Good AND Bad

You do not have to become a perfectly virtuous person before you are allowed to love yourself.

You are a human being. You have beautiful parts and ugly parts. You get things right and wrong. You have thoughts and feelings you love, and others you would rather hide.

None of that removes your worthiness.

In Episode 331, I talked about a word that can change your relationship with yourself and other people: and. Human beings are good and bad. The world is fair and unfair. Life contains beauty and pain.

When we insist it must be one or the other, we spend a lot of time fighting reality.

The exhaustion of trying to be all good

Many of us grew up with stories where the good people defeat the bad people and then live happily ever after. We carry that idea into our lives.

We want a world with no bad things left. We want to be people with no bad parts left. We may not even recognize that perfection has become the goal.

Then we feel exhausted and ashamed when we find something in ourselves that doesn’t fit.

Human beings will have flaws. The world will include unfairness and things we cannot control. Accepting that doesn’t mean we stop improving our lives or working to make things better.

It means we can act from possibility, love, and excitement instead of insisting that pain must disappear before life can be acceptable.

As we solve problems, we will encounter new challenges. When we understand that as part of the experience, difficulty doesn’t continually surprise us as evidence that everything is wrong.

Connection doesn’t require bringing someone to your side

I coached a woman who disagreed with her sister about COVID. My client believed she was right about how people should think and act. She believed her sister was wrong.

She thought the way to feel connected was to convince her sister to join the right side. Her intentions were good. The conversation ended with her sister hanging up.

I offered another possibility: Maybe each of them was right and wrong.

Notice how differently you listen when you allow that. Instead of hearing only what you need to correct, you can ask where you might be missing something and where the other person may have a point.

Your thoughts create your feelings. A thought that you are entirely right and someone else is entirely wrong creates a different experience from allowing both of you to be human.

You can have strong convictions and still understand why someone else thinks differently. Listening can help you respect them, and that respect can help them hear you.

Look at what your prejudgment filters out

If you have already decided someone is stupid, bad, or always wrong, you may hear everything they say through that judgment.

I ask clients to imagine a person they love and respect saying the exact same thing. Would they hear it differently? Would they give it a different meaning?

The words are the same. What you bring to them changes the experience.

This shows you your confirmation bias. If you label a person as all good, you may see only goodness. If you label them as all bad, you may see only what confirms that.

You miss the full dimension of the human being.

Think of someone whose words immediately irritate you. Can you find anything good in that person? If you resist looking, be curious about the resistance.

What feels threatening about acknowledging goodness? What might you be missing when you refuse to understand their side?

Understanding is part of my work as a coach

I spend time trying to understand human behavior, including behavior that causes tremendous harm. I want to know where pain, hatred, compulsion, and violent actions come from.

Looking at people as good and bad helps me ask those questions rather than stopping with a one-dimensional label.

Within the Model, thoughts create emotions that drive behavior. Understanding more about that process helps me understand humanity and, because I am human, myself.

You can love a human being who has done something bad. A person is not only the worst thing they have done.

That applies to you, too. You may be able to list your mistakes, self-loathing, anger, and ugliness in detail. You also have love, beauty, and worth.

Use and rather than making one part cancel the other.

Feel the feelings you want to hide

The goal is not to be happy about unfairness, being fired, or being treated terribly. We need to acknowledge and process feelings about painful things.

Pretending everything is wonderful doesn’t help us understand ourselves.

When you are trying to appear perfect, you may be afraid anyone will discover the thoughts and emotions you consider unacceptable. So you suppress them, buffer them away, or hide them.

Allowing negativity as part of your human experience gives you a way to feel it without adding judgment or pushing it away.

You can feel hate, shame, pain, or blame and process that emotion. From there, you can decide how you want to act. You don’t have to make the feeling your identity.

I have found a story about my own life that helps me. I had painful experiences as a child. Rather than thinking I could create a good life only in spite of them, I began seeing good and bad as part of the whole experience.

I thought about the good I could receive and create. That was a concept I chose because it served me, not a requirement for anyone else’s experience.

You are worthy within the whole of you

If you insist you must be good all the time, being wrong feels like a threat. If you allow yourself to be right and wrong, you become more open to hearing what you haven’t understood.

You can improve without making self-rejection the starting point.

Look at your relationships and your relationship with yourself. Are you missing half of someone because you have decided they are all one thing? Are you missing half of yourself because you are trying to put on a perfect show?

My dream is that you understand your worthiness in the middle of your imperfection. You can acknowledge your shortcomings, feel your feelings, and love yourself fiercely.

The good and bad are both part of being alive. Make room for the whole human you are.