When things don’t work out like you want, or even just feel harder than you’d like, blame is one of the first things people reach for in an attempt to make sense of where everything went wrong.
You might blame your partner for not being more supportive of your weight loss journey, and decide it’s their fault you opened the freezer and got into the ice cream.
You might blame your co-workers for not complimenting your weight loss, or for telling you that you “don’t need to lose any more weight.”
You might even blame ME for calling you out when you make excuses about why you went off-plan, and say it’s MY fault you gained your weight back. (Hey, it’s happened.)
On the flip side, you might also be blaming yourself for screwing up.
I totally get wanting to blame someone or something else for your mistakes.
I also get thinking that self-directed blame is the answer.
But the truth is that blame, while completely understandable, is a pretty useless emotion.
If you blame others, you give them all the power, because if they won’t cooperate, you feel like you can’t be successful (which is 100% NOT TRUE).
If you blame yourself, you feel so defeated and down in the dumps that your will to do better gets sucked right out of you, like a mosquito drinking blood.
When you mess up, the answer isn’t to scramble around for someone or something to blame.
And it’s NOT to sit around beating up and blaming yourself.
The answer is simply this:
- Look at what went wrong.
- Learn from it.
- Put measures in place to keep it from happening again.
Keep doing that until you find measures that work for you 100% of the time.
That’s a MUCH better use of your time and energy than wallowing in blame!
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