How Being a Good Person is Stopping Your Growth

"I'm a good person". 

This is a statement that I have often declared loudly and proudly. My guess is that you have as well. In and of itself, there's nothing wrong with that, is there? I mean, in a world that repeatedly teaches and reinforces the value of being good, who wouldn't want to be a "good person"? Isn't being a good person, in many ways, the goal?

Up until recently, I would have agreed with you. And then, I read something that stopped me in my tracks.

"Good is a transient adjective, not a permanent identity."

This is a quote from Michelle Mijung Kim's book, The Wake Up. In the context of the book, this statement is intended to remind people that the work of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion inevitably includes making mistakes and sometimes causing harm, often without intention, and that even good people are subject to these experiences. In other words, being a good person doesn't preclude you from getting things wrong, from doing "bad things" from time to time. 

Before I go any further in this post, I want to declare that I am coming to loathe the good/bad binary. I think the human experience is so much more nuanced than that, and labelling experiences, intentions, or people as one or the other -- either good or bad -- is just so limiting. More importantly, it's incomplete at best, and inaccurate at worst. 

Having said that, I find myself standing in curiousity these days, wondering what it takes for humans to be able to own that we make mistakes, and that doing so doesn't make us "bad". I'm thinking that our desire to be good -- whether that's collective or individual -- actually gets in the way of our growth. 

When I am committed to the idea that I am a good person, when I latch on to that as a pivotal piece of my identity, I actually deny myself the opportunity to own my mistakes, to see and hear the lessons that might be gleaned from those experiences, and grow into something more. 

What I know is that when someone points out something that I have done "wrong", my inclination is to go to defense. Often, my very basic defense is some version of "I'm a good person" which means I couldn't do what has been suggested. 

As a good person, I couldn't have hurt your feelings.

As a good person, I couldn't have been rude.

As a good person, I couldn't have broken trust. 

The question I'm standing in these days is some version of this: what if owning my mistakes, my blunders, my errors didn't malign my goodness in any way? What would happen -- for me and for those around me -- if I could own my mistakes just as well as I own my goodness? What if I could say things like:

I screwed up, and I'm a good person.

I hurt that person, and I'm a good person.

I got that wrong, and I'm a good person.

And now, just to play with semantics and impact a bit, what if I could reverse those statements and own the goodness first:

I'm a good person, and I screwed up.

I'm a good person, and I hurt someone.

I'm a good person, and I got that wrong. 

I'm not 100 % sure how big a difference it makes when I play with the order of the clauses; I do know, that holding both clauses as equally true -- I am good, and I make mistakes -- has got a liberty of some sort in it. It paves the way for my growth, without my needing to play catch up in any way. In other words, when I make mistake, it doesn't take away from my goodness. And, when I own that mistake, take responsibility for it instead of defending against it, I actually allow my whole self to grow. 

Bottom-line: it's time to let go of the notion that making mistakes is somehow limited to the domain of being "bad". As people our job when we do something wrong is not to use our goodness as a defense of our actions, but rather to acknowledge the error and take responsibility for it. Being good doesn't mean I won't make mistakes; being good means that I will be accountable for my mistakes, learn from them, and grow.