Learning From our Failures and Mistakes

How can we make sure our past is a source of resources that help us make good decisions in the present moment—which undoubtedly affects our future?

In my previous article, we saw how our?disempowering memories, as well as thinking about the past through a negative lens, create our self-limiting feelings and emotions.

In this article, we will look at some practical ways to transform our negative, self-limiting memories, and put them to work for us!

Failure and Mistakes are not what we think they are!

Analyzing our successes is not the only way to learn from our past. We can also learn a lot from our failures and mistakes. And the key to doing that is to change the way we look at those two words.

Failures and mistakes are just words that belong to the negative past corners of our minds. It is a choice we make to see neutral events as negative. However, we can transform their meaning and put them to work for us, by learning from them!

We perceive—in the present moment—events from the past as failures or mistakes because we didn’t give ourselves a fair chance to learn from and cherish those events when they happened. We didn’t analyze the events and elevated our limited interpretations and conclusions to a self-empowering level, to make them part of our positive past.

Overcoming failure

Many times we see failure as a negative thing. But literally, to fail means to not hit the mark or the target; it means that we didn’t get the result we—or others—were looking for. Simply try again! Someone wise once said that you only really fail when you stop trying. It is when you stop trying that you have decided to make from your latest result... your last one.

There is a famous and useful acronym that can help us transform our definition of failure.

F.A.I.L.?=?First Attempt In Learning

You tried something, and you don’t like the results. That is all right. Learn from your first attempt, and keep trying. Go from F.A.I.L. to what I call S.A.I.L.

S.A.I.L.?=??Second Attempt In Learning

When you allow yourself to fail, and learn from your actions, you are then free to sail in the direction of your dreams. The wind is always blowing, waiting for you to deploy your sails, so it can take you to your north. But if you don’t know what your north is, everything can feel like a failure (or a success…)

The other word we need to reframe and change its meaning is mistakes.

Overcoming mistakes

Interestingly enough, one of the definitions for the word mistake is "to commit an offense". I couldn’t agree more, since by using that word we are offending ourselves! We are hurting our emotional well-being. I propose we stop that, shall we?

Another definition of mistake is to misunderstand, misinterpret and take something in the wrong sense. This is exactly right. We misunderstand events, by interpreting them as negative instead of what they really are: neutral.

The only mistake we really make is when we think "we’ve made a mistake". My dear, if you feel you’ve made a mistake, the only truth here is that you have tried something, and you have gotten a different result than what you expected or would have wanted.

Try again! Do what they do in the movies: If you made a “mistake”, see it as “take 1” in the movie of your life, and quickly make a “take 2”. We are the directors of our own movies... if we choose so.

So how do we transform our “mistakes” and ”failures”?

We do that by learning from those neutral events we coded in a negative in our memories. We bring them back to the surface of our consciousness, learn from them, and transform their meaning to us.

And we can do that by asking ourselves questions like:

• What happened?
• How am I seeing this in a limited way?
• What am I not seeing here?
• What did I do to cause this situation?
• What did I want to achieve?
• What could I have done differently?
• What will I do differently next time something like this happens?
• What can I learn from all this?
• How is this whole thing good for me and my future?

The moment you do this, you transform the memory into a powerful source of resources that improve your confidence, motivation, and clarity. This opens up a new way of feeling and being in the present, that cannot help but transform your possibilities in the future.

When you take responsibility for your own thoughts and learning in this way, you transform your emotions, yourself, and your life, which changes the kind of impact you have on others and their lives as well.

Learning from the failures and mistakes of others

Just like we can learn from the successes of others, we can do the same with the beautiful attempts in learning of others.

Every time someone you know goes through a challenge or problem (two other words we could challenge), it is a learning opportunity, both for ourselves and the other.

But we can’t force people to do this work of self-mastery. Most people don’t like it because they don’t like taking responsibility for their own thoughts and feelings—it is always easier to blame others for our own problems. But you are not like that. You get this stuff, and you want to be the master of your own reality.

What we can do is benefit from their situations and learn; mine the gold that is waiting there for us to take, and use it to make our lives better, easier, and more beautiful.

Some questions we can ask ourselves are:

• What happened?
• How did the other manage to get into that situation?
• What would I do differently if that would happen to me?
• What can I learn from all this?
• How can these learnings be good for me and my future?

When we do this, not only will we learn valuable lessons that we place in the positive past corner of our minds, but we also enable ourselves to become great friends and coaches for those who are open enough to our feedback, ideas, and love. We are able to provide the gift of perspective to people, which is something we all could use more of, no matter how self-aware we think we are.

“Everybody needs a coach. The one thing people are never good at is seeing themselves as others see them.” - Eric Schmidt

How self-empowering is your memory?

You can find out by taking the?Mind Resourcefulness Assessment.

I sincerely hope you have enjoyed this article and the insights you got from your assessment.

InJoy, Juan Campoo

About the author

Juan Campoo is a seasoned transformational coach and behavioral expert facilitating personal and organizational evolution. Creator of the Mind Canvas model for personal mastery and writer of the Amazon Best-Selling book under the same name. In the last 10+ years, he has coached, trained, and taught more than 12.000 people either 1-on-1, in groups, or through online courses. Check out the free resources ?? here.