Giving Grace or Self-Enabling
Life is a balancing act.
Have you ever noticed that? There are always two sides to any argument. Perhaps your weight isn’t what it should be, on one hand, you have health experts saying that you need to take an interest in your physical health to avoid future physical consequences. On the other hand, you have the promotion of body positivity which says to feel good about the way you look no matter what you weigh to protect your mental health. Both options are correct. Not everything in life has to be black and white. But we can’t ignore a doctor’s advice and eat whatever we want in the name of body positivity. We have to balance trying to live a healthy life while also accepting that our bodies are beautiful even if we are currently not on the cover of a sports magazine. So where do we find the balance between giving ourselves grace for occasionally making bad choices and admitting that we are not moving past those choices towards positive change?
First, we have to recognize that we make choices every day
One of my favorite movies “You’ve Got Mail” has a scene where the main character says “The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc.” We may laugh at that quote, but even if you think you have no decision-making ability, you make decisions every day, and as my former college professor used to say “Every decision has consequences.” Think about it. Let’s take an elimination diet for an example. You may be trying out this diet for a month and the decision to not eat or drink certain foods may seem harder than the food decisions you made last month, but that isn’t exactly true. You have been making choices for the majority of your life about what to eat every day. The only reason that the decisions feel harder is because the consequences are different. You may get a headache from lack of caffeine because a previous decision in your life allowed the caffeine to enter your body in the first place.
Stop the excuses
Of course, we all have reasons and excuses for the choices that we make every day; convenience, expense, time-management, laziness. So how do we distinguish between giving ourselves grace for getting off track vs enabling ourselves to run off the track? If you have a goal that you are striving to meet, you need to make a plan and work with that plan until the goal is complete. If you make a mistake once, be kind to yourself and take measures so that it doesn’t happen again. If you continue to make the same mistake over and over again, you are making no progress on your goal. Reevaluate. Why are you continuing to make the same mistake, what in your process needs to change so that you won’t repeat the mistake again?
If you make plans with a friend to go out to dinner once a month and the first month your friend backs out you can easily forgive them and accept their explanation. If month after month, the canceling becomes a pattern, you would be far less likely to accept their excuses. It should be the same for the plans we make for ourselves. Be gracious to yourselves when you mess up but don’t let it become a pattern. Hold yourself to a higher standard so that you have something to reach for. When you do make progress, reward yourself and be proud of all that you have accomplished.
Written by Sharla Ball
