memory, you will also be teaching yourself what to do should that particular situation arise again.
Once you take the time and learn what you need, you may find that you are able to put the incident in perspective and move forward with your head held high. But what if you still can’t get over it?
It’s stored with other memories in a mental junk drawer
Everybody has a junk drawer. You know, the place where you put dice and rat poison because you are in a hurry and you want them out of sight. The problem is, when you have to find your dice to play Yahtzee, you end up looking at all of the other stuff in the drawer, and it can be overwhelming. Same thing goes for our mental filing system. We have a bad feeling because we went off pattern in a trail class. In the totality of what is everything else in the entire universe that isn’t going off pattern, it’s minuscule. However, if it is buried under the memory when your pants were too short in high school, which is next to the time that you had a bad haircut in third grade and people made fun of you, it has a lot of sting to it. If you are having a hard time letting go of little things, they may be are attached to all of the other little things, and it is now one big thing. According to Martha Stewart, the key to organizing a junk drawer is to have lots of little containers to keep things separated so you can clearly see each item for what it really is, a completely separate thing. This is no different.
A habit of attention
At our beck and call, we have the ability to put our attention wherever we want to. Give this a try. Right now, you are reading this article. But now, just shift you attention to something that you haven’t thought about for awhile, something that you really enjoyed, then please shift your attention back to the article.
The thing about attention is, if we aren’t really thinking about where to put it, it will go where it typically goes. If you are dwelling on negative thoughts that no longer serve you, just tell yourself, “Oh, this is just my old habit of attention,” and think about something else. It’s a mental version of Eat This, not That. Every time you shift your attention from Think This, Not That, you are rewiring your brain to pay attention to the things that are important to you, and over time, you will have created a entirely new habit of attention that makes you feel good about your life. While you are at it, you can gently remind yourself that you are not your thoughts and above all, you don’t have to believe everything you think.
Here’s wishing you a healthy and successful 2016.
