The people I respect are the sort of people who look back on their lives with self-compassion and kindness. They say things like that was a difficult time, but I wouldn’t change it because then I wouldn’t have ended up here. And they really mean it. There’s a level of integration and acceptance that I can only barely understand. 

I recently closed out an initiative that felt bittersweet, at best. Actually, it felt mostly not great. Not terrible, but not great. Reflecting on it, there were things I wished I done differently, alternative outcomes that would’ve been preferable. 

I tried a reframe: what did I learn from this? How will this influence my decision making moving forward? Answers to the question appeared and I scribbled them down.

After I scribbled down the lessons I learned, I wrote this: It was a necessary step to Now.

If offered the opportunity for a do-over on certain aspects, I wouldn’t turn it down. Still, the missteps and the not quites and so closes pave the way to the Now. What if we uncoupled these actions of our younger self from our evaluation of her? They are not an indictment of your credibility, nor are they are not a referendum on your competence as a human.

Or, what if we stopped judging her altogether?

There were good parts and there were hard parts and they were all part of arriving at Now.