On mistakes

This week, my 9 year old son Nima did something which he doesn't want me to share publicly. The one thing I am allowed to share is that his mistake cost us roughly €400.

This is not an amount that puts my family into any serious challenge, but it is also not little. For many people around the world, this is their monthly income or even exceeds it.

The thing that was even worse, at least from my perspective, was that he did not own the mistake. He first denied that it had happened - despite all the proof we showed him, then he had a bunch of excuses that were just plain stupid, and even after that it took him 2 days to really take ownership for the mistake.

Of course, me being me, he got punished. In our case, punishment obviously does not mean physical harm, it means not being allowed any screen time and also not being allowed to participate in his team's football match today.

Missing out on the football match was the punishment that hurt him the most. For two reasons: 1) He loves to play and does not want to let his team down, and 2) they would be playing a team that beat them last time and he wanted to take revenge.

He tried to convince me to pick some other punishment, but we decided to stick with that... we wanted him to learn this lesson.

Now what does that have to do with leadership?

I have written about the importance of learning several times. The last article on that topic was published two weeks ago: On Failure...

I have emphasized over and over again, that we won't learn if we don't reflect. Today, I want to emphasize on the importance of owning a mistake as this is the foundation to reflect in the first place.

As long as we do not own a mistake, as long as we either deny the mistake happened or have a ton of excuses - trust me, I am/was really good at that myself - we will not face the reflection.

Denial and excuses, take accountability from us. Why should we reflect if it is/was not our fault in the first place? After all, we have been victims of the situation and not the person who did the mistake.

This victim mindset is all around us... we can observe it in politics, in business, in leadership and non-leadership roles, at home, in our relationships, on the football pitch... everywhere.

And I know that I have been there myself. It is just way easier blaming the professor for asking unfair questions when we fail an exam, than looking into the mirror and facing the fact that we did not study enough.

This does not mean that sometimes people are really victims. There are people that become the victim of a crime, the victim of abuse, or the victim of a bully.

But way more often, we are a victim of our own lack of owning our mistakes and shortcomings.

Truly owning our mistakes does not make life harder... we might be afraid of owning them first, but once we do own them, we realize that we have POWER.

This power allows us to change ourselves and our actions and through that change the outcomes of our life.

We realize that it is in our power to study properly for the exam and pass it, it is in our power to prepare the presentation well, it is in our power to create high quality content, it is in our power to gather feedback from our boss... we realize that we are POWERFUL.

In German we have a saying: "Einsicht ist der erster Schritt zur Besserung". This translates to "acceptance is the first step to betterment".

When I observe myself, my kids, and many others it is hard to take that first step. Once we take it, we create momentum. Once we go from 0 to 1, we can much easier go to 2, 3, and 4.

As with anything in life, owning our mistakes is a matter of practice. It becomes easier the more often we do it. We are than capable of reflecting and ultimately learning much quicker.

Enjoy your weekend and remember #FromNothingComesNothing