What if you could look at your past self with the same compassion you offer someone you love?
Along the lines of perfectionism, I’ve been thinking about the idea of kind sight.
I heard someone use that term on a podcast several weeks ago, and it stayed with me. Her meaning was simple: looking back at who you were and what you did with kindness instead of the negative judgment we so often bring to our own memories.
That idea landed with me.
I know how easy it is to look back and see everything I did wrong. The decisions I questioned. The conversations I wish had gone differently. The moments when I lost my temper. The times I wonder if I could have done more, known more, or handled something better.
Looking back brings a certain dilemma.
We can use hindsight to criticize the person we were, or we can use it to understand her.
We Were Never Given the Manual
Even horse sales come with instructions.
This is especially true in parenting and caregiving.
No one gives us a manual when we become responsible for another human being. Even if they did, life would inevitably present us with something that wasn’t covered in the instructions.
There would be a chapter missing.
There always is.
Did tempers flare with your child or loved one?
Of course they did.
You’re human. When your life feels like chaos, frustration is a natural response. Add exhaustion, fear, uncertainty, and the weight of making decisions that matter, and expecting yourself to respond perfectly every time is an impossible standard.
The question isn’t whether everything went perfectly.
It didn’t.
The question is whether you can look back at yourself with enough kindness to recognize that you were doing the best you could with what you knew, what you had, and what you were carrying at the time.
When the Decisions Aren’t Yours to Make
I remember one particular time when doctors were looking for cancer in Mike.
He chose not to have surgery.
Years earlier, he had told me that if he ever had a choice between two options, he would choose the quickest route. So his decision surprised me.
The surgery carried a very slight risk of affecting the movement in his right arm and his voice.
He couldn’t live with either possibility.
His arm mattered because he loved to fish. His voice mattered because Mike was an extrovert. Being unable to talk would have been devastating for him.
I wasn’t uncomfortable with his decision.
I was surprised by it.
There is a difference.
And I’ve thought about that distinction many times since.
Sometimes we look back at decisions and judge ourselves because the outcome wasn’t what we expected. Sometimes we judge someone else because their decision wasn’t the decision we would have made.
Kind sight gives us another possibility.
It allows us to say, I don’t have to understand every decision to respect the person who made it.
Life Doesn’t Always Flow Smoothly
We often imagine life as a smooth river. We picture ourselves moving along, making good decisions, communicating well, responding thoughtfully, and handling whatever comes our way.
Then the water changes.
Sometimes there are whitecaps.
Sometimes there are rapids.
Sometimes we’re simply trying to keep our head above water.
When something isn’t perfect, do you look back and beat yourself up?
Or can you give yourself grace because you were doing the best you could at the time?
Kind sight doesn’t mean pretending everything was fine. It doesn’t mean excusing behavior that hurt someone. It doesn’t mean rewriting history.
It means being willing to look at the whole picture.
The circumstances. The information you had. The emotions you were carrying. The relationship dynamics. The things you understood then—and the things you understand now that you couldn’t possibly have known then.
That’s a very different way of looking back.
Understanding Yourself Changes the Conversation
One of the things that can make those difficult moments easier is understanding yourself.
How do you communicate?
How do you respond when you’re stressed?
What do you need when you’re overwhelmed?
How do you tend to hear what someone else is saying?
And perhaps just as importantly—how does the person you love communicate?
This came up often in my marriage with Mike.
There were times when we were saying things to each other, yet somehow hearing something completely different. We weren’t necessarily disagreeing about the issue. We were approaching the conversation from different places.
Had I understood more about communication styles earlier in our marriage, I believe many conversations could have been easier.
Not perfect.
Easier.
That distinction matters.
Because the goal isn’t to become perfect communicators. The goal is to become more aware. More curious. More compassionate.
More able to recognize that the person sitting across from us may be experiencing the same conversation very differently than we are.
See Yourself—and Your Relationships—Through a Different Lens
This is one of the reasons I created Discover the Kaleidoscope Within.
A kaleidoscope takes the same pieces and creates different patterns depending on how you look at them.
People can be much the same way.
When you understand more about yourself—your communication style, your patterns, your needs, and the way you naturally respond—you have another lens through which to understand your relationships.
And when you begin to understand the people you love through that lens, some of those old misunderstandings can start to make more sense.
You may even find yourself looking back differently.
Instead of Why did I do that?
You might begin asking, What was happening for me then?
Instead of I should have known better.
You might say, I know more now.
Instead of I failed.
You might recognize, I was learning.
That is kind sight.
And perhaps it is one of the kindest things we can give ourselves.
What if you looked back with kindness?
You don’t have to approve of every choice you’ve made. You don’t have to pretend there weren’t things you would do differently today. You don’t have to make the past prettier than it was.
You can simply stop punishing the person you were for not knowing what you know now.
She was learning.
He was learning.
You were learning.
And maybe the next time you find yourself looking back, you can pause before the judgment arrives.
Take a breath.
Look again.
And try a little kind sight.
If you’d like to understand yourself and the people you love more deeply, Discover the Kaleidoscope Within can help you explore the patterns that shape how you communicate and connect.
Click the button to schedule a Zoom with me, and let’s talk about what you’re discovering.
Every story needs a soundtrack.
This is the one I’ve chosen for this post—sometimes because of the title, sometimes the lyrics, sometimes simply the feeling it stirs in me.
