Seven Tools to Stop Worrying about Making Mistakes.

If you can train yourself to do this – the simplest and quickest method to change your view on any apparent mistake or failure. The hard thing is with this is getting yourself to believe it. I am not a lover of affirmations – i.e. just saying to yourself with blind positivity things like – I am worthy, I am enough. There has to be something behind it. Anyway, this one goes like this 

 

What you say now, “I made a mistake”, “I failed”. 

 

What you could say to change your perception “I learned”, “I am wiser than before” 

 

Try this and see how the world in your head and heart subtly changes from you being a sad, lonely figure (inaccurate anyway), to one who tried to succeed but didn’t quite get there. How many times did it take Thomas Edison to create a working light bulb? A lot. 

 

If you find yourself making the same mistake, and berate yourself as someone who isn’t learning, and therefore says “Why can’t I learn?” or” Why do I always get it wrong?” or “What’s the matter with me?”, then you can reframe this situation as 

 

“I am aware of this pattern”. When you are aware, you can act. So even making a mistake twice can give you a lift as you are noticing and not just blindly getting things wrong. Give yourself some power and energy back. 

The absolute catastrophe that you are predicting? Humans have been shown to be terrible at predicting how things will turn out. We think that things that are going to be brilliant turn out to be quite good, and events that we project will be disastrous turn out to be OK or a mild pain in the arse. It’s the brain’s job to predict, to anticipate, so that we may act if things go wrong. It’s a survival mechanism, getting ready to keep ourselves out of danger. 

 

If you follow this line of self-questioning, you will find yourself realising that even if events go sideways, you have the capability to manage the situation. 

 

You ask this question:- 

 

 

Then you answer something like this:- 

 

 

Using the IF…THEN technique to build yourself a contingency plan is powerful and allows you to put down your worries and get on with the job. 

 

If it turns out there is an error in your method, it is an opportunity to get things right and learn something new. 

 

The worst case often leads to new avenues of exploration and learning. 

 

Look at the Great Fire of London, which wiped out the Bubonic Plague in the city, removed old buildings riddled with disease, paving the way for new sanitary systems. I don’t mean look for disaster but carve out some space to realise that what will be will be, and sunshine follows rain. 

Just because you made a mistake, it doesn’t mean you’re useless, that you should feel guilty or even worthless. The mistake is not part of you; it is something which happens to you. You are human. We all make mistakes. 

 

Offer yourself some kindness as you would to a friend who might have been in your position. You would say, “Pick yourself up. You made a mistake. So what!” 

 

You could even think of putting an arm around yourself. As if you were a wise sage, comforting a part of you just trying to do their best. 

Sometimes we set out on a task, project or job going all gung-ho – usually in that period of unconscious incompetence where we don’t know what we don’t know – and in slightly less jargonistic management speak – just how many banana skins lie in our path! As we start to realise that the world is not as simple as we thought, and the consequences for failure are graver than we are prepared to stomach. 

 

And thus, we tighten into a ball and are afraid to do anything. Confidence is lost. We consult everyone on everything and lose the power to act without fear of error and regret. 

 

Here is a way of getting over this fear. It is a compromise in a way, but there are 2 tactics you can use. 

 

a) What is the lowest risk, quickest action you can take. In a project or complicated task, you might have a number of steps to take. Some of them may seem risky or complex. Can you break them down into more bitesize, low risk task-lets? This way you make progress which builds confidence. Confidence builds resilience which makes mistakes matter less, as you shrug them off more easily. That’s not arrogance, it is balance. There is a big difference. 

 

b) If you procrastinate – think “imperfect action is better than perfect inaction”. Rarely, if ever, have I experienced the situation where someone has been congratulated for doing nothing when action was needed. If you act and get it wrong, then often I have experienced the understanding that these things happen and at least, well done for stepping up! 

 

As always, if you can back up your actions with rationale on what you knew at the time, or that you put the APPROPRIATE amount of effort into getting the right result. By that I mean, there is double-checking – there is also obsessively checking and doubting oneself. There is nothing wrong in managing risk by putting safeguards in place. It’s just the worrying that kills us. 

We live in a results-oriented world. Just ask any high-level professional football manager. We become so fixated on outcomes that we forget about the processes which result in that outcome. I remember a manager saying once (forgive if this is not that politically correct for vegans or vegetarians), “you don’t make a pig fatter just by weighing it!” He was expressing frustration at our organisation’s obsession with measuring anything that moved, without giving due attention to the inputs affecting the output. The pig needs to be fed in order to fatten, the weighing is something that in reality, is only important to see how much progress has been made. It makes no different to the result. 

 

But – we become absolutely fixated upon it. It is the only thing that matters, the goal. Like the penalty-taking footballer who can blast the ball into the top corner of the net ten times out of ten, but with the hopes of a nation, who only care about their result, not their hours of practice and technique-honing, their muscles tighten, doubt creeps in, fear abides. 

 

The answer is to set a goal, because without them we wouldn’t get anywhere, and we would be like the hapless contestants in the Monty Python sketch where there was a 100-metre race for people with no sense of direction. The runners all headed off in random directions when the starter fired the pistol. Hilarious to watch, but not so much if experiencing this when trying to reach a result on something. The goal is important to set, but then attention must be turned to the inputs. What’s going to get me there, what is going to trip me up? Good old-fashioned planning, rolling your sleeves up and solving the problems, while trusting your skills and judgements to do the best you can. Notice I didn’t say, get it right, just do the best you can. 

 

This will take the emphasis away from the result, and on to the process of doing whatever it is you’re doing. You will even enjoy it more. Which leaves you with more chance of not making a mistake anyway? 

We do have a cultural obsession with celebrity and look up to our heroes. It’s not just the modern day famous-for being-famous stars which intrigue us, but we are taught form an early age of famous scientists such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison. The latter certainly made more mistakes in his working life than you and I would ever make, possibly because he tried to do more. Notoriously, he made thousands of attempts to produce the famous light bulb, and of course, each one of those attempts, barring the last one, could be considered a “mistake”. As we talked about in Reframing – the first remedy I suggested, we could look at mistakes as tests, essential steps before we get to the right answer. Many artists make happy accidents upon their canvas. Sometimes a colour has been mixed that they weren’t intending suddenly finds itself looking resplendent within the scene. 

 

It’s actually not the act I am interested in; it is more the person. We hold these heroes up as gods in their field. How many of them have got everything right, how smooth was their path? They learned from failure which complemented their talent and dedication. Imagine putting yourself in their shoes. Imagine yourself as someone who is succeeding at what you are doing but not getting everything right. Can you make imperfection a part of your personality, something you can accept about yourself. This is in some ways the crux of it, because it is not the mistake we worry about usually, it is how we look in making it, the damage to our pride and ego. If you can overcome that, make imperfection normal, despite what others may say or how they may sneer. The people who mind don’t matter, the people who matter don’t mind. 

Mistakes tend to lead a way to an emotion. It could be embarrassment when an error is uncovered, or fear of reprisal when the customer is going to find out. Emotions are something we find difficult to control when they happen upon us without warning. What is more, we make it worse by trying to control them. 

 

Mindfulness is the act of paying attention to what is in your conscious awareness at that precise moment in time. It is being in the now, with full focus of attention. 

 

When we have emotional difficulty, the ever-helpful mind tries to come in and solve the problem but only creates a tangle of thoughts which make the issue worse. It goes something like this. “Oh no, I think I have made a mistake. The customer will think I have lost my mind, that I don’t care. They may even complain. We may lose the account. I may lose my job!” 

 

This is what happens when a stressed mind steps in and tries to help. It may not seem very helpful, but it is trying to prepare you to act on all the things that may happen because of the mistake. It wants you to survive this. The result being that there is an avalanche of panicked thoughts which only serve to panic us even more! 

 

What would be the best response to this. Correct the mistake, or take some kind of remedial action of course, but that is best done from a position of calm and creativity, rather than fear and panic. The stressed brain will not remember creative solutions. It will tell you all the things that could go wrong using its store of similarly bad experiences. Not very kind sometimes, these brains of ours. 

 

So - apply mindfulness. Again, it is simply paying attention to whatever is going on in the present moment. 

 

This is how that would go? “Ok, what is going on? I am panicking. I notice that I am worrying my head off about this mistake. I notice my thoughts. I notice what I am saying to myself, the words I am using. I notice how my body feels, the sweating, the increased heart rate, the shortness of breath.” 

 

As I pay more attention to all of these things that are happening, I pay less attention to the things that aren’t but seem to be troubling me – that is, my thoughts. They are not real, they are an invention, they are trying to help but are not. And then notice this: as I calm my mind by simply noticing, those thoughts start to change. This is not so bad. I can recover this. It could have been far worse. And as the mind calms, then so does the body.