Embracing Your Flaws

One of the things I've learned is that it's best to embrace your flaws. Don't misunderstand-- it's never good to dwell on your flaws. However, it is always good to try to understand them so that you can improve yourself (and know yourself better).

Even high-profile businesspeople agree. At the conference I just attended, I had a conversation with some of the industry leaders about how it's best to own up to your mistakes and take the appropriate action to correct them. Not only is this method sensible, but it's also highly respectable.

That being said, not many people realize that it's better to do this than to try to hide the mistakes, blame someone else for them, or avoid dealing with them altogether. Ray, for instance, refused to discuss my mistakes with me, because he wanted to avoid it altogether and not get into it. I had to work really hard to get John to tell me why he agreed with Ray that I was immature.

I guess people think that when you tell someone that they suck, they will get defensive and angry. Shooting the messenger, so to speak. So they avoid doing it.

I admit that I did get a little defensive when John was talking to me. Mostly, though, I was upset because he had misunderstood and/or assumed a lot of things in making his judgments of me, and I didn't think that that was fair, because he didn't completely understand those things before jumping to conclusions. Also, most of what he said didn't have anything to do with immaturity at all, and I had only asked him to tell me about how I was immature. It seemed like he wasn't JUST telling me about why I was immature, but rather was telling me about how much I suck in general and am a completely horrible person. Not a great feeling.

Anyway, I'm glad that I learned about my flaws as other people see them. Yes, I tend to be overly emotional. Yes, I get upset easily when things go wrong. Yes, I am opinionated. Yes, I am obsessive about understanding the truth. But do these things make me a bad person? No. Not at all. These are my flaws, and that is fine. I don't need to be perfect. I just need to be myself.