A short YouTube empowerment talk by Sandi L Boucher about overcoming guilt. Using a river-journey metaphor, she argues that past mistakes should be treated as learning opportunities rather than burdens, urges listeners (particularly mothers) to stop self-blame, to apologize when appropriate, and to move forward into the present.
Chapters
Hi, everybody. Sandy Boucher here, and welcome back to my world. I'm just getting ready for an empowerment session here and took a minute to update a group and I had a chance to chat with a friend of mine. And she was sweet enough to share that by watching these videos, it is actually helping her on her own healing path. And I am so honored and so thrilled that she took the time to share that with me. And she also honored me with her honesty. And she shared that there is one demon she is still very much struggling with. And she asked me if I would speak to that. And I am honored to do this for her. The demon we speak of is guilt. Now, let me use a metaphor here. You have often heard me say that life is. Is a river. Now, if you think of a river, you're in your canoe and you're going down the river. There's going to be rocks and rapids in front of you, and there's also going to be beautiful shores and beaches and lovely scenery. If you look behind you at the river that you've already come down. What if there were different times in that journey that you did something you're not too proud of? Say, for example, when you first started the journey, you were in your canoe and along the way you stopped to have lunch and you ate your sandwich and you took the plastic bag the sandwich was in and threw it into the river. And then you drank your chocolate milk and you took the little carton and threw it into the river. Well, that was miles upstream. And now you know that that was really bad. And that didn't help Mother Earth at all. Now you have two choices. You can sit there and feel bad about what you did and feel guilty and beat yourself up for it and miss the rocks that are right in front of you, or mix, miss the beautiful shore that you just passed. You can allow guilt over the past to rob you of your present and future. What I need you to remember is, except for a very select few cases, if you're basically a good person, then we always make the best decision we could at that time with the knowledge we had at that time. If you threw that milk carton into the river, about two seconds later, the elder in the canoe smacked you upside the head and said, hello. Don't be doing that. And here's why. You didn't know that at the time. You didn't think, you just did it. Now you know better. The only responsibility to the past you have is to learn from it. And the great news is there's a trump card and the present always trumps the guilt of the past. Now, as moms, we like to feel guilty. We, for some reason, as soon as we give birth to a child, we expect perfection of ourselves. And we forget that we're human. We don't expect our children to be perfect. We don't expect our partners or our co workers to be perfect. But for some reason, that's what we expect of ourselves. And it's as ludicrous as expecting our partner to be perfect. It's just not going to happen. And the sooner that we accept and acknowledge we're human and we're flawed and we're going to make mistakes, the easier our life gets. Because guess what? How do we learn from our mistakes? That's how we learn. Back to school. How did you learn to spell your name? By not doing it right a few times. How did you learn to drive the car? By not doing it right a few times. That's how we learn. Mistakes are part of our lives and shouldn't be. Huge regrets. Huge weights. Recently, I had to sit down with my children. I was not a perfect mom. I made some monumental mistakes, and I realized one of them of late. I sat down with my kids and I shared what I had realized and I apologized to them. I shared with them that I was just a young mom trying to do the best I could, and that now that I was older and wiser, I realized the error and that I was sorry to them. My kids hugged me and they shared with me that I had restored their faith. Because as an adult, they had seen way too many adults who refused to grow, who refused to learn. And they actually feared the day that they would get to that age and stop learning and growing. But you know what? By sharing with them my realization, I showed them that not all adults are that way and that we do learn and we grow. And even moms make mistakes. Let go of the guilt. It serves no one. The people you love don't want you to feel guilty like everyone else. They just want you to learn. Learn from it, say you're sorry and move forward. Because there are amazing things waiting for you. There is no need to beat yourself up for a learning lesson you needed. Have a great day. I love you. Bye. Bye.
