A High Achiever's Spell for Self-Forgiveness

This week’s spell is for those of us

who’ve been told we’re Exceptional,

and have internalized the message

that we can’t ever let ourselves fail.

Mistakes are not only inevitable,

they’re invaluable.

Every mistake we make,

every failure we experience

helps us to learn more about

who we’re truly meant to become.

Subscribe! Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Pandora | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn

Mentioned: Neko Case’s song I’m an Animal.

Dr. Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Make Magic:

What wisdom could you glean,

about life, about people, about yourself,

if you gave yourself permission

to embrace your mistakes?

Who could you be if you weren’t so afraid

of getting it wrong?

Transcript: A High Achiever's Spell for Self-Forgiveness

Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host, Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here. 

Hello, my friend. I’m so glad you pressed play on today’s episode. And I want to acknowledge that the title is a lot. [laugh] Today’s episode is A High Achiever’s Spell for Self-Forgiveness. And you may already identify yourself as a high achiever, and you also may be a high achiever who does not allow yourself that definition. 

Today’s spell really is for people that are really hard on themselves, and so if that speaks to you, I’m excited for you to keep listening. So, today’s spell has been one that has been brewing for a while. This is something that I work on a lot personally. I work on my tendency toward self-criticism, and the extremely high standards that I hold for myself, for my work, for the way I show up in the world. And I have to say, it helps me a lot, and I hope that it will help you too. 

So, before I get to the spell, I would like to actually talk a little bit about high achievers. Like I said, you may already know you are a high achiever, meaning that if you look back on your life, you see, oh, yeah, I was the captain of that squad. I was the president of that club. I had a very high GPA. I went to the good college. Maybe even if I was the first one to go to college in my family. I got the job. I get the promotions. I get the leadership roles.

So, you might, just looking at your life, see, OK, yeah, I tend to be an achiever. You might also be this person but not give yourself the credit for being this person because—here is number one trickiness about high achievers—we tend to move the bar higher and higher as we go along. And we tend to not give ourselves full credit for our achievements. And we are humans. We do make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, it is so difficult for us. It is so challenging to our very identity that it’s difficult for us to incorporate having made the mistake into our sense of self.

And, so, instead, we’ll be like, well, I thought I was a successful person. I thought I was a high achiever. But I guess I was wrong because of this or that mistake or misstep. And I think this inflexibility in our identities, this refusal to (a) give ourselves full credit and (b) allow ourselves the very human tendency to make mistakes, to get it wrong sometimes. 

So, I’ve seen this inflexibility originate in two different places. There’s one that I myself am very familiar with, and then there’s one that I’ve seen in a lot of my clients, so let me give voice to those. So, for me, I was always labeled as a child exceptional. I was an early reader. I was a straight A student. I was the kind of person whose brain takes tests well.

I was the kind of kid who would really throw myself into learning things, and so I played instruments, and I played them well. And I learned to write, and I wrote well. And I was always told that I was talented and brilliant, which, you know, was great in a lot of ways… and also it made it so that when I wasn’t good at something, or when I struggled with something, it was deeply disturbing to me and my identity.

Like, I really thought when I struggled that something was wrong—and not just wrong with the situation; also, secretly, wrong with me. Because, like I said earlier, yes, I would make the A. But, soon, the A didn’t matter. It needed to be an A+. Yes, I played piano well. But, soon, playing piano well didn’t really matter unless I won the piano competition, right?

Being told that I was exceptional made me need to keep proving that I was exceptional, and so when something was difficult, it was super scary for me. I worried that perhaps it wasn’t true. Perhaps I wasn’t actually exceptional or talented at all. And that, of course, would just fuel even more over-achieving. So, that’s one way that it works. It’s the person who’s been identified with being exceptional in their lives.

Here’s the other one. It’s the child who has been overburdened with adult responsibility. So, I see this in a lot of my clients. So, these kids also tend to be exceptional—exceptionally dependable. They are great at doing their homework. They are great at getting things done. They are actually shouldering, if not household responsibilities and familial responsibilities, they are definitely shouldering emotional responsibility beyond their years in their families—and they’re depended on for that.

So, one way of saying this is these are kids who weren’t really allowed to be kids. They needed to be agreeable and easy. They needed to take care of themselves and take care of things. And in their family or community dynamic, there wasn’t a lot of room for them to fuck up, and so they became also identified with high achieving, with receiving very little help, very little support, and, nonetheless, being able to be Good—capital G, Good—a Good kid all the time. 

So, for both of these high achievers, you can see it’s a very lonely place. If you are exceptional and/or if you are solely shouldering outsized responsibility, it’s all up to you. And not only is it all up to you, but it’s all up to you, and there is no room for mistakes. And this is such a high-pressure environment. This is such a [laugh] high-pressure mental space in which to live, especially because the more we journey into adulthood, the more we are faced with challenges, the bigger challenges we face, and the less and less, I find, permission we give ourselves to grow and to learn.

I mean, we do at least have that going for us when we are kids. We are students. At least there is a veneer [laugh] of understanding that we are in a learning mode. But when we are adults, we can transition into this place where it’s like I should already understand this. I should already know how to do this. I should already have the skills for this. I should be able to handle all of this on my own.

So, why is it a spell for self-forgiveness? It is because when we hold ourselves to an incredibly high standard, we will inevitably fall short—of course we will. We are human beings after all. However exceptional we have been, however capable and responsible we have been, we are still people. We’re humans. And/but we have a really hard time honoring that. 

When, inevitably, we fall short, we are exceedingly cruel to ourselves about it. When we fail or when we make a decision that doesn’t work out the way we wanted it to, we make it mean that there is something wrong or bad about us. We take it incredibly personally because we have identified so closely with our highly capable, high-achieving tendency. 

And that, of course, is not just self-identification, right? Culture helps us a lot with that. Culture loves the myth of the exceptional individual, of the genius, of the super star. So, our own identification with that identity, it’s not completely self-generated, and/but it is self-perpetuated. And in this perpetuation of the exceptional, high-achieving identity, there is not only no room for mistakes, there’s also no capacity for self-forgiveness.

If you resonate with any of that, this spell is for you. Today’s spell, A High Achiever’s Spell for Self-Forgiveness, it is actually a song lyric. It is a song lyric by an artist named Neko Case. If you’re not familiar with Neko Case’s music, I highly, highly, highly, highly recommend that you check it out. I’ve seen her in concert personally more times than I’ve seen any other artist. And every single time, it has been amazing.

So, the lyric is in a song that is called I’m an Animal. And it goes like this. “I do my best but I’m made of mistakes.” So, both parts of this spell—“I do my best but I’m made of mistakes”—both parts of this spell are vital, and I want to look at them one-by-one.

So, let’s first look at “I do my best. I do my best.” For high achievers, doing one’s best equals flawlessly winning, which is not actually possible. Like I said, the high-achiever raises the bar again and again, and so no performance, no creation, no move is ever enough. It’s kind of built in for the high achiever is it could always be a little better. There is no resting for the high achiever; there’s just the next achievement in the line.

So, to say, “I do my best,” is actually hugely counterintuitive. And it’s weird, right, because you are identified with being the best and, yet, you never can quite reach best-ness, right? So [laugh], the sense is always that you’re living a lie. Everyone’s expecting you to be the best, but you are very aware of what you’re not doing. 

So, the first part of this spell is really asking us to shift that. It’s asking us to say, you know, in any given moment, no matter what the score says, no matter what the bank account says, I am doing the best that I can in this moment. And there’s a very holistic and humanizing element to this. It says, you know, given everything that’s happening in my life right now, this is the best I can do. You know, given the trauma that I’ve survived, this is the best I can do. Wow, given how tired I was this week, this was the best I could do. I do my best.

I remember the first time someone said to me, “You know, I really believe that most people are always doing the best they can.” This was maybe seven or eight years ago, and I sat with it for weeks. Really? Could that be true? People are doing the best they can?

And I’m curious how it will sit for you, but the more I sat with it, the more I realized I do think that is true. I do think that is true. In any given moment, people are doing the best they can. And “people”—my love, my exceptional high achiever—“people” includes you. 

So, the first part of this spell—“I do my best”—asks us to give ourselves credit for what we’re doing; to not look at the external bar, right—like the external proof, the position on The New York Times bestseller list, or the agreement of the board, or whatever it is that we’re looking for to help us to be reassured of our goodness—but, rather, really beginning to believe in any given moment, I am doing my best. I know that’s challenging, but it’s an essential piece here. Even if you don’t win, you’re doing your best.

Even if the goal is higher, bigger, more, right now, you are doing your best. In Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, which is all about fixed mindset and growth mindset, she talks a lot about how incredibly debilitating it is to be labeled as a talented or gifted person. And she talks about how to begin to move from a fixed mindset that does not allow for failure, toward a growth mindset where failure is actually an essential part of becoming who we want to be in the world.

And the very first step—I love this because this book—if you haven’t read it, we’ll link it in the Show Notes—it’s a very [laugh]—it’s a hard-assed book. [laugh] But when Dweck talks about how to shift from fixed mindset to growth mindset, number one is embrace your fixed mindset. And I love this so much because, of course, as a high achiever reading the book, I’m like, “Oh, OK, I get it. Fixed mindset equals bad, and growth mindset equals good. I’m just going to have growth mindset from now on.” 

And [laugh] Carol Dweck is like, “Not so fast. The first thing you need to do is accept where you are.” The first thing to do is to say, of course, I have fixed mindset. I live in a culture that promotes fixed mindset in so many ways, that is, promotes the idea that either you’re born with talent or you’re not; that you’re a genius or you’re not; you’re a star or you’re not. 

And I love that Dweck starts there because that, to me, is a way of saying, “I do my best.” Yeah, I have fixed mindset. I do my best with it. I embrace where I am right now. I trust that I am doing my best in any given moment. OK. So, that’s part one of the spell. I do my best.

And the second part is, “But I’m made of mistakes.” And I do want to make a tiny edit here. I would love to think of it as “and I’m made of mistakes.” So, think about this reframe. “I am made of mistakes. It is my mistakes that make me; not that break me; not that destroy me. It is my mistakes that make me.” 

And what is a mistake anyway? Because I think sometimes we think of a mistake as an error or a wrong judgment. But if we go etymologically to the word “mistake,” it’s actually rooted in misunderstanding. It’s like, oh, I didn’t see the whole picture. I made a choice, but I didn’t understand fully the situation or the consequences.

Maybe I made a choice, again, doing the best I could in that moment, but the way that reality cocreated from that point was not the way that I intended. And, so, maybe you have a story that you chose the wrong school, or you bought the wrong house, or you married the wrong person, or you took the wrong career path, or you launched the wrong offer—whatever it is. 

And, again, because your identity does not allow for that—our identity; it’s mine too, OK—our identity does not allow for wrong, does not allow for things to go in a way that doesn’t work well for ourselves and others, we take that mistake, that misunderstanding so personally, and we take it as proof that we aren’t who people think we are, and we’re not even maybe who we think we are. That perhaps after all, we are not so powerful, successful, exceptional, capable. Right? We take the mistake, and we allow it to break us, when the reality is every mistake offers new perspective, right? Every mistake, every misunderstanding helps us to see more of the picture. 

I know, for me, when I went to graduate school, I chose—of course, as the high achiever often does—I chose the most exclusive program. I chose the highest-rated school, and I was miserable there. I had been so sure that what I was meant to do was to be an English professor. But it turns out I was mistaken. I did not fully understand [laugh] the world that I was trying to work my way further into. I did not understand what the life would actually look like, until I got there.

So, that was a mistake. But that was also the first time—of many, by the way—that I took a leap of faith out of a bad situation, and it was foundational for everything I’ve done since. It was foundational for this very podcast you are listening to right now. The identity expansion, the immense amount of growth that had to come out of that mistake has made me who I am—is making me who I am becoming. 

I bet you could do the same thing by looking at one of your mistakes, one of the places where you made a decision or you took a course of action that did not work out the way you wanted it to, or the way you expected it to. So, find one of those. What’s one that stands out, one of the big mistakes that you made? And now please appreciate, give more value to what that mistake has meant for you; how it expanded your self-understanding; what it taught you about humanness, about humanity. 

And, listen, that is a very big ask I’m making. Again, we are taught that our mistakes break us. Failure’s not an option. And, yet, we’re humans. Of course, we’re going to fail. And our mistakes—if we let them—actually make us. They build character and empathy and wisdom in us. So, looking back at that mistake with different eyes, think about it. How did that mistake contribute positively to your character?

How did that mistake generate in you deeper empathy? What wisdom did you glean about life, about people, about yourself through the mistake that you made? And what could it mean if your mistakes didn’t break you but rather fortified you, softened you, and expanded your sense of who you are?

All right, my friend, it’s this magical lyric, this magical pair of declarations that I invite you to embrace as you think about the inevitable mistakes you’ve made in this life. “I do my best, and I’m made of mistakes.” Who could you be if you weren’t so afraid of getting it wrong? 

If you embraced your humanity so deeply that you took the thing you’ve heard your whole life—“Wow, you can do anything”—and you expanded “anything” to include getting it wrong, that it could actually be OK for you to get it wrong sometimes, so that the question becomes not, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” but rather, “What would you do, what heart’s desire would you follow and feed if you knew you were definitely going to make mistakes, and every mistake will only help you grow?” I bet—I bet a lot—that what you would do would not isolate you. I bet that what you would do would help you connect more fully to your humanity and, therefore, more fully to all of our humanity. I do truly believe that. 

All right, my high-achieving friend, we do our best, and we are made of mistakes. I hope this one helps you as much as it’s helped me. Thank you so much, as always, for listening. Bye for now.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday Letter at mindwitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world. 

Like all good things, this podcast is cocreated by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, executive producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time. 

End of recording