I wrote a while back that ‘Doing your best‘ is really an attitude. And I mentioned in that post that I never quite knew what my best was. Perhaps I know it when I tried; but we aren’t really sure if we did because there seem to be always something more we can do. And our minds are such that if we did put in the effort and already did our best but obtained an outcome less than our aspiration, we start questioning ourselves.
At the heart of every fear lurking around is our sense of inadequacy and being ‘not enough’. It is important to recognise why and how you have fallen short when you do. Because having done your best, in those specific circumstances and resources which you have can yield different results when doing your best in a different set of circumstances.
For example, you could have scored a 75 instead of 70 if you had not missed out reading a particular chapter in the textbook. But you could have gotten 85 if you had money to pay for a few more hours of tuition with Mr Wong. So yes you could have done more, you could have done things differently – the key here is that every outcome contains an opportunity for you. It is an opportunity to know more about the world and how it works. To know more about how your actions, circumstances, resources and even thought patterns interacts with the world. So use it wisely rather than get back into the cycle of fear and anxiety around your inadequacy.