How to Let the Small Things Go

 No one likes to mess up. Especially those who strive for being better each day. Striving to be perfect all the time can cause us to get stuck in a loop of guilt and regret over past blunders, with our mind constantly playing the movie of our mistake. It can be hard to learn how to let the small things go. Holding onto the guilt only hurts you because that encourages clinging to negative emotions and self-criticism.

I was reminded of this tendency recently when I was driving and busted my side mirror. I was driving on a two-lane road, and on a bend, the oncoming car decided to keep going straight, so I had to swerve to avoid their vehicle. In the process, I took my side mirror out on a trash bin. As I pulled into work with my dangling side mirror, I kept replaying the scenario in my head.

While driving home, I kept ruminating on the mistake. I couldn’t let it go and decided to research how to let small things go. I found a lot of helpful tips, but no step by step guide. The below method helped me let go of a small blunder in my life, and hopefully, it should help you too!

Steps on How to Let the Small Things Go

1. Acknowledge how you Feel

Instead of bottling up your emotions or putting them aside, take five minutes to see how you feel. Are you feeling angry, sad, even relieved? Feel how you are feeling. After a while, the emotions will run their course, and you will be back to a normal physiological state.

Bottling up the emotions causes an emotional build-up that lasts for even weeks at a time and keeps us in a negative state for longer.

There are also benefits to accepting how we feel. From the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they have found that “Research has consistently linked the habitual tendency to accept one’s mental experiences with greater psychological health. This research has typically demonstrated links between acceptance and clinically relevant outcomes, such as fewer mood disorder and anxiety symptoms”. Consistently accepting our feelings over time leads to building this muscle where we can deal with challenges easier.

2. Step Back and Accept the Realities of the Situation

Accept what happened as reality. Is it the end of the world like it is in your head? Probably not. Take what psychologists call the “so what?” test. You took your side mirror out with a trash can? So what? Will it matter in the next week, six months, or a year?

It can help with putting mistakes in context, especially small ones. Once you step back after acknowledging how you feel, you can place the situation in an appropriate setting and tackle the issue from there.

3. Think of Some Empowering Beliefs

Before tackling how to fix the mistake, think of some past success. It might sound a little touchy-feely, but you have to acknowledge you just made a mistake. You are more likely to be self-critical and beat yourself up it.

Beating yourself up can limit creative thinking and put you down. Think about all the times you have successfully solved a similar problem. If you haven’t dealt with this before, think of people who have solved it before. What can you take from them? Tell yourself this isn’t the end of the world and that you can solve it. Self-affirmation can lower stress and the tendency to ruminate according to research from Positive Psychology. These emotions let you enter the right frame of mind on how to tackle your problem.

4. Assess the alternatives and make a plan

Ask yourself what you can do in this situation. what obstacles are you facing and what would you like the ideal situation to be? Look to WOOPING to help overcome some of those initial roadblocks.

For inspiration, what online resources can you use to mitigate or fix the problem? What have other people done? What friends of yours have encountered similar challenges, and what did they do to solve it? For my busted side-mirror, I looked online at how much the part itself cost, looked for YouTube videos on how to change it myself, priced the dealership cost to replace, and priced third-party auto-mechanics. It all took about an hour, but after that, I had all the options before me.

5. Decide and execute the plan

Making a plan and executing are different,  like workout goals, we all have good intentions and do not always follow-through. Sometimes 80% of a plan with action is better than a 100% perfect plan that has no action.

For me, the repair was a bit complicated, so I knew I had to get a mechanic. The rates were close, so I took it to the dealership to ensure it was done correctly. That was it, the blunder I had been beating myself up over was solved. Spending the money still stung, and I accepted that I was feeling stupid for making the mistake, but I followed through with fixing my problem instead of ruminating on it for weeks.

6. Look for learning opportunity

Mistakes can offer learning opportunities. There is truth in Thomas Edison’s 9,000 lightbulbs. What got him to the one that worked was he learned from his 9,000 mistakes of what didn’t work.

For driving, I learned to not over-correct as much when faced with a potential accident at the only cost of a mirror (no one got hurt, and the rest of the car is fine). I also negotiated with different mechanic shops and got $50 off through my negotiating. As dumb as this mistake was, it was still a learning opportunity.

Having a growth mindset helps you turn negative situations into learning opportunities where you learn how to not make the same mistake twice!

7. Let it go

In the end, this can be the hardest part. You accepted your emotions, you handled the situation the best you could, and learned from the mistake. Now it is time to let it go.

Ruminating on the failure is now a diminishing return that only steals your present happiness. If there are still some leftover feelings, go back to step one and feel the emotions. Indulge in them for a few minutes, and then view the situation as heavy 50lb suitcases. Wouldn’t it feel nice to put them down and walk away? Visualize yourself walking away from the negative emotions and rumination. When you start to feel those feelings again, look at it as the heavy suitcases, and tell yourself you already solved the problem and learned, there is no need to pick up the suitcase again.

Main Take-Aways

• Letting go of small mistakes is a combination of handling your own emotions and also being practical in dealing with the situation at hand
• Every mistake can be a learning opportunity, find the silver lining of learning, and try to not make the same mistake in the future
• It is easy to ruminate on past mistakes, even silly ones. Walkthrough the steps and remind yourself picking up the heavy suitcase no longer serves any purpose for you and only steals present happiness

Action Items

What small mistake have you been ruminating on? Can you implement the steps above to help solve the problem and also make yourself feel better about the situation?