Embracing Growth: How to Learn from Your Mistakes and Move Forward
We All Make Mistakes
As human beings, we are bound to make mistakes. It's a natural part of life and an essential aspect of personal and professional growth. However, many of us tend to shy away from our mistakes, allowing fear, guilt, and shame to hold us back. But making mistakes is just a part of life. We take people for granted. We do something bone-headed. Sometimes, our temper or excitement gets the best of us, and we do something we’re not proud of. Know that you’re not alone – it happens to everyone. It’s just part of the human experience.
Not only are you not alone, I would argue that mistakes are part of what gives our life depth and texture. With the right perspective, every mistake can serve as a lesson toward resilience and personal growth. Despite the inevitability of mistakes as well as how they can help you develop and grow, society (and often each of us as individuals) places an emphasis on perfection…which is ridiculous. When we’re able to embrace the notion that mistakes are just going to happen (to everyone), we uncover a new outcome of mistakes: empowerment and self-discovery.
The Importance of Embracing Growth
Embracing growth is crucial for our personal and professional development. When we are willing to acknowledge and learn from mistakes, we open ourselves up to new opportunities and possibilities. Growth allows us to expand our knowledge, skills, and perspectives, enabling us to become better versions of ourselves.
For a long time, I was hesitant to own up to my mistakes. I fell into the trap of having a fixed mindset about myself (read more about fixed versus growth mindsets here). If we believe our level of talent will remain unchanged through life, we will have a tendency to hide our mistakes from others to avoid looking somehow less-than. In the process, we miss the chance to improve.
Instead, we should face mistakes head-on though a lens of growth. Take stock of what happened, how you might do it better next time, and what lessons you can learn. This process underlies one of the main reasons I find so much power in simplicity coaching. Once you know what and why you want to change, you can work with a partner to encourage you and measure your progress forward. Over time, new habits and thought processes emerge, and you can become a truer version of yourself that is less burdened by things that don’t serve you.
Understanding the Role of Mistakes in Your Development
Mistakes are not failures; they are opportunities for growth. When we make mistakes, we have the chance to learn valuable lessons that can shape our future success. Mistakes provide us with feedback on what didn't work and allow us to course-correct and try again. By understanding that mistakes are stepping stones to improvement, we can shift our mindset and embrace them as a necessary part of our journey.
There’s no point in continuing to beat yourself over a mistake, but it is important to understand that there was an issue and how we can do better. Was the “good time” of drinking too much worth the error in judgment we made? Was being right worth the cost of a friendship? Was disappointing your partner worth spending more time at work?
We’re all going to screw up from time to time, and there’s really nothing we can do about it. What matters is what you do next. Can you learn something from your mistake and continue to strive for improvement? If you can make amends for the mistake, do it. If not, take your lumps and move on. Those are really the only ways forward. Living in regret not only is a terrible place to be – it also doesn’t serve you as you try to do better going forward.
The Power of Learning from Mistakes
Mistakes are opportunities to learn, though it requires humility and a willingness to reflect on our actions. When we take the time to analyze our mistakes, we gain insights into what went wrong and how we can improve. This self-reflection allows us to identify patterns, make better decisions, and avoid repeating the same errors in the future.
I’m reminded of the famous line from Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So, step one is that you need to something different if you want a different result. Even if you’re not sure what that something different is, you owe it to yourself to try…something, anything different. The crux is that we can’t just ignore mistakes, but we can’t dwell on them either. We must strike a balance – one that propels us forward in a positive way.
Once you’ve internalized the lessons to be learned, it’s time to let the mistake go. There is no value to be had from carrying a weight around that serves no good purpose for you. If others remind you of the mistake you made, it has become their problem…not yours.
Overcoming Fear and Guilt Associated with Making Mistakes
Fear and guilt often accompany our mistakes, hindering our growth. It's crucial to recognize that making mistakes does not define our worth or competence. Everyone stumbles and falls along the way; it's how we respond to our mistakes that truly matters. By acknowledging our feelings, we can work to overcome them and embrace the growth opportunities that mistakes present.
The bitter truth of making a mistake is that it comes with consequences, and there’s nothing we can do about that. It may erode trust someone had in us or cost us money to fix. If the mistake is big enough, we may lose a relationship with a friend or loved one. Consequences suck, but that’s just the way it is. That often sounds something like: I just wish I hadn’t done that…
Retrospective guilt, though, is useless…at least on its own. What matters is what we do next: How can I learn from the mistake and do better next time?
Many philosophies and religions underscore the importance of learning from and moving on from mistakes. A few examples are:
Stoicism: “If anyone can refute me – show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective – I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone.” –Marcus Aurelius
Minimalism: Finding the benefit in getting rid of something you don’t use, even though it was expensive when you bought it. The sunk cost fallacy.
Christianity: For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes. Proverbs 24:16
Judaism: God never asked us not to make mistakes. All He asks is that we acknowledge them when we make them, apologize, make amends, heal the relationships we harmed, and commit ourselves not to make the same mistake again. The Rabbi Sacks Legacy
Many parents: “You’ll do better next time.”
Unfortunately, many of us have a difficult time actually taking the advice. Sometimes we hear societal pressures that amplify the fear of failure, and we hide from mistakes we may have made. And when we hide from our mistakes, we’re reluctant to take risks or step outside our comfort zones going forward. None of which serves us as individuals or as a society.
Strategies for Embracing Mistakes and Turning Them into Opportunities
Cultivating a Growth Mindset
A growth mindset is the belief that our abilities and intelligence can be developed through dedication and effort. By developing and embracing a growth mindset, we can view mistakes as opportunities for learning and improvement rather than as setbacks. This mindset shift allows us to approach challenges with resilience and persistence, knowing that we can grow and develop through our mistakes.
Seeking Feedback and Learning from Others
Feedback is invaluable when it comes to learning from our mistakes. By actively seeking feedback from mentors, coaches, and people we trust, we gain valuable insights and alternative perspectives. This feedback can help us identify blind spots, challenge our assumptions, and provide us with new strategies for moving forward.
See Failure Through a Different Lens
I tend to frame moving on mistakes in one of four ways:
Embracing Simplicity
Life can seem complex. We’re trying to navigate our own path, while dealing with all the intersecting paths of everyone else. Whether the other people involved are your own family, your neighbors, or from the internet (so, all the people), it’s a lot. Simplicity encourages you to strip way the unnecessary clutter of stuff, circumstance, and other people’s expectation in favor of the things that are most important to you…your core values and living within your life. When we can simplify our perspectives and expectations, we create a clearer path forward. If we know mistakes are teachers we cannot avoid and we’re on a mission to build a life focused on what’s most important to us, simplicity encourages you to take the lesson and move on. Lingering on a mistake does not serve you in your larger goal.
Power of Acceptance
We all want to be on a journey of personal development, not stuck in grime of self-doubt and criticism. Rather than viewing mistakes as failures, acknowledging and accepting them as stepping stones to growth unlocks a next step on that journey. When we can cut through the noise of self-criticism, we’re able to build a more compassionate and understanding relationship with ourselves.
Take Control of Your Life
Taking control of your life means that you prioritize the things that are most important to you so you can more of what you want out of life. I think we all want that, but we’re not always clear how to take the next step. While it certainly involves perspective and self-work, it also requires a balance between ambition and self-compassion. This approach doesn’t mean that we just run roughshod over everyone and everything in our way; it means we set realistic expectations for ourselves and work toward achievable milestones toward the ultimate goals we have for ourselves. When we take control of our lives, we protect our time and attention, which means we not only reduce the chances for mistakes that come from overcommitment (to things we don’t want to do anyway) but we also enhance our ability to learn from the inevitable mistakes that will happen.
Learn, Adapt, Thrive
This is the mindset of continuous learning, where mistakes are just opportunities to learn, change, and do better. This mentality is a simpler approach to problem-solving that pushes us toward success by building on the mistakes (lessons) we encounter. This approach is about curiosity and developing and embracing a growth mindset.
Tools and Resources for Learning from Mistakes
There are various tools and resources available to help us learn from our mistakes and grow. Here are a few examples:
Journaling: Writing down your thoughts and reflections on your mistakes can provide clarity and help us identify patterns or areas for improvement.
Celebrate Mistakes: I'm not suggesting you should throw a party with every mistake, but it is possible to find a silver lining and work toward keeping a positive attitude. As you work through the transition of accepting a mistake, consider ways you have grown from the experience, how you might do something different next time, and then celebrate mistakes.
Coaching and mentorship: Working with a coach or mentor can provide personalized guidance and support in navigating through our mistakes and learning from them.
The most important thing here is to find what works well for you. How can you create the space for introspection and perspective?
Embrace Growth and Move Forward with Confidence
Embracing growth requires us to embrace our mistakes and learn from them. The longer we live, the more mistakes we’re going to make. It’s a natural part of life. That said, we can appreciate the opportunities for growth and for learning more about ourselves. Embracing the reality that we’re all going to make mistakes frees us from the fear of failure and allows us to take control of our lives. Simplicity becomes a guiding principle, helping us navigate the complexities of life with resilience. By accepting our imperfections, learning from our mistakes, and simplifying our approach to life, we can transform setbacks into stepping stones toward a more fulfilling and empowered future.
