Keren Smedley | 6th June 2016
Have you ever been tempted to blame your age?
I had an experience today which I must admit is very unlike me. I was happily sitting at my desk writing a work proposal when I got a call asking me why I wasn’t at a presentation I should have been at! I had read the time wrong and written the time I believed it was into my diary. I can make the excuse that UTC is not a time scale I normally use, or that the last time I saw this group of people it was in the afternoon. but the reality was I made a mistake! I’m normally very good at keeping appointments but this time I had written the time down wrong and just didn’t turn up .
I apologised profusely and the meeting has been rescheduled.
I found myself as soon as I put the phone down wondering if this was confusion due to my age! Is this something you ever do? It certainly isn’t helpful and also 99% of the time isn’t the case!
I had to do a few things when I caught myself.
- The first was to say stop!
- The second to laugh at myself! I spend a lot of my time with people trying to dispel that myth! It is so deep rooted in our cultural beliefs that we can easily find ourselves slipping down that unhelpful path.
- The third was to remind myself of other mistakes I’d made over the years so I had evidence that I, like others. make mistakes at times! And my age hasn’t anything to do with it
- The fourth was to share this with you!
It’s really important that we can be kind to ourselves, accept when we go wrong , apologise when we’ve made a mistake and then move on without giving ourselves a hard time.
If any of you have any similar stories please jot me a line.
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