Do your mistakes haunt you?
Steps I have learned to face mistakes.
From the moment we get up, until the moment we are asleep, we make choices. Some choices are easy, and some keep us up all night.
Just think about your daily interactions, and all the choices that influence our interaction with others. The way we will greet someone, what we are saying, questions we are asking, what we are not saying and so much more. Maybe interacting with others comes naturally to you or maybe you are painfully aware of all the little things that are happening. Either way, we are faced with endless choices and depending on our process of making those choices and the outcome, there are a lot of things we can perceive as a mistake.
We all make mistakes, but they don’t affect us in the same way. If you tend to overthink, and many of us do, making a mistake can lead to a very vicious circle. Make a mistake, dwell on it, be more insecure, overthink simple choices, repeat.
Mistakes can make us want to stay in bed in absolute isolation from the entire world, but the thing is, there is no safe play. Humans are codependent, social beings and even if you choose an isolated life, that itself can turn out to be a mistake in the long run.
There is no playbook on what to do when mistakes happen. Still, we have a choice to change the way we look at mistakes. Here are the steps I have learned to follow.
1. Give yourself time to process what happened
You know the plot of all the ghost movies. Wandering alone just because they have some unfinished business on Earth.
Not many things can steal your focus or energy, like having unfinished business. Our mind needs to process everything that has happened, so when there’s something that keeps coming up in your thoughts and feelings, it is time to make space in your life to face that ghost and process the thoughts and feelings.
2. Consider context
Context is everything. When thinking about a mistake, go back to the time and place when the situation occurred. Remember what led you to make a mistake. How did you feel? Was there something important going on in your life? Is this something that is recurring?
We all know what we should and shouldn’t do, but reality is something different. Understanding why something has happened is the first step toward being kinder to yourself and even preventing those mistakes from happening in the future.
3. Think about the things you can change
I’m all about systems, so I’m not talking about grand personality changes, but those little habits that nudge us toward the right choices. Think about the things that are under your control.
Imagine you forgot about your friend’s birthday. Our forgetfulness is influenced by so many factors, such as stress, genetics, and everything else that is happening in our life. We cannot control our memory and we cannot make sure we will remember the birthday, but we can do a lot to be reminded about the birthday in case we forget about it.
There are a ton of tools, ideas, guides we can use to make the system work for us. You definitely won’t apply everything, but you have an opportunity to explore the things that do work for you.
4. Be realistic
In the end, be real with yourself. In retrospect, it is easy to figure out what we should’ve done in a certain situation. Knowing why we did something, being kind to ourselves, accepting what we did, and figuring out how to prevent this in the future is the hard part.
Looking at the future, we can be sure that mistakes will happen and that is scary. Still, we do have control over some things. We are the ones making all the choices and, although we can never know what our choices will bring us, we can ask ourselves if the choice we are making is worth the risk.
Because if it is, we are not making a mistake either way.
