Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” - Albert Einstein
It's never easy to admit you've made a mistake, but it's a crucial step in learning, growing, and improving yourself.Many of us — though more likely most of us — fear making mistakes. And it makes sense. We live in a mistake-phobic society, according to clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel, Ph.D.
The most important life lessons we will ever learn will be from the bad decisions we make. Time and experience can be excellent teachers when you actually learn a lesson from your poor decisions. Experience comes from our way of living, understanding and the adjustments we make. It also comes from suffering, agony and the ordeals we are afflicted by.
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.
This advice runs counter to the cultural assumptions we have about mistakes and failure, namely that they are shameful things. We're taught in school, in our families, or at work to feel guilty about failure and to do whatever we can to avoid mistakes. This sense of shame combined with the inevitability of setbacks when attempting difficult things explains why many people give up on their goals: they're not prepared for the mistakes and failures they'll face on their way to what they want. What's missing in many people's beliefs about success is the fact that the more challenging the goal, the more frequent and difficult setbacks will be. The larger your ambitions, the more dependent you will be on your ability to overcome and learn from your mistakes.
But for many reasons admitting mistakes is difficult. An implied value in many cultures is that our work represents us: if you fail a test, then you are a failure. If you make a mistake then you are a mistake (You may never have felt this way, but many people do. It explains the behavior of some of your high school or college friends). Like eggs, steak and other tasty things we are given letter grades (A, B, C, D and F) organizing us for someone else's consumption: universities and employers evaluate young candidates on their grades, numbers based on scores from tests unforgiving to mistakes.
For anyone who never discovers a deeper self-identity, based not on lack of mistakes but on courage, compassionate intelligence, commitment and creativity, life is a scary place made safe only by never getting into trouble, never breaking rules and never taking the risks that their hearts tell them they need to take.
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
We need to learn from our mistakes so that we do not run the risk of repeating them. We must develop the wisdom and sense to make good decisions and choices. Good judgment will only develop if you truly learn from your mistakes. Unfortunately, for many people, it takes a few repeats of the same mistake to learn the lesson.
Good or bad, experiences are what help us learn lessons and form a better sense of judgment. Bad judgment seems to stick with us longer as a lesson learned because we really do not want to keep repeating it. Wisdom is the knowledge you can gain from making mistakes