What are you really hard on yourself about?

I’m really hard on myself when I do something stupid.  Not any stupid, but the kind where I’ve told myself what to do or not to do and I go ahead and do the opposite.  For example, I’m doing some kind of task and it has become obvious I need to stop what I’m doing and regroup.  But no, I continue on until I start shouting at myself to stop, often several times, before my body listens to my mouth.  It’s that kind of stupid I can’t stand in myself.

Conversely, I’m generally not hard on myself for being wrong, unless that wrong is really stupid.  I’m notorious for poor navigational driving skills.  I turn on the wrong street often and even drive by my own house on occasion.  Being in Information Technology all my adult life, I’ve written many errors into programs, misconfigured hardware more often than I care to admit, and have had to take a whole different approach when a decision turned out to be poor.  I personally think admitting you are wrong is a strength, so much that I wrote on my office’s dry erase board “It’s good that I don’t mind being wrong, because I’m so good at it.”  It’s much easier to manage people when they see you as imperfect.  They don’t worry as much about being wrong at times. 

I’m also hard at times when others are stupid, for example, a football player that just needs to take a knee to seal a win, but instead tries to score another pointless touchdown and in the process fumbles the ball, the opposing team recovers and wins the game.  I just can’t stand losing because I, or others, haven’t thought about the current situation and planned out the proper response.  That’s what really steams me.

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