Forgiving Yourself

by Paul on 7 May 2009

To be able to focus on anything, and I mean really focus, we need to be able to empty our brain/head/mind of everything else.

Photo by Rooneg

This one truism is, in my mind, the guiding principle of “Getting Things Done” (GTD), a Time Management methodology by David Allen. GTD works marvellously well both in business and in life when it comes to corralling tasks, ideas, goals and the like.

Where it doesn’t work though is for the baggage we carry through life. My earlier post highlighted the types of baggage I’m thinking about but I narrowed it down to just two types.

Hurts done to you; and
Hurts done by you.

This post is going to deal with “Hurts done by you” and I’ll cover the other in a third post later.

The Hardest Thing

Possibly the hardest thing to do in life is to forgive yourself for stuff you’ve done in the past. These things could be big things or they could be small things. Here’s an example from my own life:

When I got married in 1981 my “best man” was a joker named Robert. I’d met him a number of years earlier and we were almost kindred spirits. At the time I was 22 and Robert would have been 20 or 21.

After a while we ended up in different cities for a while and lost touch. (No twitter, email or even mobile phones back then. Toll calls even cost a fortune!)

The in a few more years we were living in the same, but at opposite ends of New Zealand’s biggest, city and with separate families and new friends we never caught up again.

Over 20 years ago I had a call from my Mum to tell me that she’d heard that Robert was dying of cancer. Apparently he went to the Doctor one day and would be dead within four months. He had a little boy just a few months old when he was told.

What I will regret until the day I die is that I was too scared to make contact with Robert’s wife, who I’d never met. So I never saw Robert again, never offered any real friendship to him when he needed it most.

And all because I was scared because I wouldn’t know what to say.

It took me a long time to be able to forgive myself over this. But I did and I’m pleased I did.

Forgiving myself doesn’t mean

It doesn’t mean I’ll ever forget it.
It doesn’t mean I’ll stop regretting it.

But it does mean

It hasn’t stopped me doing things in my life.
It didn’t stop me becoming a Pastor.
It didn’t stop me ministering to a family after their son had committed suicide.

How I Forgave Myself

First of all I didn’t bury what I had done. I didn’t push it down and say it didn’t matter – it did – very much.

This may seem to be an unusual post for a productivity site but I reckon this type of thing adversely impacts our productivity/leadership and achievements more than we care to acknowledge!

What I had to do was admit it. Admit that it was all my own doing. Often in these circumstances we try to rationalise or justify our actions. I tried to justify my inaction on the basis of not knowing what to say. But in reality I could have sought advice. (They would have told me not to say, just listen. Just be with. Just cry with.)

We see blame for actions most often I think when someone gets angry – “You did such and such and that made me angry!” When actually we choose to react the way we react. Whatever you do, when you admit it, don’t add a portion of blame in there. That’s not really admitting fault!

The next thing I needed to do was to accept forgiveness. “How?” you may ask. After all, Robert wasn’t around to offer me his forgiveness. Christians are in the enviable place that God will forgive sin once it has been confessed (and turned away from). This forgiveness is openly available but most Christians still have difficulty actually accepting it. For a Christian, this step is freeing and life transforming.

Once I truly accepted this forgiveness I needed to stop condemning myself and actually at that stage I realised I had forgiven myself.

Important

This self forgiveness is really important. I see a lot of people going through life who aren’t able to achieve what they want because they have something in the back of their brain constantly telling them they’re not good enough.

We need to empty our brain/head/mind of this type of baggage just as much as the tasks, ideas, emails, inputs, goals and accumulated stuff that David Allen talks about.

Is something holding you back?

Do you have a little voice that keeps reminding you of mistakes you’ve made?

Do you need to forgive yourself?