Okay, I know, know...no need to alert the media; this is hardly a revelation. You make mistakes too! So does everyone you know. We all do. There’s not a person living who hasn’t messed up, failed at something, bailed on someone, tanked, stumbled, blundered, slipped up, fallen short or been a big ol’ flop at some point or another.
Good intentions are great, but it’s virtually impossible to follow through on all of them. Life gets in the way sometimes, despite our best efforts, and even the most controlled, focused, determined folks are faced with circumstances beyond their control on occasion. Can we all agree that nobody’s perfect? Yes? So holding ourselves to unreasonable standards of perfection doesn’t make any sense at all, no matter who we are or what our circumstances may be. It’s simply a bar too high, and failing to clear it can discourage us from attempting anything at all.
Messing up is one of the major ways human beings learn to do things. Sure, some of us try and succeed at a few things right away — we all get lucky sometimes, and our innate talents or the right set of circumstances can mean we skip the “messing up” stage of things on occasion — but for most us, we fail a whole bunch. Good thing failure is instructive.
When we have a less-than-ideal result it gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the failure, examine what we did (if anything) that contributed to the result, figure out what went wrong or didn’t work for us, decide what we can change to make our next effort successful, and try again. That last part is really important, so I’ll risk repeating myself: TRY AGAIN. Because most of the time, we’ll have to.
Dwelling on the failed effort doesn’t help, but learning from it certainly does. If you can hang onto the lesson and let go of the feelings associated with the failure itself, you’re making mistakes work for you, instead of just making mistakes.
A series of failures can be disheartening, as anyone who has tried (and tried, and tried, and #%!*#%!! tried again) to make major behavioral changes knows all too well. It wears us down. It makes us question ourselves. It gives us an excuse to beat ourselves up, perhaps following some self-critical inner script (a script we totally need to ditch, by the way).
But even the longest string of apparent failures can be useful, and even something to celebrate. Because even if we’re failing (for now) at least we’re making an effort, and continued effort is pretty much the only way to (eventually) succeed. Failures show that we’re giving it a shot...and if we can allow ourselves to learn from those mistakes, they weren’t useless after all, were they?
Who’s Your Little GUS Buddy?
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