How to deal with Mistakes?

Making mistakes usually plunges us into a wave of conflicting emotions resulting from the mental bombardment of thoughts like: How did I not realize it before? How could this happen to me? Whom can I blame? What do I do to fix it? and so on.

The moment is often so bitter that the fear of making mistakes seems more than justified.

However, there is a compelling reason why this fear should not exist, as, just like with death itself, making mistakes is unavoidable. The fact that we dislike what we feel when we make mistakes —or the discomfort generated by the word "death"— will not prevent it from happening.

The reason is none other than that mistakes —and their underlying bitterness— are what help us grow and become the people we desire to be. If it didn't hurt to make mistakes, we would never learn from them and would live like in Groundhog Day, where every day, regardless of what we do, we would get the same result: stagnation…

We must, therefore, understand the error in its purest essence as a rough diamond imbued with immense opportunities, as it is these errors that will help us become more aware, more present, know ourselves better, grow, and improve.

The question is How can we rid ourselves of its dire consequences? In the following exercise, I will outline steps to use mistakes as a tool for improvement instead of sinking into its aftermath.

Step 1. Recreate in your mind the mistake committed and feel the negative emotions it produces. Moving through the emotions instead of avoiding or repressing them is crucial for this process. If you want to learn how to release emotions, follow this link.

Step 2. Take responsibility for the mistake committed. The moment is often so bitter that our defense mechanism leads us to justify ourselves. Avoiding that justification and fully taking responsibility for the error will help us release all the negative consequences it produces.

In this act of taking responsibility, we must identify the internal aspect that led us to err. Thus, it could turn out that at that moment we were being very selfish, or very complacent, or dominated by fear or anxiety, or simply operating on autopilot without being very aware. Recognizing that aspect can result in an interesting invitation to change it; and in that sense, strive to be less selfish, less absent, less complacent, less fearful… Remember, every mistake carries within it an opportunity for growth, and identifying our negative aspects and transforming them is the springboard to that.

It is important not to confuse responsibility with guilt, as the latter does not invite us to change but to sinking, while taking responsibility awakens in us the desire for improvement and transformation.

Step 3. Commit to changing the aspect identified in the previous step. Being an active part of life, pushing us to grow and improve, will cause our thoughts to lose focus on the aftermath of the error and turn towards the array of opportunities that life constantly presents us.

Every fall makes us stronger, and the greater it is, the greater our evolution will be; mistakes are the gifts that life sends us to help us bring out our best version.