You were an idiot yesterday (and nothing could be more ok).

I'm an ambitious person. I bet you are too. When I say "ambitious" what I mean is that I want to make a difference. I want my life and my career and my time to have value for more than just myself. I've always wrestled with time. If it's passing, I want those ticking minutes to count for something. And I want them to count for something bigger than just me.

You feel me on this? Pretty sure you can relate.

One of the many pitfalls we ambitious types fall into is what I will call Retrospective Self-Shaming. What is that?

It's looking at your past self through today's more enlightened eyes and judging yourself negatively. (Hence the title of this article. I am sure you've had the thought on at least one occasion that your past self behaved like an idiot according to the standards of who you are today.)

But that is SO unfair.

Because if you ARE ambitious, one of the ways you have no doubt been using your passing minutes is to grow. You have probably worked pretty hard to learn through experience, to turn setbacks and failures into evolution, and to right the little wrongs that inevitably crop up unknowingly in a world where we have to interact with 8 billion people with different ideas, perspectives, and pain points than us.

So OF COURSE you are better today than you were yesterday.

OF COURSE when you look back at some of your past choices and actions, you'll have a little pang of chagrin, regret, or disappointment.

(In fact, the MORE ambitious you are, the more you are consciously growing in your career, the MORE foolish yesterday's choices will seem. The rate of acceleration in your personal development makes things in the rear view mirror appear even dumber than they actually were at the time.)

But if you turn those little pangs into self-shame, or self-doubt, you risk missing one of the great joys of life.

You are supposed to grow.

You are supposed to be bigger and better now than before.

Do you think the tree looks back on its sapling self and says: "Bro, you were such a sap then! What a weakling. Grow a pair!"

We have something the trees don't have, for better and for worse.

The mind.

The gift of our mind is that we can self-reflect.

The curse of our mind is that without discipline - the discipline of self-compassion - we can end up hurting our present selves by retroactively shaming our past selves.

It sounds a little crazy when I say it that way, but I bet you've done this countless times.

I know I have. I've struggled with at least my share of self-doubt and self-judgment over the years.

But here's the challenging part: It's easy to confuse a willingness to grow with a destructive tendency to self-flagellate.

Here's how to know the difference:

Willingness to grow...

• reflects on your experiences with compassion
• it examines your actions and choices with an attempt to find the gold (e.g. what you did really well and what you could do differently next time to have an even more positive impact)
• it might cause you to initially confront an unpleasant emotion when you notice something you didn't notice the first time, but that quickly passes because...
• it always gives your past self the benefit of the doubt.

A good mantra to embrace is: "It seemed like a good idea at the time!" and "I was doing my best."

Because weren't you? At the time, you did the best you could do with the information you had, didn't you? This is the definition of human action under uncertainty.

As Socrates said, "No one errs or does wrong willingly or knowingly." Or something like that in Greek.

Meaning, we can only choose the good. If it didn't have the desired result, it's because we didn't have complete information or sufficient capacities or the ability to do any better in that moment.

Retrospective Self-Shaming on the other hand...

• reflects on experiences with an intent to find fault and condemn
• it examines your actions and choices in an attempt to find the turds (e.g. to find all the things that are "wrong with you." BTW, there is nothing wrong with you.)
• it never gives you the benefit of the doubt: it presumes you should have been omniscient and omnipotent in that past moment and judges your failure to be so an innate character defect and insuperable flaw
• as a result, it causes intense and lasting negative emotion in the form of shame, guilt, self-doubt, anger, apathy, hopelessness, or helplessness that can damage your self confidence, your resilience, and your willingness to keep growing.

If you've ever retrospectively self-shamed, don't you dare retrospectively self-shame yourself about that. Hahahaha.

If you have been guilty of judging your past self too harshly, nothing could be more normal or predictable. It's human to want to be better. And it's human to sometimes view yourself just a little ungenerously.

Now you have the chance to forgive it all. You can forgive yourself first for all your past retrospective self-shaming. Then you can forgive yourself for all the things you did that seemed like a good idea yesterday, but today in the cold light of your more evolved awareness, seem like mistakes. And you can forgive yourself for ever being unkind to you. It was the very best you could do at the time.

And today is a new day. Now you can do better.

• You can hold your past self in the lovingly kind light of a caring parent, aware of your limitations, but unconditionally loving nevertheless
• You can gently urge yourself to extract the golden lessons you can only gain from past experience and apply them to the choices and actions you take today
• You can look forward to the person you are becoming while still being inspired by the amazing person you already are today (and the frankly awesome person you were yesterday, too).

The world needs you to forgive yourself. Retrospective Self-Shame silences your voice, suppresses your potential, and stifles your contribution.

You are here to matter. You already do matter. You will give yourself the freedom to matter even more tomorrow when you can love the "idiot" you were yesterday.

Did you ever learn any truly valuable lessons from your past self's escapades? Please leave me a comment and share what you learned.

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