I found myself watching the Winter Olympics on some of these grey wet mornings, afternoons and evenings. I used to go to the ice rink as a teenager, but that is my only involvement with any winter sports, so a lot of what I am seeing is new to me – and also confusing when it comes to rules, point-scoring and how you actually win.
What has really caught my attention is the amount of mistakes the athletes – Olympic athletes! – make. When I was watching some men doing figure skating, they all made at least one mistake, some of them even fell over. The sliding sports – the luge, the skeleton and so on – the commentators pointed out mistake after mistake after mistake, I think when they bumped rather than slid. The skiing I’ve seen – again, littered with mistakes.
So I’m led to understand, from my watching, that Olympic athletes make a lot of mistakes. And that this doesn’t preclude them from doing their sport, and sometimes even winning Olympic medals in their sport. The idea of perfection is just that, an idea, it’s not a real thing, it’s hardly ever going to happen.
And I thought about all the people I know who hate making mistakes, who would rather not try than risk making a mistake, and who feel really bad about themselves when they do make a mistake. It seems like we humans typically believe that we either must not or should not make any mistakes. Which is just hopelessly unrealistic. Humans make mistakes all the time, why are we torturing ourselves?
If making mistakes is good enough for Olympic athletes, surely it is good enough for the rest of us.
If you’re interested in reading more about mistakes and perfectionism, here is some wisdom:
https://www.youngminds.org.uk/young-person/blog/tips-for-coping-with-making-mistakes
Something I noticed from reading around mistakes is that most of the advice is ‘learn to embrace your mistakes’. But for a lot of us, making mistakes feels absolutely awful: at the time, if anyone has noticed the mistake, we might feel awkward, maybe even go into an adrenaline response if not being perfect really feels dangerous to us. Then after the mistake, we might feel even worse as we go over and over it in our minds – torturing ourselves with how awful we are. The idea of embracing this pain feels at best counter-intuitive. I suppose one way to think about this might be that either we continue feeling terrible pain forever whenever we make mistakes, or that we feel some terrible pain for a short time, while we learn how to embrace the mistakes.
A tool that will help you along the way is as much self compassion as you can manage:
By the way, not making any more mistakes ever is not an option I’m afraid – I think the Olympic athletes have shown me that!