Fear of making mistakes can hold you back from creating something new, taking up a challenge, or reinventing your life.
Here are 5 quick tips on making mistakes:
1. Be willing to make mistakes. Keeping a beginner’s mind allows you to explore possibilities, hone in on what works, and eventually build your expertise. There will be discomfort, hesitation and doubt. Let go of the struggle with all of that. Learn, adapt, and most of all, make room for mistakes. A confident, victorious finish can begin with a clumpy, first step.
2. Celebrate your mistakes. Yes, you can! Instead of tightening up and holding back, open up and give it your all, at the risk of making mistakes. Smile, make amends, and move on if you step on your partner’s toes while learning to dance, hit the wrong note as you play your solo piano piece, and flub your lines during rehearsal. Mistakes are key ingredients of true success.
3. Reflect on your mistakes. Reflection doesn’t mean dwelling on and complaining about what went badly, but rather on what you learned from it. What critical piece of information did you gain? What unique insight came your way? How did the experience deepen your perspective? How will you apply the lessons next time?
4. Know that mistakes happen to the best of us. In our culture of denial and blame, hardly anyone likes to ‘fess up about mistakes. But each and every one of us has made mistakes that caused big shifts or triggered small rifts. Even the experts aren’t immune to them.
5. Learn the difference between making a mistake and making a bad decision. Cutting yourself some slack doesn’t mean you get to put out sloppy work, blow your budget, and ignore reliable intel, and then call them “mistakes” to downplay the consequences. Cheating on your taxes, lying to your spouse, embellishing your qualifications, and backstabbing your colleague is not a mistake. It’s a choice. You got caught. Your bluff was called. Own up to it.
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Photo by: Nikita Lukianets
