No one is immune to making mistakes. But if we simply apologise and carry on as before, we’re in danger of repeating the same errors. When we don’t learn from our mistakes, we inflict unnecessary stress on ourselves and on others, and we risk losing people’s confidence and trust in us. Here are five steps to help you to learn from your mistakes:
1. Own Your Mistakes
You can’t learn anything from a mistake until you admit that you’ve made it. So, take a deep breath and admit to yours, and then take ownership of it. Inform those who need to know, apologise, and tell them that you’re working on a solution. Saying “sorry” takes courage, but it’s far better to come clean than to hide your error or, worse, to blame others for it. In the long run, people will remember your courage and integrity long after they’ve forgotten the original mistake.
2. Reframe the Error
How you view your mistakes determines the way that you react to them, and what you do next. Chances are, you’ll view your error in a purely negative light for as long as any initial shock and discomfort about it persists. But, if you can reframe your mistake as an opportunity to learn, you will motivate yourself to become more knowledgeable and resilient. When you’ve acknowledged your mistake, think about what you could do to prevent it from happening again and how you can learn from it.
3. Analyse Your Mistake
Next, you need to analyse your mistake honestly and objectively. Ask yourself the following questions:
• What was I trying to do?
• What went wrong?
• When did it go wrong?
• Why did it go wrong?
Conducting this “post-mortem” should reveal what led to the mistake and highlight what needs to change to avoid a repeat.
4. Put Lessons Learned into Practice
The danger at this stage is that pressures of life force you back to your routine tasks and habitual behaviours. The lessons that you identified in Step 3 could languish as mere good intentions. In other words, learning lessons is one thing, but putting them into practice is quite another. Acting on what you’ve learned will require discipline and motivation to change your habits. Identify the skills, knowledge, resources, or tools that will keep you from repeating the error. Any actions that you take to implement your learning need your commitment.
5: Review Your Progress
You may have to try out several ways to put your learning into practice before you find one that successfully prevents you from repeating past errors. From there, monitor the efficacy of your chosen tactic by reviewing the number and nature of mistakes that do – or don’t! – still get made.
To err is human, and we don’t have to punish ourselves for the mistakes we make. They can be opportunities to learn, and to develop. We just need to learn from them and put that learning into practice.
