Everybody who cooks knows that if we have a precise recipe, we´ll get a precise meal. If we have a mistake in the recipe, the result will not be what we expected.

If you have the right recipe in different areas of your life, and if you follow the recipe, your result will be what you expect. The only thing you need to do is to follow the instructions.

Let me share a story to make my point clear.

There was a first grade teacher who one day asked her students: Does anyone know how to cook something?

And this little girl raised her hand and said with both confidence and excitement: I do!

"I know how to make toast" she said, "First I put it in the toaster; then I wait until smoke starts coming out of it and the bread gets all black, finally I scrape the toast in the sink with a knife."

We may want to smile because we know that that´s how she´s seen her mom or dad make toast a few times.  Why does she know how to make the toast that way? It is obvious that she didn't get the recipe right. But now I want you to consider this:

Is the girl stupid? You know she´s not.
Is the girl a loser? You know she´s not.
Is the girl worse than the other children in her class only because her mom lets the toast burn, and she happens to learn that with perfect accuracy? You know she´s not.

The only thing wrong with this girl is that she has the wrong recipe.
There are recipes for everything in life. Recipes for how to get better at sports, have more friends, scare all of your friends away, "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" (Starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey), etc.

I know somebody who is still single, and the reason she is single is because she has the wrong recipe about how to properly interact with a boyfriend.

One day she finally got a new boyfriend, she loved him so much and I asked her: "Hey, let´s go for dinner tonight, so you can tell me all about your boyfriend."
- No - she told me - Tonight I´m having a romantic dinner with my boyfriend.
- That´s fine with me, tomorrow, let´s go tomorrow.
- No, tomorrow I´m having a romantic dinner with my boyfriend too.
- What about Saturday? I said.
- On Saturday, I´m having a romantic picnic with my boyfriend.

So, I got the idea. She only has time for the boyfriend, but still I told her: "I think that at some point your boyfriend will need to get some time for himself. You´re going to suffocate the poor guy with romantic stuff every day."

She did not listen to me, but I knew that that was not the recipe for keeping a boyfriend.

My friend´s boyfriend broke up with her in less than 2 weeks.  That really hurt her and hurt her self-esteem as a human being. There was nothing wrong with her. She was simply following the wrong recipe.

That is a clear example of how we choose to approach life sometimes.

First: we have wrong information: the wrong recipe. We missed something in the learning process…
Therefore, we don´t get good results, or at least the results we were expecting.
Then, and this is the worst part of all: we come to conclusions, and the conclusions are something like this…

I´m really stupid, I don´t know why I cannot even keep a guy with me.
I´m a loser.
I´m no good.
We ruminate so much about our flaws and our mistakes that we end up feeling very bad. Then we end up trying to punish ourselves at a subconscious level.

Here is another real-life example of something that happened to me when I was 14 years old.

I decided to bake cookies for my family.  I took a recipe out, went to the supermarket and bought whatever the recipe took which was the following:

Shortening
Cream of Tartar
Baking soda
And sugar

Back then I did not know any better, but my grandma who was watching knew…

-Alba, -she said -your recipe is wrong, cookies take flour.
-No grandma, these cookies are different- and I kept on mixing.
Alba, every cookie on earth has flour in it.
And insisted to be right

-Alba, for the amount of shortening you are using, you should at least add 3 cups of flour, please do this for me, add at least one cup so you get some consistency.

I agreed to add some flour, not because I wanted to, but because I was getting tired of her nagging. (Nagging does work, unfortunately)

My cookies turned out disgusting, very greasy, hard and tasted like baking soda

I was very mad, because I had been working all evening to end up with cookies like that.

I started eating them and at the same time telling myself: "I can´t believe I cannot even make cookies, I must be very stupid. I´m an awful cook. What a waste of time and money." While thinking that I kept on eating, and eating and eating.  Until I made myself sick.

I punished myself by eating the cookies. At the time I couldn´t just let go and say: "Wrong recipe, there´s nothing wrong with me".

If we let our mistakes define our self-worth we end up:
Overfeeding ourselves
Letting others abuse us
Getting sick repeatedly
Losing our self-confidence
Accepting less from life, because we think we´re not that important after all.

And all that can start, because we had the wrong recipe.