You place a judgment on every action you take. When you do something positive, something you approve of, you feel better about yourself. When you make a mistake or do something you regret, you feel worse about yourself. In both directions, you’re probably attaching too much meaning to your behaviors.

Yes, your behaviors do reveal who you are. Your actions are the best reflection of both the way you see yourself and the way you view the world. But you don’t have to assign permanent meaning to your behaviors.

Let’s say you make a mistake, a bad mistake. You shouldn’t just sweep it under the rug. You should reflect and analyze that mistake because it’s a sign that something was off about your life at that exact moment.

But that doesn’t mean that you’re destined to make the same mistake over and over again or that the error was so grave you can never recover from it. Honestly reflecting on your own behavior doesn’t mean you have to deeply care about your behavior in a negative way. Make sense?

You have to be like the quarterback who throws an interception, shrugs it off, and throws a touchdown the next drive. But how?

I’ll drill something like this into my head over and over — Ok, you messed up. You’ve spent quite a while messing up. But is it useful for you to keep dwelling on it? Or can you find a way to move on? Do you have to be this person forever? Do you have to care so much about every little action you take that it leaves you paralyzed or can you learn how to shrug it off?

Then, you try to take the right actions in the future without the weight of your self-perception making it ten times more difficult. Easy to say, hard to do, yes, but it’s the way.