Owns Up

 

When my son was a toddler I used to read to him stories about the cute little monkey Bubbles. Each story would have an important value for children to learn and imbibe. “Bubbles owns up” was a favorite story which my son would tell me to read morning, noon and night every day. What fascinated him about the story was how bubbles broke a jar of chocolate chip cookies and bravely owned up his mistake when his mother asks him. My son certainly was influenced by this value and would never hide any mischief from me because for him owning up was a part of life and I had always told him that making mistakes was the first step to learning provided one accepts that one has made a mistake.

Today, more than one and half decades later we have moved from the days of bubbles stories to Dan Brown series and my son in his teenage gives me the typical teen challenges to handle, one of them being his argumentative nature. Often he does not admit he has made a mistake and will argue how what he says or has done is correct. As a mother I believe I must groom him to admit his mistakes courageously so I don’t easily give up.

As a school counselor I often have had to deal with issues of bullying between the adolescent boys. The boys most of the times apologize to each other but never accept they have made a mistake by bullying and physically hurting each other. So merely saying sorry never solves the problem and the same boys are brought back for similar reasons. My challenge is to patiently make them realize that their behavior is unacceptable as it hurts another person and they must alter their behavior. My work never gets done till  behavior alteration does not happen.

There are two very important advantages of owning up; firstly it helps in self improvement and secondly it greatly helps in building better inter-personal relationships. “To err is human” is a meaningful proverb. The universal truth is that no one is perfect until death and it is natural and humanly to make mistakes. The mistakes may be small or big, but accepting the mistake and also the fact that each and every one of us has some weakness is half the road towards self improvement. When we realize that we need to correct ourselves we will make a conscious attempt not to repeat the mistakes. This in itself is a giant leap towards self improvement.

It is rightly said that self improvement is a life long journey. To understand ourselves we need to introspect and realize our weaknesses and mistakes but to improve ourselves we must declare our trip towards improvement to a few close people. This declaration keeps our efforts towards improvement stronger. An attempt to get fit and healthy,or to learning and perfecting a new language or to becoming emotionally intelligent and controlling our temper and impatience, we must share our action plan with near and dear ones. This sharing will make our journey effective as we will get support from the ones who are a significant part of our life and who are aware about our journey towards self improvement.

Another advantage of owning up mistakes is for having more meaningful and better relationships. We must prioritize whether the relationship is important or accepting our mistake is important. When a person does not care much about the relationship such a person will not bother when someone points out his/her weakness or mistakes. Such a person always tends to defend themselves to prove their superiority. But when we care for the relationship more and we don’t want to hurt the other person we will accept our mistake and weakness graciously without defending ourselves, irrespective of whether we are wrong or otherwise. We dissolve our ego in our greatness when our priority is the relationship and the person. Such behavior will automatically irk the other person less and reduce the number of squabbles leading towards a more meaningful understanding relationship.

So, next time when we don’t admit a mistake or weakness when a well wisher brings it to our notice let us pause for a minute and remember “Bubbles owns up”.