The reality is your thoughts don’t define your value. You are not the summation of your past experiences. Just because something doesn’t work out, doesn’t mean you are now labeled as a failure or you’re incapable of receiving what you desire in life.
~Jaimee Ratliff
VIM Executive Coaching concerns itself with mindfulness training, business coaching and the development of executive leaders. We are, of course, aware that the personal and the professional have a tendency to come up against each other.
For example, it is often difficult for clients to extricate themselves from mistakes they have made in past employment situations and to forgive themselves for lost opportunities or for regrettable things they may have said or done. In fact, they can so obsess over past professional mistakes to such an extent that they are almost immobilized as executive leaders in the present.
Unfortunately, it gets personal
We must be a little careful here as we are business coaches and mindfulness coaches and not psychologists. However, as the wonderful psychological quote above teaches, what and who we may have been in the past, should not define us in the present. There can clearly be room in life for second chances.
As the quote states, you are not the summation of past experiences. Executive leaders may have certainly been hurt by mistakes they have made, but those slipups should not be held against them “for eternity.” We would further argue, that those who would incessantly remind an executive leader of a mistake they made in the past are most probably not worth keeping as associates or friends. We would go further on that point and suggest that anyone who gloats over another person’s mistakes, is often less mindful than the person they criticize.
Letting go of the past is often an arduous and painful process. In fact, it can be crippling to body and spirit. Letting go becomes more painful still, when we are unable to personally forgive and reflect without turning that crippling judgment on ourselves. When our “personal” judgments block our need to become more effective, it is as unfair to our progress as executive leaders as most anything else we do.
Mindfulness is the key
Many executive leaders who have made regrettable decisions simply, cannot let go of the past. They might forget everything decent and kind and empowering they have done for others, and focus only on a mistake they made. Whether that particular mistake resulted in a warning, demotion or termination is not the issue. The issue is how to effectively understand and more on, and not repeat the same or similar mistake.
Mindfulness training is a way of being and staying in the present and not dwelling in the past, or anticipating every possible concern of the future. Mindfulness training acknowledges the past only as a useful basis for present action but not as a touchstone executive are “required” to return to as a constant penalty for living.
Mindfulness training requires authenticity above all else. In essence, it may have been a lack of authenticity that led to problems in the first place. Mindfulness requires honest, authentic responses to situations, not pointless or unwise reaction.
Mindfulness training allows an executive leader to let go of what hasn’t worked and to embrace those things that will. Letting go may be difficult at first, but it is wholly empowering as the executive goes forward without judgment or regret.