How to Recover, Release, and Revamp After Mistakes
Relax! Messing up means you’re human.
No one goes through life without making mistakes. Some mistakes are small; others are monumental; a few are funny.
Not surprisingly, most of us remember our mistakes more vividly than our successes. Not only do we remember them, we beat ourselves up more over them than we take credit for our accomplishments.
According to Clifford Nass, professor of communication at Stanford University:
“Negative emotions generally involve more thinking, and the information is processed more thoroughly than positive ones. Thus, we tend to ruminate more about unpleasant events — and use stronger words to describe them — than happy ones.”¹
The brain was hard-wired to stay alert to potential dangers that could lead us into danger. Part of that vigilance came from our ability to remember mistakes that had unpleasant or dangerous consequences. Survival depended on our ability to be extremely sensitive to threats and to be prepared to respond to bad outcomes while ignoring or discounting good ones.
Mistaking a stick for a poisonous snake is a mistake you make only once.
“The mind is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.” Rick Hanson, PhD.
