Mistakes: the fuel to grow up!

Nobody wants to fail. The mistake reveals things about us that, many times, we don’t want to find and don’t even know how to deal with it. This is because we meet shame, fear, and insecurity. Feelings that rarely we are taught to deal with healthily while we grow up.

It is even common for these feelings to be left by the side or ignored to have the false sensation that we are in control. Some call it self-sabotage, but I particularly don’t believe that the human wants to self-sabotage or that there is another “me” who really wants to screw yourself. That’s why I want to bring it as protection.

And I tell you why: if we grow up without learning to deal with these annoying feelings, we’ll sign it as bad and strength in us that it is not good to feel. Our brain, longing for defending ourselves from feeling these annoying emotions, starts to tell us that we need:

• avoid situations that generate them;
• discard moments that may bring them;
• to not involve ourselves in tasks or charges in which these emotions might be evident;
• worry about not show this;

and so it goes.

That is, in an unconscious way, we keep molding the situations we will be in to PROTECT ourselves from feeling what we think is unpleasant.

The mistake isn’t the biggest problem

The mistake is not the major problem in your life. Your fear is not of the mistake itself but of everything it brings as meaning and emotion to you. It is what it awakes in you that worries you the most. Do you know why mistakes and emotions are linked?

Because you grew up listening to people saying if you make a mistake, you’ll be a loser or that you won’t be loved. You signify the error as the cause of your sadness, from people’s distance, from lack of love and admiration. Many people deal with low self-esteem by the lack of admiration and estimation while they were kids. And that doesn’t mean to applaud everything that is done but having a host on a mistake, having expression space, and freedom to fail. Because of it, we grow up ashamed of our mistakes, being ashamed of having no success. We grew up charging ourselves not to make mistakes.

An invite to resignification

Resignify is giving a new meaning to something. But how is it possible to do it with failure?

There is no magical formula for it, but there are some auxiliary resources in this process. To resignify something in our lives, we must be open to looking from another perspective to that situation. For this, some resources might be:

• Search the opinion of other people about the error;
• Understand and go deeper into the roots of your relationship with a mistake;
• Dedicate yourself to self-knowledge about who you are and what you want to improve;
• Allow yourself to experience the error, not running away from the emotions that may arise;
• Working the dialogue with unpleasant feelings, learning to deal better with them, and how to welcome them.

That is, learn to deal with your emotions, Ou seja, aprenda a lidar com suas emoções, a ouvir elas e não negá-las. Descubra o que elas querem te dizer, o que desejam proteger e acolha esse sentir. Assim como, busque referências diferentes sobre o erro. E escolha, escolha olhar por outra lente, para ver o quanto errar é importante na nossa história.

3 reflections to strengthen the mistake as a friend:

1. The failure improves us:

Think about everything you have learned till today. Certainly, many of the things had mistakes to improve. This is because while we notice we are failing and have mistakes, we try to improve ourselves and improve our knowledge, abilities, and attitudes. After hurting someone, we want to get better communication with that person. After creating art that didn’t yield much, we will improve it to yield. This learning only comes from failure. Without the error, we would be people locked in many ways.

2. The failure is the engine for creativity

Imagine all the great inventions in the world. To create a lamp, Thomas Edison needed more than 1000 attempts without success. Can you imagine yourself trying something more than 1000 times?

During humanity’s history, failure was the engine for creativity, which improved each day with that failure try or even bringing new discoveries. If we didn’t fail, surely we wouldn’t be as creative as we are.

1. The mistake is the fuel to grow up

“The cost of being wrong is smaller than the cost of doing nothing.”

— Seth Godin

This last topic is an invitation to look to the mistake as a step too. Because, even it is a step that had an unexpected result, it was still a step. And it is more worth a fail step than none.

That who takes the first step and fails is longer than the one who didn’t, because certainly will know that need to test in another way now. The mistake makes us humans, and when we learn to look to it as fuel, we develop more humbleness and emotional intelligence to deal with the uncertainties of life.

Vanessa Mattos

Psychologist CRP 12/19366