Making mistakes is part of everyday life, forgetting to lock the car door, missing a deadline, banging a nail into a water pipe, not renewing your passport, tripping over, the list is endless…
They have many potential consequences: losing confidence, injury, financial loss or causing upset and embarrassment. We can offset any consequences by changing the way we react to them, leading to personal growth, happiness and contentment.
With research it became clear that we strive for perfection, which is unrealistic and unobtainable. Striving for perfection can also cause mental or physical harm to people striving for it – are you a perfectionist?
Everybody is imperfect
With this in mind make a mental note of the following to help alter your mindset:
Firstly – we need to recognise that mistakes are going to happen.
Secondly – mistakes are remarkably common.
Thirdly – everybody makes mistakes.
Fourthly – we are all flawed and imperfect.
So, let’s take back control by understanding more about mistakes.
What’s the problem with mistakes?
Having a traditional view of mistakes has a negative impact on us, here’s a few examples:
- We feel foolish and imagine people thinking negatively about us.
- Progress stalls with whatever project we are working on.
- It stunts our self-development, making us less likely to pursue our goals.
- Reduction in our confidence and resilience, even if only we know about it.
- Regret thrives as we remember and dwell on our mistakes rather than our successes.
An alternative perspective of mistakes
A common definition of a mistake includes doing something ‘wrong’, which has negative connotations, however they are necessary and essential. Imagine learning to drive without mistakes, it would be impossible, how could you be expected to drive perfectly first time, stalling a car teaches us how to control the pedals, near misses may teach us that we drive too fast or concentrate too little or have too little experience.
Mistakes help us grow, so recognising, accepting and learning from them helps us develop. They can enable us to build on our resilience, confidence, problem-solving skills, subject expertise and much more. Recognising your mistakes is not about finding ways to avoid making mistakes, it is about avoiding making the same mistake.
Used correctly they lead to competence, an expert is someone who has made mistakes, tried again and repeated this until they become competent at what they do, a heart surgeon would have practised in numerous ways to build competence, and although mistakes will still occur, if used correctly they will lead to development of their skill set and provide leaning for other medical practitioners, which once adopted will reduce these types of mistakes.
It’s making mistakes that has enabled us to be able to drive, walk, talk, write, cycle and many other wonderful things, if we have the self-discipline to learn a lesson from every mistake, we will thrive and become greater than we are, with this in mind let us move on to how.
Acknowledge your mistakes
The problem when something goes wrong is we can too easily see ourselves as a victim, believing that the mistake was the cause of outside forces. We blame others, circumstance, bad luck, or anything else which takes the burden of responsibility from us.
Doing this may make us feel better in the short-term, but ultimately it means that we are deceiving ourselves and giving away control of our own destiny. When we are honest with ourselves and acknowledge the mistake happened because of our actions, we break out of the victim mindset and take back control.
However, sometimes things that go wrong can be caused by outside forces, of which we may have little control, but this is where we need to question what happened and why, this is when it is essential to make this distinction, so we know when we are responsible and when we are not.
Embrace your mistakes
Being open to embracing your mistakes leads you along the path of self-improvement, to take ownership, the following two methods have worked for me:
Share it – to embrace your mistakes confide in a friend, family member or colleague, talking it over helps bring it into the open and we gain a second opinion, ruminating, denying or ignoring mistakes can lead to physical and mental issues. We need to take ownership of our mistakes and see them for what they are.
Record it – make a note of it in whatever form you like, I personally prefer pen and paper, because I feel it has a therapeutic effect, critically analyse it to identify what caused it and what learning can be taken from it.
Some mistakes are so minor they require very little analysis or awareness, others need a lot more attention, discussion, noting and analysis (this is a personal assessment). We all feel and respond differently to things that happen in our lives, so something that may appear trivial to one person may be significant to another and vice versa.
If we admit our mistakes, embrace, and learn from them, we are going to benefit greatly, however this is all reactive, but how can we be more proactive?
A proactive approach
So how can we be proactive and put this into practice? If we admit our mistakes and take ownership, we are building up our resilience and confidence; if it or similar mistakes occur in the future we will be better prepared.
But we can benefit even further, whatever we wish to do in life we can prepare ourselves for things going awry. This isn’t about setting ourselves up for failure and we’re not doom mongering, we’re setting ourselves up for success.
This is especially useful if we have a goal or task we want to complete, we can identify the most likely and serious things that can potentially go wrong and have contingencies or a plan ‘B’. We already plan in life for things going wrong, through the use of insurance, home accident cover, or a rainy-day fund.
If you struggle with being proactive and lack the confidence to admit or make mistakes there are many techniques which can help boost your confidence.
Summing up…
We now have the tools to thrive in life by making, admitting, and embracing mistakes. We know that mistakes are commonly viewed as a negative occurrence which can put us into a negative state, but with a different perspective we can turn a negative state into a more positive state through reacting differently to an event.
Through this new positive perspective we acknowledge, embrace and take ownership of our mistakes. We have become aware that some of the things which go wrong in our lives are out of our control. But when things do go awry we must question whether it was out of our control, our fault, or a combination of the two.
So from now on we should try to respond differently to things that go wrong, and never ever waste a good mistake again.