Avocados are one of my favorite fruits. For the past few months, I have been making a lot of guacamole. Lately, I’ve been getting better and better at telling when my avocados are ripe.
Despite making more guacamole in the past few months than I ever thought I would in such a short time, I still make mistakes and cut into one every so often when it’s not yet ripe. I’ve also missed the prime moment of ripeness and cut into many (many!) avocados that are starting to go bad or are not salvageable. At. All. (Yuck.)
Though it’s disappointing to get it wrong, I haven’t given up on making guacamole because of my mistake in assessing whether or not a particular avocado is ready to eat. I make mistakes a lot, and I still get to enjoy delicious guacamole more often than not.
Why? Because I keep trying and working to improve my skill of deducing the level of an avocado’s ripeness. (And because I really, really love fresh, homemade guacamole!) The pleasure of eating my share of guac with K more than outweighs the risk of getting it wrong. When I get it right, OMG — it’s soooo yummy!
Stick with me. There is a lesson (and a recipe) in this.
It’s okay to make mistakes.
It’s better to try something and make mistakes than it is to strive for perfection and be so paralyzed by the potential of failure that you never take the first step. Or to think that you’re not capable, so why even bother?
You are capable. Remember, if there is a chance for failure, the potential for success is there, too, and, with strategic practice and a willingness to learn and grow, you will get better at the skills you are aiming to improve.
When it comes to exercise (or anything else that you are working to get better at doing), give yourself permission to make mistakes and move forward.
If your goal is to exercise 4 days this week for an average of 30 minutes each time, and you are halfway through the week without having logged a single workout yet, don’t give up. Yes, it might not be possible at this point to exercise 4 days this week, but you can still exercise 3 days. And if you do that successfully, that’s worth celebrating. If you’re having a rough week and you only get in one workout of 20 minutes, that’s still better than none.
If the goal is important to you, do what you can do today. And keep trying tomorrow…and the day after that. You don’t have to be perfect with your execution and you don’t have to give up when you know you won’t reach your original goal. Try again. You set that fitness goal for a reason.
Celebrate the times when you get it right and be patient with yourself when you are working on a goal and aren’t able to execute on that goal as planned. The benefits of getting it right most of the time vastly outweigh the times when you don’t. Keep going.
My recipe for guacamole is below. I usually double or triple this and have tacos with my guac. Enjoy!
🥑 Guacamole (serves 2) 🥑
2 to 3 ripe avocados, peeled and pitted
1 small red onion, chopped
1 lime
1/2 tablespoon of minced garlic (optional)
fresh ground black pepper (to taste)
sea salt (to taste)
Add avocados to a bowl and mash with a fork. Add onion, and then squeeze the lime to add its juice to the bowl. Add garlic (optional). Use the fork to mix ingredients. Add fresh ground black pepper and sea salt* to taste. Mix again with fork.
Taste test with a tortilla chip (the saltiness of the chip will help you determine if you need more salt in the guac). Add more salt and pepper, if necessary, and mix again.
*Be careful when adding salt. If you add too much, the best way to fix the batch is to add more ingredients and make a bigger batch!
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