This Strange Relationship Between Mistakes and Self-Esteem
How many times have you messed up trimming your beard at home? How do you feel when that happens? Anger? Frustration?
I believe this happens when we're searching for an ideal standard, which doesn't actually exist.
The last few times I trimmed my beard, I was in a hurry, thinking about something else, completely unfocused on what I was doing. On autopilot.
I tried a freehand, cut shorter where I didn't want it, and in the end it looked like this: each hair a different length, unstructured, messy.
I thought: "There's an opportunity to change my look again. Maybe just leave the mustache...".
Then I started thinking about this: our relationship with mistakes, which in this case was trimming my beard, but it could be anything.
I know most guys would be pretty upset. I have been a lot.
How many times have we exchanged ideas in the comments or live streams about a barber who messed up, or when you yourself made a mistake and angrily shaved it all off?
The other day I was replying to comments here on the channel and in a video where I shaved off the lumberjack beard I was wearing and left a beardstache, there was a comment from a guy joking, "here's a tutorial on how to ruin a beard."
Joking aside, I started thinking about what's behind this idea that shortening the length and leaving only the mustache would be considered a mistake.
I think this shows a lot about the influence and weight we carry in a society that sees men as beings who must be virile, rough, strong, with a big, full, voluminous beard. This image of the so-called "Real Man."
And anything outside this standard is considered lesser, wrong.
This only generates frustration and a race to fit into a standard. This can destroy self-esteem. Ultimately, the issue here is self-esteem.
It's great when our self-esteem is high. Having a good relationship with ourselves automatically improves our relationships with friends, at home, and at work.
But it's very difficult to achieve that self-esteem if the benchmark is always that of others, or the group we're part of. It's the worry about what others will think, how they'll judge you. And then we end up judging them the same way.
And I think we can only discover our own benchmark, truly like what we see in the mirror, and what we feel about ourselves when we feel more secure enough to experiment, not take ourselves so seriously, discover what we can like about ourselves, and that can be very different from the norm.
And let me tell you something, whenever I completely changed my look, I might not have liked the final result very much, but that didn't mean my self-esteem dropped.
Acknowledging the mistake and simply looking at it and saying, "Well, I'll never let it look like this again because it didn't turn out the way I thought it would," is liberating. Because OK, it will grow back, and NOW my face looks like this. I'm sure a lot of people will like it, and maybe I'll even change my mind.
But the point is internal. It's about using this "mistake" to get to know yourself a little better and realize how it changes your relationship with yourself and with others.
But that was my experience and a little of what I've been thinking about. I'd like to continue this conversation with you in the comments. Tell me how you react to mistakes? How does it influence your self-esteem? Let's chat!
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MACHINE USED IN THE VIDEO
Wahl Cordless Clipper: https://amzn.to/3iiMSWk
~ PRODUCTS FROM SOBREBARBA:
Beard Balm: https://sobrebarba.com.br/collections...
Shaving Gel: https://sobrebarba.com.br/collections...
Mustache Wax: https://sobrebarba.com.br/collections...
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