“Mistake can be the mother of success when one is honest enough to admit and willing to learn from it consistently.”

We will all make mistakes and bad decisions in life. I am not exceptional. Making a paradigm shift and learning from those moments can help us discover the opportunity that is always present.
Mistakes are the simple fact of life. Others may be dismayed by the thought that they might make an error and ‘tarnish’ their life, however, learning to accept that fact and work through it is crucial if you hope to thrive.
The obvious reason for this, is that any mistake is an opportunity. An opportunity for personal improvement and building up confidence. If you have made a mistake, it gives you a chance to deconstruct that error and to learn how to avoid letting it happen again in the future.

The first step is to accept that the mistake happened and then resume your responsibility for it immediately. Humans tend to have the belief that our circumstances are dictated by us, right up until something goes wrong – at which point we blame others for causing those mistakes, or we accuse the weather of being wrong. That is definitely good for our egos, but terribly useless when it comes to preventing future mistakes. It is therefore a bad habit that needed to be quashed.

By accepting the responsibility, you will then be poised to identify precisely where things went wrong and what you could have done differently to help. You first debrief yourself and the objective will guide you mentally through what happened in order to identify the ‘failure points’ where things started to go wrong.

The failure point can be a simple ‘process’ – for instance, it could be that you forgot to preheat the oven before the actual baking. But in other cases, the mistake might be more ‘general’ and related to your emotional state. For instance, a common mistake in all manner of scenarios is to rush.

After identifying the failure points, you can then take note of the things that went wrong and make sure to avoid that mistake next time.

If you find yourself continually making mistakes, then a very quick and easy solution is to create a checklist. This checklist is something that you can consult whenever you perform the same task and it will outline every single step that you need to take, along with cautions for things to avoid.

Checklists have been demonstrated to be highly effective tools for preventing mistakes and errors. Doctors and surgeons for instance will refer to checklists even for tasks that they are highly experienced in and qualified to perform. Research shows that as soon as they stop using the checklist – mistakes start to happen.

Most important is simply to take the right psychological approach to those mistakes made. That means you need to acknowledge them as mistakes and simultaneously avoid letting this hurt your self-esteem. Just because you made a mistake, that doesn’t make you a failure. In fact, many highly successful people would say that they only got to where they are by learning to make mistakes and then get back up and keep going on anyway!

Mistakes and bad decisions are abundant in life, but so are opportunities.

Regardless of what you have done in the past, good or bad, it is in the past. Change is constant. Change makes us different beings with each tick of a clock.
The question we should all ask ourselves is: Are we changing for the better, or worse?

There are no problems in life, only opportunities. Discover yours.