Everyone knows the feeling of being under pressure — having deadlines at work, throwing an event, trying to achieve lofty goals.
But for some of us, most of the pressure comes from ourselves. We push ourselves to achieve more and more, and the idea of failure stresses us out. We love the feeling of doing a great job, but we often beat ourselves up over the little things.
If you are too hard on yourself, you will be able to relate to these 10 things.
1. We don’t like asking for help, but we are more than happy to help anyone who needs it.
We don’t like to ask other people for help because we worry that they will think we are incompetent. We strive to be capable and independent, but we are more than happy to help anyone who needs it — and we would never judge them for asking for help.
2. We want to live life to the fullest.
We don’t want to have an average life; we want to have amazing, happy, successful lives. We are hard on ourselves because it takes a lot of work to achieve greatness.
3. We hate failing.
No one likes failing, but we really, really hate it. We are always thinking about our goals and how to avoid failure, and this attitude has benefits. We often manage to predict mistakes so we can avoid making them, but when we do make a mistake, it really gets us down.
4. We can’t stop thinking about constructive criticism that we have received.
If anyone offers us constructive criticism, we listen up and remember it for months. It can often be hard to hear at first, as we don’t like to hear anything negative about ourselves, but we will always eventually follow the advice — anything to improve our skills.
5. Compliments make us feel awkward.
Even though we work really hard, we are always surprised to receive a compliment. We often worry that the other person is just being nice to us, so we will turn red and try to be as modest as possible. We are much more likely to say “forget about it, it’s no problem” than “thank you!”.
6. We say sorry a lot.
If we let someone down, we apologize immediately. We understand that we have made a mistake and the only thing to do is apologize and try to fix it. Even when the other person forgives us, we struggle to believe that they actually have, because we expect other people to be hard on us too.
7. We fixate on past mistakes.
People who are hard on themselves always remember their mistakes because they hope that keeping the mistakes in their mind means they are less likely to make the same mistakes again. Sometimes it’s tough, but it’s also useful — we never make the same mistakes twice!
8. We are over-thinkers.
When we imagine a scenario, we always think of every single possible outcome. This means we often worry about problems that may never happen, but we can also think about our bright future and all of the possibilities it contains.
9. We give ourselves pep talks.
We give ourselves positive pep talks to prepare for everything from job interviews to cooking a new recipe. We tell ourselves that everything will be fine, and it normally it is — probably because of our awesome pep talk.
10. We are not hard on other people, only ourselves.
We are tough on ourselves, but we really hate the idea of being mean to other people. We know how difficult it can be to receive criticism and we don’t want to hurt or upset them. Instead, we try to be positive and encouraging to other people so they feel happy about their achievements.
