Do's and Don'ts for Difficult People Wanting to Change Part V: Self Maintenance

Recognizing old behavior patterns as they creep up is a necessary part of self-growth. Setbacks should be an expected occurrence. Setbacks give us the opportunity to increase our self-awareness and fine-tune our interpersonal skills. The worst thing a person can do is take a set-back as a failure. This is often where self-growth stops, because that’s when a person believes they have failed. Trying again seems out of the question.

To better recognize setbacks, it’s important to be self-aware, but to also listen non-defensively to people who notice a change in us. Our instinct might be to get defensive, but those wanting to be the best they can be can look at it as an opportunity to improve. Setbacks are negative when people deny them, get overly discouraged, don’t have a plan on learning from them, and see them as irreparably undoing their progress.