Speaker A
hey guys Heidi Priebe here welcome back to my channel I wanted to start this video by telling you a story about a mistake I made and I had a really weird experience like processing this mistake because it was very different from my
Heidi Priebe explains how to apologize to yourself after a mistake, using a five-step framework: express remorse, show understanding, make amends, forgive, and plan differently next time.
Key Takeaways
- Apologizing to yourself is a legitimate and necessary form of self-compassion after letting yourself down.
- A holistic apology includes remorse, understanding, amends, and a concrete plan for change.
- Self-criticism ('I'm an idiot') is a common reflex that replaces genuine accountability.
- Treat your time, energy, and resources as valuable, and ask whether you would treat a loved child the same way.
- Examining the context behind a mistake helps prevent repeating it.
What the video covers
- Heidi opens with a personal story: she took on a project knowing she lacked the time and resources, then had to withdraw and fell behind on other commitments.
- She noticed an internal voice apologizing to another part of herself, a sign of growing self-compassion rather than self-criticism.
- She observes that people readily apologize to others but usually respond to their own mistakes with harsh self-criticism.
- She critiques the 'apology language' concept, arguing that a complete apology needs acknowledgment, repair, and prevention together.
- Step one: express remorse toward yourself by recognizing that your time, energy, and resources matter and that you squandered them.
- A useful test: would you put a child you love in the same situation? If not, you may owe your inner child an apology.
- Step two: show you understand what you did wrong and why, examining the context and gut signals that were ignored.
- Later steps cover making amends, forgiving yourself without minimizing the mistake, and creating a realistic plan to handle similar situations differently.
- Self-apology is framed as an act of self-respect, not an excuse, and distinct from simply avoiding pushing yourself to grow.
- The video closes by encouraging viewers to treat their own failures with the honest, caring tone they would use with a friend.
Chapters
- 00:00Intro: A Personal Story of a Mistake
- 01:13Hearing Yourself Apologize to Yourself
- 02:25Why We Rarely Apologize to Ourselves
- 03:38Critiquing the Apology Language Idea
- 04:52Step One: Express Remorse Toward Yourself
- 07:00Step Two: Show Understanding of What Went Wrong
- 09:00Steps Three to Five: Amends, Forgiveness, and a Future Plan
- 11:00Closing Thoughts and Wrap-Up
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
past experiences of making a mistake and just being like Heidi you are completely useless um it was actually quite nicely the opposite of that so basically earlier this year I picked up a project I agreed to a project that
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at the time when I knew I was agreeing to this project I was like I don't have time or resources for this project like I knew and there was certain things that I found very enticing certain skills I
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wanted to build through taking on this project and I was like you know what I'll just say yes I will say yes and figure it out and a lot of times in my life that works out pretty well for me this time Flash
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Forward several months later it did not I had to drop the project I got behind on like some schoolwork and other commitments because I'd spend so much time trying to work on this other thing and I had this moment with myself after
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I had let the team in question know that I was going to need to take myself off the project where it was like I could hear a voice in my head apologizing to myself almost as if like one part of me was
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saying to another part hey I'm sorry that I wasted your time and resources I knew at the beginning I knew the moment I said yes to that project that I did not have the capacity to take it on and
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to finish it and to not get behind on all this other stuff and I'm sorry that I put you through that that I stressed you out that I made you stay up late at night that I did not respect your time
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and energy and resources and the ways that you had thought carefully about how you wanted to allocate them at the beginning of this year and I was like that is one of the weirder experiences I've ever had is the
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feeling of listening to part of myself spontaneously apologize to another part of myself and I think that that was a really cool sign of um just getting somewhere with like my inner work around self-love and self-compassion and rather than berating
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myself and telling myself I should have known better the predominant voice in my head was like yeah I did know better and I let you down part of you that deserves comfort and spare time and spare resources and I'm sorry
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and it made me think about how little we talk about self-apologizing like we talk a lot about apologizing to other people but normally when we let ourselves down what we do instead of apologizing to ourselves the way we would to a friend
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who deserves to hear an apology when we have done something that hurt them we go instantly to self-criticism right we're like I should have known better I was such an idiot I should never have taken that on I never get anything right and
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we don't show ourselves True self-compassion by acknowledging the impact that we have had on ourselves by treating ourselves in a way that we knew was not necessarily the most respectful and giving ourselves a genuine apology so that's what we're talking about today
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how to apologize to yourself and by the way there's this thing going around earlier this year that was like what's your apology language and it broke down apologies into all these different components which I thought was cool like
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I thought that the breaking down of a apologizing was a neat idea but I was like all of these kind of matter like the questionnaire asked you to pick between things like do you like when someone acknowledges that they hurt your
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feelings or do you like when they fix the situation so you know it won't happen again and I'm like both of those things need to happen for an apology to be complete so it's not about apology language it sounds like you're just
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fragmenting what could otherwise be a really beautiful holistic healing apology that you could give to someone else and saying like what part of it do you want so in this video we're going to talk about how to give a holistic
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apology to yourself step one of five that I made up and Loosely stole from the apology languages Express remorse towards yourself so this step is all about admitting to yourself and acknowledging to yourself that your feelings matter the situations you
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choose to put yourself in in life and the way that you choose to spend your time and money and energy and resources those things are important and if you have made a bad calculation and you have spent those things unwisely you need to
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acknowledge that and you need to look at yourself and go I squandered something important you have but one life on God's green earth and I wasted part of your life or I did something that I am not in
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retrospect happy that I did with your life and I am sorry because your life matters this step is about acknowledging that you matter that the way that you spend your time your energy your resources it matters it's important it's
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not frivolous and if you have squandered some component of that you owe it to yourself to your inner child to say I'm sorry I should not have done that I should be careful when I think about the situations I put you in I should be
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careful when I think about the way I'm using your time I should be careful about the things I ask you to invest in and show up to day after day after day these things matter because they make an
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impact on you as a human being and sometimes when I'm trying to figure out like do I owe myself an apology or not I think about what if I were a child like what if I were a child who I were
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responsible for taking care of and I think about the situations that I put myself in and I'm like would I put a child who I loved in that situation would I put them in a situation that would stress them out to the point where
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they weren't getting enough sleep or they weren't eating healthily or they were experiencing chronic stress would I put them in a situation where someone else were being rude or inconsiderate or talking down to them and if you would
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not put a child who you love in the situation that you put yourself in you probably owe the child in yourself in apology right step one Express remorse recognize that the situation you put yourself in was not a particularly kind
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one to put yourself in and this is different than saying don't push yourself right there are lots of ways in which we push and challenge ourselves to grow and we might end up not sleeping much for a little period of time while
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we're working on something we're excited about or we might get into conflicts that is really important to work through but this is about recognizing when we have put ourselves in situations that we know are disrespectful to ourselves where the cost-benefit analysis of the
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situation we're in doesn't quite work out in our favor and we keep engaging with it anyway step two show that you understand what you did wrong and why so at this step what I encourage you to do is get really real with yourself about
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why you did the thing that you did that you now need to apologize to yourself for and I think this is an important component of apologizing to other people too right when people just quickly apologize as soon as we're mad at them
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or as soon as we express discontent with something they did but they don't really seem to understand what led to them doing that thing the apology doesn't really feel sincere because it's kind of like well I know next time you're just
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going to do the same thing again because I don't think you actually have an idea of what the Dynamics behind this situation was and the same is true for ourselves right if I took on this project Knowing damn
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well at the time that I did not have the resources to complete it how do I know I'm not going to do that again if I had that gut intuition at the beginning and I didn't listen to it how do I know
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things will be different in the future so this step is about examining the context that led you to making the mistake that you made so maybe some part of me in this area of myself I don't really want to look at or admit actually
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kind of wanted this project as a distraction from other things that were more important maybe I kind of wanted a reason to not look at more difficult things in my life and if I can admit that to myself I'm going to be a lot
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less likely to make that mistake again than if I tell myself oh I should have known better but I didn't and I did it for no reason that's never the case we like always more or less know the reason
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right or maybe I took on this project because I thought that completing it would make me look look really good to other people and I was in a phase of my life where my self-esteem wasn't doing great and I wanted something to give me
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a boost maybe I took on this project because I was feeling avoidant and I wanted a reason to opt out of a bunch of social engagements for a while the more clear we get on the secondary reasons behind why we did what we did the more
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we can isolate those variables that are going to be kind of danger zones for us repeating the mistake in the future right so the more honest we can be with ourselves and the more we can explain to ourselves without judgment why we did
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what we did the more self-trust we start to build because now we're not letting ourselves get away with anything we're getting really clear on the reasons why we did what we did and we are not committing the cardinal sin of lying to
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ourselves about our own motivations because that's where stuff gets really dicey step three is kind of the flip side of step two which is acknowledge what you didn't get wrong so I read this blog years and years ago
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and unfortunately I completely forget who wrote it um but it was talking about how when we fail we're often a lot closer to success than we realized so often we look back at failures and we only look at what did
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I miss right what did I get wrong where did I fail to show up where I could have shown up and we don't look at the 80 percent of the thing that we got right we don't look at how overwhelmingly we
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may have been on the right path we just didn't have all of the skills or resources or time or energy or knowledge and understanding that we needed to get to the end right this can apply to jobs it can also apply to personal
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relationships like I see a lot of people coming out of let's say long-term romantic relationships and they see the entire thing as this terrible failure and it's like well if you spent years in that relationship there's probably a lot
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of really great stuff that went right in that relationship there's probably a lot of ways you guys found to to make each other laugh and to support each other and to really celebrate your lives together and that stuff is equally if
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not more important than what you did wrong that led to the downfall right that stuff really needs to be remembered and to not be thrown out with the bath water and the same is true of any mistake it's important to look not just
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at what did I do wrong but what was I getting right in the process sometimes I think it might even be helpful to just make a little like t-chart things I got wrong things I got right and you're
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showing yourself in that process that you are not in epic failure you are someone who tries very hard and you win some you lose some but you want to be able to extract the wins from the losses and keep those going forward step four
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make any amends and repair any damage that you have caused to other people so depending on what the mistake is you might have to do a whole ass apology tour or you might have absolutely nobody to apologize to but yourself but this
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step is really important because when it comes to your own sense of alignment and self-esteem you need to make sure that you are showing up in the world in a way that is congruent with the way that you
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are feeling and thinking internally so if you have made a mistake where you let yourself down and in the process you let someone else down this step is about taking the time to acknowledge that to the other person or people involved and
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doing whatever you can to make right by them and if you want you can borrow the structure of this video to make your apology to them because apologizing to other people and apologizing to yourself in my opinion should be not that
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different at all step five make a plan to address the same situation differently in the future so this is harking back to point number two right where you looked at why you did the thing you did now you owe it to yourself
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to take it a step further and help yourself come up with alternate solutions to similar problems going forward again I feel like all of us have had at least a situation where someone is sitting in front of us apologizing
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and we're just looking at them being like I know you're going to do it again I know the next time we're in this situation you will behave in the exact same way don't be that person to yourself do not be the person who is
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sitting there lying to their own face okay if you cannot change and show up differently for yourself no one else is ever going to so you have to get this right from the inside go back to everything you wrote down in Step number
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two every hidden motivation every obscured fact everything that led you to make this decision that in retrospect you know you should not have made and find a better way to deal with every single one of those problems in the
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future in a way that actually addresses those unmet needs holistically so you know if this situation comes up again I will have a better way to handle it write down an action plan that is realistic not one that leaves out half
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of your needs which you might then cave to in the moment the next time a decision or a crisis Point comes up figure out a way to incorporate the conflicting needs that led you to make the wrong decision in the first place
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and work towards a place where next time a similar decision comes along you now have a 360 degree view of the situation and you know a better more comprehensive solution to it alright this video is uncharacteristically short for me but I
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think I'm going to keep it at that that is my five-step self-apology process I also chose to buy myself a cake me and my closest cousin who's also one of my like best friends uh when we were around
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20 years old we started this practice of apologizing to each other with cakes anytime we had a fight needed to make up with each other so whichever one of us was in the wrong would go to the store
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and get a cake and get them to write like sorry for the whatever went wrong on the cake so with this project I was talking about at the beginning of this video I actually the day I handed it
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back and was like I cannot finish this I'm sorry uh I went to the store and bought myself a cake and wrote sorry for taking on that project on the cake and then I had some friends over because I'm
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not eating sugar at the moment and I got them to eat the cake on my behalf but I actually encourage you to find something like that that really memorializes and makes it clear to yourself explicitly clear that you are not getting away with
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your own behavior you have made a mistake you are deeply acknowledging it and from this point forward you have a better way of dealing with it alright let me know your guys thoughts on this in the comments of this video as always
Speaker A
I love you I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon [Music]
Topics:self-apologyself-compassioninner childself-forgivenesspersonal growthself-loveapologymental healthself-improvementHeidi Priebe
