Accepting Your Mistakes: The First Step to Improvement!

Everyone makes mistakes- including your friend, your sibling, and even your boss. However, you do not have to let your mistakes define you.

I was at a technical for UBAA with Chiampou, Travis, Besaw, and Kershner (CTBK) and one of the auditors that were representing the firm gave a great example of how she did not let her mistakes hold her back. When she first started at CTBK, she was not a great auditor and made frequent mistakes. However, she set small goals for herself and worked on one mistake at a time. She would look at one mistake from her audits and think “I will not do that again.”

This is the type of mindset you need to have throughout college and, especially, the workplace. This type of mindset is called a growth mindset. A growth mindset is the idea that you are always improving and that there is always something you can work on. I learned about this mindset while I was a Music Education major, but I have realized that the growth mindset can easily be applied to all areas of study.

Now, here comes the fun part. The part where I talk about MY mistake while presenting. Last semester (coincidentally the same semester as my best presentation with PwC), I was presenting with a group for a class and I only had to read one slide. Easy peasy! Or is it…? I ended up getting cocky and I never practiced or rehearsed what I was going to say. Before you know it, I was stumbling over my words and could not say “Amazon.com” to save the life of me. That presentation was the worst presentation I have ever given.

Instead of beating myself up for it. I honed in on what I did wrong and what I should improve. The main issue that I had was that I did not practice. I made a whole blog post on practicing and rehearsing because it is SO important. Now I know that I MUST practice to be successful.

In the end, it is never fun to admit to your mistakes and say “I was wrong.” But, admitting that you made a mistake is the first step to improvement!