There’s nothing quite like learning a lesson and mentally marking down that you’ve learned it, and telling yourself you’re never going to make the same mistake again. It’s the best version of checking off an item on your to-do list.
There’s also nothing quite like learning that same lesson again, some time later, whether it be a few days or a few years. I do think you learn it in a different way, because you at least hopefully can recall it from the past and get to that lesson again sooner. But it’s still one of the more painful conclusions to get to, and it’ll take all the self-awareness-power that you have.
A couple of years ago, in my personal life, I found myself being very terrible at sitting in silence and waiting for people to respond to me. Whether it was over text or even in person, during tough conversations, I struggled to wait, so I would talk and stutter and ramble on to get through the silence. Well, how about this — I didn’t find myself doing it, my friend helped me recognize what was going on because I was so frustrated. Sometimes you don’t really learn those lessons by yourself, but I struggle with asking people for help, so it took awhile to reach that conclusion. Anyway, I vowed to myself that day that I would learn to sit in discomfort and silence for the sake of improving my relationship, improving my patience, and knowing when to walk away.
Fast forward to last week. I was presenting a research idea to a lab-mate and I found myself doing the exact same thing. I just kept blabbing on and on because I was nervous my idea would suck. I suppose I do these kinds of things for multiple reasons, but the main one is just…what if my idea sucks, and what if that fact means I am terrible at everything and shouldn’t be in this program? Yes, that is how my mind works. It automatically jumps to negative thoughts, and will work its way up to an ultimate negative thought that trumps all other negative thoughts. The final boss of negative thoughts! And then I have to defeat it…and it’s really difficult.
Luckily, I realized immediately after what I was doing. I wasn’t trying to discourage anyone from giving me real advice, or trying to be rude at all, I was just so engrossed in trying to avoid criticism. I’m not scared of the criticism itself, I’m scared of potentially being wrong and having that determine my worth. I’m scared of having spent time on something & then realizing that I wasted my time on it by being wrong. I seem to forget that in the pursuit of what’s right, people will often run into what’s wrong. The difference is if those people give up easily, or if they stay the course and try to improve things.
I don’t really know if I have any solutions for not having to re-learn lessons. Self-awareness is obviously important, but I think we just exist in such a state of ebb-and-flow that it’s only natural to forget these things. The other thing is that maybe it just becomes an unconscious part of our behavior, which is the entire point of life. Which is very helpful, but that means it can be easy to slip out of doing it. In stressful times we tend to resort to these certain defense mechanisms that likely don’t play a part in “healthy” times, and I suppose this is one of mine.
So I think this is the answer: slowly chip away and recognize patterns in your behaviors as you enter your journey of self-growth. At first, you might attack each specific problem that you run into because that’s the only way you can do things, because you don’t know your patterns yet. But as you go, you might see more hints…then maybe you can take a step back and take a look from a broader point of view.
It’s kinda strange, because I usually emphasize not taking life too seriously (the entire reason I watch standup comedy). But then I write things like this and I realize just how serious I am about some stuff (I mean, I literally wrote “journey of self-growth”. Ugh! Who am I!). So I’m not sure where I stand on that, perhaps that’s a story for another time. But the point of this was to just recognize your behaviors because you can’t really change things unless you recognize what you need to change.
