Let it flow, let yourself grow

In this blog, I want to talk about how being hard on myself and the fear of making mistakes have paralyzed me many times in my life. When we tak about being self-demanding, many people probably see it as something positive, since it pushes us to improve and reach our full potential. But when that self-demand crosses “the healthy line”, it can turn into our own worst enemy. Imposing extremely high standards to ourselves means to constantly notice our failures and in the end that leads to low self-esteem.

Since I was little, I was used to always giving my best—at school, ballet classes at the dance conservatory, swimming, French classes, piano… I think I tried a lot of different activities. I was so busy that many times I had to use my school recess to do the homework for the next day. At that time, I didn’t notice how hard I was being on myself in everything I took on and how that could affect me if I failed (which hadn’t happened yet).

Over the years, after experienced so many situations in personal and proffesional life, that self-demand turned into insecurity. The very high standards I set for myself caused me a lot of fear of failing or not being enough. Questions like: “What if I’m not good enough?” or “What if I mess up?” often crossed my mind, making every decision and choice even harder. I missed many opportunities in my life because of self-demand and the fear to fail. But since I became aware of that, I started to work on it and I tried to rebuild my mindset from scratch. I started allowing myself to fail without being criticized by my inner voice, to laugh at my mistakes, to be more flexible with myself, to set short-term goals instead of big ones, to remind myself that I’m not going faster or slower than others on the path of life, to stop comparing myself, and above all, to stop linking my self-worth only to my achievements, but also to who I am as a person.

Becoming aware of these things has brought me a greater sense of inner peace and regarding my professional life, that helped me to be more flexible and adaptable to changes, improvements, and of course, to mistakes. The level of self-awareness and personal understanding that I have reached has helped me to be more empathetic with my workmates and with our guests, also to recognize who might be more sensitive to this kind of ‘issue,’ and to empower those who need it — including myself when I forget about it.

And that’s what life is about: trying and failing, which also applies to business. When things get tough, I remind myself: “We are all going to die, don’t take it that seriously, Marta”. I hope this helps someone — always using it with responsibility, of course 🙂

“No matter how many times I fail, I will try again”