Giving Yourself Grace When You Slip Up on Something You've Worked Hard to Overcome | #163

You've done the work. You've made real progress. And then one day you slip up — and your brain immediately says, "See? You'll never change." In Daily Dose of Dawn #163, resilience coach Dawn Super speaks directly to the person who has come so far but still struggles to give themselves grace when old patterns revisit. From anger to gossiping to shutting down, this dose is packed with real strategies — including the phrases and mindset tools Dawn used herself — to help you hold your own hand through the setbacks without becoming your own punching bag.

Watch the Video Here or Read the Script below

Giving yourself grace when you feel like you're falling short.

This how-to dose is for a person who's done a lot of work to overcome their trauma. They've made enough progress that they're starting to see themselves as a person more aligned with where they're trying to get to and they're very proud of that fact. To go down one more layer. This person has a hard time when they slip up on something they've invested a lot of time in. Something significant like stopping lying, gossiping, or some other significant social issue like being overly angry, rude, or mean. And one more layer, you've heard the phrase, "People don't change." And every time you slip up, your brain says, "See, I told you you'd never get the hang of this humaning business." And now you're ready to stop being your own punching bag and are ready for some strategies to help you hold your hand through the process.

If all that sounds like you, welcome in to your daily dose of Dawn at Dawn videos designed to expand your thinking.

Today we're thinking about anger. If you don't have a problem with the anger, you can insert whatever your issue is. Gossiping, snapping at people, shutting down, lying, people pleasing, whatever is revisiting after you've overcome it.

One of my clients is working through excessive anger. They had a situation happen over the weekend where they had a setback. So, we had an emergency session to discuss that healing is not a one and done. In dose 81, I talked about ghost feelings coming back to whisper drama in your ears. I'll link that below. But you can teach yourself to ignore them, Cindy, so you can keep on with your life. Oh, yes you can.

The most important thing is that you try on some strategies and see which ones fit you so you can see which are effective. Not everything you try will work. We are all different. We learn different, think, see, and even feel things differently from each other. This is why you want to use the YOU filter and put all these tips through that filter and see how you can modify them to your own life and your own situation.

One of the things I did that helped me long ago now was come up with five rules for arguing. I'm going to dive into those tomorrow. So if you have trouble with your mind or body when you argue like you short circuit from it, then this will be good for you to think about.

Phrases are my favorite support tools. That's why you see them all over my magnets. Lefty loosey, righty tighty. It came in to save me so many times when I was tightening and loosening things throughout my whole life. So when I started working on the personal growth, I used that repetition and those little reminders helped me reprogram my mind.

My anger came from being mistreated and being in pain. My father was an angry person. My mom was kind of mean looking back now. And that shapes the way that you learn, behave, and treat others. I needed to learn to be someone I wanted to hang around with because my anger cost me friendships.

I needed to remember that everything doesn't have to happen right now when people upset me. There's time to fix things to be the daisy I wanted to see in the world. Chewed leaves and all. And that unconditional love is not acceptance of bad behavior. Reminding myself to be a no drama llama. Saying no when over asked so I didn't get resentful. Having a nice steamy mug of STFU if I thought my tongue might slice someone open. and most importantly getting on my own side.

I taught myself how to deal with frustration when it came up. I remember I would say to my kid, "What are you 11?" Because it would it was true. And it would help me get it out of me without injuring him in any way. It's like all grace.

Do I still get angry? Oh my days. Yes. Like murderous. Truly, I'm a Pisces after all. I joke I'm 97% fairy and you don't want to find out what the other 3% is.

One of my favorite quotes is, "Unless you're capable of great violence, you're not peaceful. You're only harmless." What this says to me is controlling my anger, working through it, learning what to do with it, how to use it, how to let it go, is living in peace. Being peaceful. If you never had to do any of that, you would just be harmless like a little ladybug. Instead, you have fangs. And I used all of that for grace.

It's okay. Your anger served you. It got you here. It's okay to forgive yourself for everything you did simply because you didn't know better. I was a feral child. I had nobody raising me. I did it all myself and just obviously didn't do a good job.

And give yourself credit for deciding to listen to this all the way to the end just in case there was something else that you might miss if you didn't. And now you can leave your pain here and go out and do your magnificent things.

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