Do you ever find yourself saying ‘I’ll never do that again’ and it then happens a short time later? If so, you aren’t alone! Everyone makes mistakes, both in their personal life and at work, but everyone grows and progresses as time goes on… it is how we learn.
There are steps you can take to learn from where you went wrong, instead of repeating them again, and you’ll gain valuable knowledge that will help you in the future.
At work when you make mistakes you may feel as though you aren’t getting anywhere, but without realising, these setbacks all just help to make your business grow even stronger. If you didn’t make mistakes then you wouldn’t learn. Mistakes also provide us opportunities to showcase our leadership.
Not only do we make errors of judgements at work, but also in our personal lives too. For example when decision making, sometimes the option we pick may not always be the right one, but we learn to reflect on this. By doing so we become stronger people as we come to know our strengths and weaknesses.
Ways to learn from your mistakes:
Own your mistakes:
The best thing to do is always admit to your mistakes, you can’t learn from them if you don’t see where you have gone wrong. If anyone else was involved then apologise if necessary and let them know that you are working on it. Remember… in the long run people will remember your courage to admitting to it, and instead of trying to hide and forget your mistakes you can use them to your benefit.
Make a plan and move on:
Overthinking your mistakes won’t help you in the long run, its more important to be thinking about how to do better in the future. Start by making a plan which will help you to avoid making similar mistakes again.
Ask yourself questions:
Although the last thing you may want to do is think about the mistake you made, its important to ask yourself questions to ensure that you know how you’re going to move forward. Ask yourself ‘what went wrong?’, ‘what can I do to prevent this next time?’ and ‘what did I learn from this?’. It will help you see it from a better point of view and allow you to break down how you will improve this.
Listen to feedback:
When making a mistake in your personal life or at work you might get feedback from your manager, co-workers, friends or family. It can be easy to take this the wrong way but some criticism can be constructive and gives you the opportunity to improve… so make sure to take what people say into account and address the situation.
Albert Einstein once said: “A person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new” When you make a mistake it is easy to feel demotivated and as though you have let yourself down, but it’s important not to forget that our mistakes are what make us stronger, they are a lesson and not a loss, a temporary, necessary detour, but not the end. Failure is critical to be successful in life!