The Bigger Picture Shalini SinhaOne of the hardest things for us to do, it seems, is to watch someone we love make a mistake. And yet, getting things "not quite right", "blundering", even creating a few disasters now and again are, in a strange way, an important part of developing and getting smarter.
We all fear a life of mistakes. It is the worst feeling in the world to discover after the fact that we've hurt someone, sometimes fatally (at least for the relationship).
A close second is the realisation that we've lost a significant amount of our money or resources. And yet, few of our mistakes ever come close to this colossal scale. On the contrary, most of our would-be mishaps are mundane - risks of personal expression gone wrong, things turning out differently to how we'd expected.
Let's be honest. What we fear most about making a mistake is feeling stupid - and the wrath that follows in the form of someone criticising us or getting mad at us.
Indeed, it is very likely that at some point in our lives, someone did get mad at us and we did feel stupid. If it happened regularly without any counter-input of encouragement and trust, we internalised the feeling and it has never really gone away. The result: we police ourselves against personal risks. What's more, we take the opportunity to hold back those around us whom we love.
It is not just anyone's mistakes we find hard to watch. We can quite easily stand witness to a stranger making a driving error, and not feel we must go out of our way to speak to them, plead with them or make demands until they understand. We get annoyed, all right, but only insofar as their behaviour affected us (we could now be three seconds later arriving at our destination). We don't "care" for them, per se, and so we allow them to carry on being bad drivers - fully in charge of their own lives, if you will.
The people whose lives we interfere with are those whom we care very deeply about. The people we feel responsible for. Something goes wrong in our minds around love, and we identify with an individual so fully that we think that their choices and directions reflect on us.
It becomes our job to make sure that they choose the path we think best. Children are a primary example of this, but spouses, partners and really good friends also fall into this category.
When we care very deeply, it can be hard to have perspective on when we are helping and when we are holding someone back. Who hasn't struggled with the fine line between wanting (needing!) the best for someone and letting them make their own choices?
Indeed, the question of free will is central to some of humanity's most enduring philosophies. As people who love deeply in relationships, it is our job to empower those we love.
An individual should have a greater life because we loved them, not a smaller, more limited existence. Your love should enable me to take the risks I need to take to understand and express myself, to challenge my struggles and to discover how far my imagination can take me - in love.
Anything striving to make me less is not love in its full force, but something diminished, sometimes even harmful. And so, loving someone also includes standing by and watching while they make a mistake.
This is all fine and good but, realistically, many of us are watching those we love struggling with being less than themselves, and are dying to help them be more. How do we enable them to take flight?
The difference between loving powerfully and slipping into controlling is offering insight, guidance, trust, respect and honesty, without insisting that the outcome be what you were expecting. Every individual is responsible for their own life. We need to let this be true.
We must struggle if we are to overcome our struggles. These are paths we must walk alone - with an army of supporters behind us, of course, but the steps must be ours alone. What would they be like if our loved ones were never allowed take their own steps?
Children who are not let fall become insecure of themselves and, ironically, accident prone. What are we afraid of when we stop them from walking their own path? A bruised and bleeding knee is nothing compared to a lack of personal power.
We all make mistakes. And so it should be. Life is a journey. Denying us that journey ensures that we never get through our struggles. It makes us fearful, timid, insecure and worried. A lack of struggle means a lack of opportunities to practice courage. This diminishes our self-belief. One might argue that these consequences are far greater than those of our common mistakes.
In our life, we will get some things wrong. I hope so. It means we are trying new things and walking in territory we have never walked before. This is how our thinking develops. This is how we get smarter. We must let ourselves do this, even if in hindsight it appears that we have made a few mistakes.
Shalini Sinha has established Forward Movement, a clinic where she practises life coaching and the Bowen technique.
ssinha@irish-times.ie