Don’t Be Too Hard on Yourself

It’s good to have high standards and to hold yourself accountable for striving to reach them, but don’t crucify yourself for the inevitable mistakes you will make along the way. Making mistakes is a sign that you are trying, that you are putting yourself out there and risking failure/the pain that comes with it in order to get what you want. As long as you learn key lessons from the failure, it will facilitate your growth as a human being. There will always be things that you struggle with in every period/stage of your life: Insecurities, things you don’t like about yourself, and things that you feel you should be doing much better at. At one stage of my life, I badly struggled with body image issues. I had convinced myself that because I didn’t look the exact way I thought I should, I didn’t live up to this image I had in my mind of what I should look like, that I was ugly and unattractive. I had already had issues with confidence when it came to dating. Of course, this only made my problems worse. Another example would be anxiety around careers and around my future. I, in sixth form, had been becoming increasingly worried about my inability to figure out what I wanted to do in the future. I put so much pressure on myself to get things right, I forgot that it’s ok to be unsure. That I’m not God, or some sort of omniscient model of perfection, I’m very much a work in progress and that life is largely trial and error. 

There is a danger of becoming fixated on, or overly focused on, the anxiety you feel about the future. It can start to eat you up inside if you are not careful. It also is not practical. All that time you spent worrying, could have been spent working on hobbies and passions and working on things that can help you figure out exactly how you want to try to shape your future. Enjoy the process of figuring out the answers to different conundrums in life, rather than being worried or scared about what hasn’t even happened yet. Some people are lucky enough to figure out what they want to do with their future from a young age, for others like me it has taken much more time to even have any sort of clear picture of what the future could hold. I, up until recently, certainly saw this as a scary thing instead of actually being excited for the opportunities that could come my way. Your process is your process, try not to compare yourself too much with others. That can be a one-way road to depression if not done in the right way. Don’t use comparison of where you are with others as a stick to beat yourself with, and certainly don’t let anybody else do this to you. It should be inspiring and a motivation to see others succeed in the area/areas you wish to be successful in. At the end of the day, why can’t that be you next?

Growing up in an African Household, I certainly had it drummed into me by my parents to be a high achiever and to reach for the stars. They had very high standards for me and my siblings and this has definitely helped me so much in my life so far. Much of what I have achieved, and am on track to achieve, is thanks to the mentality I grew up with. And it is this mentality that lives inside of me, the desire to reach my full potential and to thrive in life. Having said that, whilst it is excellent to be ambitious and it is great to have high standards, I didn’t realise, until a much older age, that it was actually ok to make mistakes. Not only was it ok, but it was also very normal. I tended to be unnecessarily harsh on myself. There is always a balance that needs to be struck in life; if you start to be too harsh on yourself, it can often become counterintuitive. This is because you expect too much of yourself and you can become a perfectionist.

Perfectionism is a great goal to strive for, but one that you have to be aware is not actually attainable. The problem with perfectionism is that perfectionists accept nothing lower than to always reach the excessively high standards they set for themselves. Its excellent to have high standards, but not to the extent that you devalue yourself because you can’t reach a standard that isn’t really able to be reached, not all of the time at least. In my case, even when I did reach my incredibly high standards, I didn’t learn that it was not the end of the world to fall slightly below sometimes. Hence, I was never really satisfied with anything I did for the longest time. I would never give myself credit for the good things I did and for the work that I always put into trying to be excellent. But nobody is excellent one hundred percent of the time in all areas of life, such is just not possible.

So, while I am always striving to be the best I can be, I know now that I will never be able to reach the perfect version of myself that I dream of. But it’s actually ok to have such an unfulfillable dream, it provides me with something to strive for. It keeps me on my toes, never fully satisfied and always seeking to improve but simultaneously happy with myself and my life nonetheless. I strive to never stop living life with a smile on my face, this is something I can control. No matter the hardships, that smile shall remain; that’s the least I can do for myself. Life is a wild ride; we might as well enjoy the rollercoaster.