Sometimes in my line of work I have cause to counsel people. If I'm speaking to a person who wants to change something about themselves I often use the byline quoted on the top of this page: first decide who you would be, and then do what you have to do.
I have changed quite a few things about myself (with the help of a lot of people, one of them a professional). What I've noticed is that when I try something new it exposes weaknesses in the old me, and I make more mistakes, not less.
It makes sense. You decide to learn to fly fish and you make more daily mistakes than you did before. You learn to fly a plane and you make seventy total mistakes per day instead of three. It's part of learning.
Physician heal thyself. Why did I think that it would be any different for me?
There is, I have learned, a vast difference between being a serious practicing Stoic and a person who knows a little about Stoicism. My mistake count has gone up. I'm more sensitive to other people, now that Stoic cosmopolitanism has made me more aware of them, and I've learned that sometimes I'm not very kind. It's difficult because I realize that I could have been this way all along had I come to Stoicism earlier. One of the hosts of "The Painted Porch" says as much, I think in Podcast 4. How much better would his life had been had he found Stoicism in his twenties?
But the past is gone. I can't change that. I've felt real personal growth as a result of this process, and that is a thing to be grateful for, not a thing to regret.
Somewhere Epictetus compares himself to a doctor, and he compares we students to suffering patients. There's something to that.
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