Rerouting Your Goals - Embracing Mistakes as Learning Opportunities
Imagine driving to your friend’s new house. You’ve never been there before, so you’re following the directions that she gave you when you happen to run into a road closure. Do you turn around and go home? Of course not! You follow the detour signs or let your navigation redirect you through an alternate route.
Perfectionism and High Expectations
The idea of going home when being faced with a detour sounds ridiculous, but so many high performers do something similar when they’re working through a goal or implementing a new habit. They have an expectation of perfection, so a mistake feels like a failure rather than the learning point that it should be. While the high expectations can be helpful in many aspects, they can be a hindrance when working through the learning process.
"The most successful people are not those who avoid mistakes, but those who learn from them and adjust their course."
Shifting from "Failure" to Learning
Making the transition from the closed-minded response of “I didn’t stick to my healthy-eating habit, so I should just give it up,” to “I enjoyed a few too many treats last week. This week, I’ll make a rule to drink a glass of water before I reach for the chips.” The key is to learn from our mistakes. The most successful people are not the people with the fewest failures; they are the people who made mistakes, learned from them, and then did even better.
Making this transition starts with how we think about failure. If we think of failure as an ending, then we are more likely to quit when faced with difficulties. If, instead, we think of failure as a learning point, then we’ll learn to embrace difficulties to adjust our actions and behaviours.
Practical Step to Reroute
The next time you make a mistake or have a setback while working on a goal:
Take a deep breath and pause for a minute to allow yourself to feel whatever emotions you feel about what just happened.
Reflect on your actions. Are you happy with your behaviours in the situation? If you could rewind time, would you take the same course of action or would you do something differently? Were there any other contributing factors?
Determine your learning points and create a new or reworked plan utilizing those points.
The most important thing about mistakes is not to avoid making them, but to recover from them quickly. As you face inevitable challenges with your goals this year, remember to learn from the challenge and reroute.
© 2024 Kristina Schmitt Development. All Rights Reserved.
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