If you’re like most people you hate the idea of making mistakes. Who wouldn’t? We get taught from a very early age that making mistakes is bad. All through school, you get punished for making mistakes and rewarded for not making them.
Imagine if the teacher said to you: “I’m so pleased that you got 51% of this test wrong”. It doesn’t happen. In fact, even if you got 90%, the teacher would concentrate on the 10% you got wrong.
And so we develop the erroneous belief that we must avoid making mistakes at all costs. But the problem is, when we aren’t making mistakes we are also aren’t learning.
Think of a baby learning to walk. Babies fall over all the time when they are learning to walk. Unless she makes mistakes, she’s not going to even be able to stand. She has to keep trying, learning a little bit from every mistake and finally taking her first steps. It’s only by making mistakes that you learn what works and what doesn’t.
Ask any successful person and they will tell you that they learnt far more from their mistakes than from their successes. Most successful businesspeople have a few failed companies and bankruptcies in their past that set the groundwork for their subsequent success.
Part of being confident is being able to try new things. To cross over from your area of competence into new areas and not feel intimidated and immobilised by fear. When you venture into new areas that are not your strength, you are likely to make mistakes. But it is only with making mistakes that you learn and with the lessons you learn you broaden your experience.
In other words, success in any field means you need to be willing to make mistakes. So how do you make yourself cope better with mistakes. Again, like with much of confidence building, it’s about modifying your beliefs. What are your beliefs about mistakes? Do you feel like mistakes attack your self-worth? Do you feel like mistakes mean you are less of a person. The most empowering way to think of mistakes is to stop calling them mistakes and instead describe them as learning. It is part of learning. And to add to this, the more mistakes you are making, the faster you are likely to be learning.
The person who makes the most mistakes learns the fastest.
In other words, if you want to learn quickly, you need to be out there making as many mistakes as possible. And surely, we all want to learn things as fast as possible. What’s the benefit in slowing down your progress?
The more comfortable you can be with mistakes, the more likely you are to succeed.
Action Step:
Today, notice if you make any mistakes in anything you do. See what you learn from it. I can guarantee you will learn more from the mistake than you would from a flawless performance. You just need to look for the lesson.