Hard on Yourself vs. Honest with Yourself

Nora ran three lives at once. Head of programs at an agency serving people with developmental disabilities, with an executive director who measured everything she touched. Board member of the statewide youth track program where her late father had coached for twenty years. Mother to two-year-old Stella, whose eyes lit up every evening when Nora came through the door at five o’clock.

Late one night, she stood in her dark kitchen. Stella was asleep after a bath and a book. Beside the window hung her father's track stopwatch on a frayed shoelace. Staring at it, Nora's breathing turned ragged, and she began to cry.

After her breath slowed, she typed a rushed email to me saying she was falling short on all fronts: distracted during dedicated time with her daughter, short with colleagues, holding the track program too tightly, and replaying an agency family summit she felt was far below her standard.

When we met that week, I asked what the executive director had said about the summit.

She hesitated, then said, "That it was the best one we've run."

"Anything sharp?"

"She asked me to open next year's summit. That's it."

I said, "Understood. What's the challenge with the track program? The board?"

"The board is fine. I was just elected to another term. But I wasn't able to make the coach-mentor event. Thankfully, Cyndi was leading, and it went well. My father and I would do that event together."

She then told me about the stopwatch. Her father coached her through four years of high school track with it. After every race, good or bad, he would show her the time and say, "That's where we are." The number was never a judgment. It was just true, and they went to work on it.

She said, "As a coach, he was always honest and never once hard on me."

I raised my eyebrows and stayed quiet for a few seconds. She caught up to herself, and mumbled, "I'm being harder on myself than anyone else is."

She had kept his watch, but she had lost his method.

Nora left our meeting with two practices. The one I offered her was this: before judging any outcome, look first at what was absolutely true, and deal with the facts. The second practice was one she developed. Every night, after putting her daughter to sleep, she would ask herself: What would Dad say about my day?

By the next session, she said the practices were taking hold, and she had a small surprise. The hours with her daughter weren't different, but Nora was different in them. She was more present, less distracted.

Hard on yourself hides your talent. Honest with yourself unveils it.

The Question

Where are you confusing the need for a harsher critic with the need for a more honest mirror?

"We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate; it oppresses." — Carl Jung