Are you Learning from your Mistakes?

Have you ever made the same mistake twice? If you are like most people, you have. At the mistake-making moment you may declare ‘I will never do that again.’

Easier said than done.

Despite our best intentions we keep making the same blunders over and over. We are creatures of habit. Conventional wisdom says a mistake is a ‘teachable moment'. But if learning from our mistakes is so significant, why do we keep making the same ones over and over?

Mistakes are valuable.

Think back to all the mistakes you have made in your life and consider how they have strengthened your character and ability. Consider the plethora of skills that your mistakes have taught you, and how they have shaped your knowledge, personality, your social development, and your life experience.

Mistakes are valuable. However, for them to be of true value, you must first see them as a beneficial and critical part of your life that you cannot avoid, and you must actively learn from them, not just assume you have.

How to Learn the Lessons

There are a lot of things we should consider when learning from our slip-ups, mishaps, oversights and more significant errors. Here are 3 thoughts that I had about what might be stopping us from truly learning the lessons and changing our behaviours.

You haven’t acknowledged the mistake.

Avoiding and rationalising mistakes will just cause them to repeat. You have to face the issue head on to put it behind you. It is not someone else’s fault. Or the fault of some extraneous circumstance. ‘I dropped the ice cream because there was a crack in the pavement’. Or because ‘you made me rush’. My presentation wasn’t well received because ‘the audience didn’t understand the concept.’ The meeting ran so long because ‘John wouldn’t stop talking’. Maybe the real issues are – don’t run while wearing flip-flops and carrying an ice cream. Understand your audience before preparing your presentation. Improve your meeting facilitation skills.

You are not learning the right lesson.

Imagine that you received some feedback from an interviewer who said you talked too much. You reflected on that and learned the lesson to speak more slowly. In the next interview, at a different organisation, you are incredibly careful over your words. To your disappointment you are now told that you appeared hesitant. Seems like you can’t win. But think about it. Is the lesson about the speed and fluency of your speech – or is the lesson more about being tuned into the interviewer and pacing yourself accordingly? It’s great to listen to feedback, but you need to dig deep and determine the real issue – which may not be the obvious one.

The lesson hasn’t translated to wider circumstances.

Let’s say you were caught by a speed camera at the intersection of Elm and 4th. You learned your lesson – don’t speed at Elm and 4th. The very next week you have been caught speeding on the motorway. You learned a lesson but it only applied in one place, circumstance or situation. This type of thinking really limits your learning. You need to consider the wider lesson. And what habits you can build to ensure it is embedded in.

But regardless of the type of mistake, this remains true: When you step back and take the time to learn from your mistakes, you stopped repeating bad habits and patterns. You grow and develop. Mistakes are a necessary component of change.

“Admitting your mistakes makes you humble. But not repeating your mistakes makes you clever.” — Sarvesh Jain