Why Making Yourself Wrong Costs More Than Getting It Wrong
The Hidden Habit That's Draining Your Energy and Your Self-Trust
A few weeks ago, I had a hard conversation with someone I respected.
I saw the situation one way.
She saw it differently.
I knew what I knew.
But her certainty was louder than mine.
So I folded.
And then the spiral started.
“If I’m wrong about that, what else am I wrong about?”
“Maybe I should just give up on the whole thing.”
“Who am I to think I can do this?”
The conversation lasted a few minutes.
The case against myself lasted the rest of the day.
Looking back, I didn’t just question one decision. I questioned my ability to trust myself. One difficult conversation became a referendum on my judgment, my direction, and whether I belonged in the room at all.
Since then, I’ve noticed the same pattern in so many thoughtful, capable people.
The thing that drains us isn’t usually the moment.
It’s what we make the moment mean.
A piece of feedback becomes proof we’re failing. A difficult conversation becomes evidence we don’t know what we’re doing. One mistake becomes a case against our entire identity.
I’ve come to recognize the voice behind that pattern.
I call her the Perfectionist.
Did you miss something?
That wasn’t good enough.
You should have seen that coming.
Slowly, almost without noticing, we stop trusting ourselves.
That’s the real cost.
Self-abandonment.
Coming Back to Yourself
A few days later, I came back to that conversation with fresh eyes.
What surprised me was how quickly I’d abandoned what I knew simply because someone else didn’t see it that way.
The lesson was about staying with myself.
Because we’re all going to have conversations that don’t go well. We’re all going to disappoint people. We’re all going to make mistakes.
Those moments will happen. The only thing that matters is whether we turn them into evidence against ourselves.
Inside this week’s Ritual, I’ll share the morning practice that’s become my antidote to the inner prosecution.
It’s surprisingly simple. And it’s one of the fastest ways I’ve found to reclaim the energy I’d been spending making myself wrong.