It's never easy to admit you've made a mistake, but it's a crucial step in learning, growing, and improving yourself.
You can only learn from a mistake after you admit you've made it. As soon as you start blaming other people (or the universe itself), you distance yourself from any possible lesson. But if you courageously stand up and honestly say "This is my mistake and I am responsible" the possibilities for learning will move towards you.
Admission of a mistake, even if only privately to yourself, makes learning possible by moving the focus away from blame assignment and towards understanding. Wise people admit their mistakes easily. They know progress accelerates when they do.
Learning from mistakes requires three things:
·Putting yourself in situations where you can make interesting mistakes
·Having the self-confidence to admit to them
·Being courageous about making changes
The Four Kinds of Mistakes
One way to categorize mistakes is into these categories:
·Stupid: Absurdly dumb things that just happen. Stubbing your toe, dropping your pizza on your neighbor's fat cat or poking yourself in the eye with a banana.
·Simple: Mistakes that are avoidable but your sequence of decisions made inevitable. Having the power go out in the middle of your party because you forgot to pay the rent, or running out of beer at said party because you didn't anticipate the number of guests.
·Involved: Mistakes that are understood but require effort to prevent. Regularly arriving late to work/friends, eating fast food for lunch every day, or going bankrupt at your start-up company because of your complete ignorance of basic accounting.
·Complex: Mistakes that have complicated causes and no obvious way to avoid next time. Examples include makingtough decisions that have bad results, relationships that fail, or other unpleasant or unsatisfying outcomes to important things.
I'm leaving all philosophical questions about mistakes up to you. One person's pleasure is another person's mistake: decide for yourself. Maybe you enjoy stabbing your neighbor's cat with a banana, who knows. We all do things we know are bad in the long term, but are oh so good in the short term. So regardless of where you stand, I'm working with you.
However mistakes are defined in your personal philosophy anyway, this list should help you learn from them.
The Learning From Mistakes Checklist
·Accepting responsibility makes learning possible.
·Don't equate making mistakes with being a mistake.
·You can't change mistakes, but you can choose how to respond to them.
·Growth starts when you can see room for improvement.
·Work to understand why it happened and what the factors were.
·What information could have avoided the mistake?
·What small mistakes, in sequence, contributed to the bigger mistake?
·Are there alternatives you should have considered but did not?
·What kinds of changes are required to avoid making this mistake again? What kinds of change are difficult for you?
·How do you think your behavior should/would change in you were in a similar situation again?
·Work to understand the mistake until you can make fun of it (or not want to kill others that make fun.
·Don't over-compensate: the next situation won't be the same as the last.
“ Many times what we perceive as an error or failure is actually a gift. And eventually we find that lessons learned from that discouraging experience prove to be of great worth"
I hope this article has been helpful.
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