Mistakes and Failures: How to Grow and Learn from Them
We all know it, the sinking feeling we get once we realize that we have made a mistake or experienced failure. For me it really turns my stomach inside out and I usually enter a vicious cycle. Breaking this cycle is a real challenge and many have mastered breaking it or speeding the process up. It is a boiling cauldron full of emotions. Are these emotions positive or negative? Can we use these emotions to our advantage? How do these emotions affect us in our life and our performance at work? These are just a few questions that have popped into my head over the last years of making plenty of mistakes and having to deal with the consequences. Reflecting these mistakes and consequences has brought me to a few conclusions, which I am sharing with you today.
Why We Don’t Learn from Mistakes - Neurological Processes
Why we don’t learn from mistakes has a lot to do with our neurological processes. While we still don’t know a lot about them – even though we as humans are making new discoveries in this field at an astonishing pace - it is worthwhile to dive into the topic of how we perceive our own mistakes.
The Orji Cycle
The emotions we feel when we make a mistake are similar to the emotions that come up when we grief the loss of a loved one. There are several phases that we run through and usually in the same order.
I do believe that these phases differ from person to person. The way we grew up and our internal biases have a huge amount of influence on how we process and deal with mistakes. By looking at the ORJI cycle we can see how psychological biases play a role in perception and judgement. Just as we observe and judge what others do, so do we for ourselves. I for example am much more forgiving when others make mistakes and in comparison, I am very hard on myself for any mistakes I make.
As we can see, we usually observe, react, judge, and intervene in this order. When observing we should register accurately using all our senses, what is going on around us in our environment.
However, most of these processes are governed by our subconscious mind, which makes influencing them more difficult. This means, that we often have already completed the cycle before we realize what has happened. Not only that, but also our personal filters and biases have a massive effect on our observations. Our biases influence how we see things. These biases are often put onto us by society, family or our own experiences and are not necessarily true. If you think of yourself as stupid, any observations you make on your own behaviour, will most likely end in you finding why something you did was stupid.
Our emotional reactions occur right after we observe something. “Mastering” your emotions is not a question of not having an emotional reaction, which is inevitable, but rather a question of controlling your emotional reactions before you are able to judge what has just happened. We are often excited or scared before we even realise that we are in a dangerous or exciting situation.
I believe subduing your emotions is not a good way. Listen to them, realise them, and ask yourself why you are having them. This tells you more about the situation than any rational thinking you can do on the spot.
Judgement comes after our emotional reactions. Therefore, we should keep in mind that any data we analyse has been filtered through our observational capabilities, then altered by our biases and distorted by our emotional reactions. Any judgement we make is only as good as the data we base it on. We are usually not so good at rational decision making as we might think we are, especially when based on distorted information.
At the end of the cycle, we come to the part where we act upon our judgments. The intervention phase might be just acting on impulse fuelled by our emotional reaction, or we make a decision based on the influenced information at hand.
By looking at the ORJI cycle we can see clearly that our self-observations concerning our own mistakes are probably not the most reliable. Often, we are sure that we did something incredibly stupid, whereas this notion is basically triggered by our own insecurities and insufficient information analysis.
If you google biases, there is an exhaustive list of all the different biases that are out there on Wikipedia. You won’t believe how many there are. I personally for example have the biases from my upbringing, that I think everything is my fault and that nothing I do is good enough. These two biases for example have influenced my decision making in the past in toxic ways. It is still a hard battle to stay clear of them. But just by realising that I need to be wary of them, the way I perceive events has improved by heaps.
Fight Flight Freeze
The fight, flight or freeze response is one of humanities oldest neurological processes – something we have in common with any other species on the planet. In stressful situations – if seen as a threat – the FFF-response kicks in. Overwriting many other processes in our brain. Therefore, it can stand in the way of learning from mistakes and might even be the culprit of reinforcing false behaviour.
As you might be able to see already, trying to learn from a mistake while in the FFF-response is near to impossible. Time needs to pass for the FFF-response to disperse and for us to think about what happened. Especially with the way society condemns mistakes, we overly focus on not making mistakes, that when we make one, we enter the FFF-response due to the stress and humiliation we fear.
Moreover, if we do not take the time to pause and analyse a past mistake, once we have calmed down, we might end up reinforcing the faulty behaviour and then repeat it, making it worse. The reason for this being the two mechanisms that can reinforce neuroplasticity and the growth of myelin on our pathways: repetition and stress. We either remember things because we repeated them a lot or because we learnt them under a lot of stress.
Article: “Why It’s Hard to Learn From Our Mistakes” on psychologytoday.com
Denial
Denial is a defence mechanism, which is supposed to protect us from feeling anxiety. If something was traumatising for you it can trigger denial. You will refuse to deal with what happened or even admit having any part in it. Obviously, this is not good when you want to learn from mistakes and experiences. While we are still in denial, it is incredibly hard to work on it. Sadly, we see this too often in our society, partly due to the enormous stress that is put onto people to perform accordingly.
How can denial be diagnosed? There are a few signs of denial. Try to use these to see it in yourself or try to listen to others around you who might point them out to you. Usually, others are better at observing you, than you can yourself.
You refuse to talk about the problem.
You justify your behaviours.
You look to put blame on other people or outside factors.
You persist in the behaviour although there are negative consequences.
You keep promising to address the problem in the future.
You avoid the problem or thinking about it.
Often it takes time for the defence mechanism to wear off and once that has happened, we can start to work on it. If denial doesn’t wear off (which I have experienced many times), it is paramount to realise that you are in denial. Again, this is best done by listening to people around you, especially those whom you trust. When you have a sickening feeling thinking about something and you find yourself pushing it away, you are most probably in denial.
Once you realise you are in denial you can ask yourself a few questions:
What am I afraid of?
What are the consequences of staying in denial?
Who can I ask for advice on this? Whose opinion do I trust?
What distorted thoughts am I having?
Using the questions above as a kind of checklist, you will speed up the process of leaving denial behind you.
Regret
Regret can greatly inhibit learning from mistakes. Regret happens when you realise you made a mistake and you become incredibly conscious of not making the mistake again. This is another defence mechanism in our brain, to stop us repeating hurtful experiences.
The problem with this mechanism is however, that we tend to be so scared of repeating a mistake, that we stop short before there is a possibility of making a mistake in a similar fashion. A simple example from my own experience was, that I once took an offer to sell a property and it turned out to have been a very bad idea to accept said offer. I deeply regretted it and thus for months afterwards I found myself not wanting to accept any other offers for any property and being overly careful and essentially scared of selling anything. Real Estate being part of my business, this was obviously not good for performance. Another experience I have had with regret is in friendships. I have been betrayed by people I thought of as friends in the past and regret opening up to them greatly. This has made it difficult for me to form new friendships and trust people.
Another issue that arises from regret is, that we automatically believe that the pathways we did not chose would have been better. There is now way for us to know which pathways would have worked out better for us. Regret will stop us from seeing the bigger picture and to see the positives in any decision that has had rather unpleasant effects. Nothing ever is only bad; everything has positives that come with it. It is for us to find the positives and leverage them to our advantage and to take the negatives and draw from them to improve ourselves.
Regret becomes especially limiting when it comes to actions we have taken, that have had an adverse effect for others. By regretting doing something, we stop ourselves to go into remorse, which is painful. However, remorse is needed to improve on our actions. Only by reflecting and realising how we have caused harm by our decisions or actions, are we able to improve. With remorse we are truly sorry for it and can muster the courage to admit our responsibilities.
Make sure to get over regretting things quickly and get onto reflecting on mistakes and accepting the consequences they have had for us and others. Realisation is the first step. Don’t let regret or denial get in the way of your self-improvement.
Article: “Learning from Mistakes” on caltech.edu
How to Better Deal with Mistakes
Earlier we looked at how neurological processes can hinder you from learning from your mistakes, now it is time to look how we can adapt to deal with mistakes better.
Your Fault, Your Responsibility, Your Problem?
One of the most helpful quotes I have read this year to help me process events was from James Clear:
“In life: (1) Some things are not your fault, but they are your responsibility. (2) Other things are not your responsibility, but they are your problem. (3) Many things are neither your responsibility nor your problem, but they make the world better. Take action on all three.”
-James Clear
Depending on who you are you may fall into the group of people who tend to see “everything” as their fault. I personally fall into this category, often going back years in my thinking to find which decision was at fault to have caused a current predicament.
In reality many things happening to us are not our fault. Often, they are your responsibility to fix. For example, a CEO of a company has the responsibility to save the company from bankruptcy, even if the possible bankruptcy is caused by outside factors outside his control. Thus, it is not his fault and there is no point in searching for who made a mistake, it is time to get the job done. In other cases, it is not even your responsibility to solve a problem. However, if it is a problem for you, why hope for someone who is responsible to solve it?
I have discovered for myself that many of the problems I encounter, are neither my fault nor my responsibility. Still, I will suffer consequences if the problems are not solved and thus, I decide to take them on, own them and solve them. And then there are things, that are just the right thing to do, even if it’s neither your fault, your responsibility, nor a problem for you. Whenever you have a problem to solve and wonder if you are at fault and if you made a mistake, look at the three levels and objectively decided where you are at. I often if I am unsure ask a trusted third party for their opinion.
"It doesn’t matter whose fault it is that something is broken if it’s your responsibility to fix it. Accepting responsibility is not an admission of guilt. Taking responsibility is a recognition of the power that you seize when you stop blaming people."
-Adam Grant
Will Smith on fault vs. responsibility:
Is It in Your Control?
Adding to the above concept comes the stoic mindset - is it in your control? The following quote by Epictetus explains the mindset in wonderfully simple words:
“Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.”
- Epictetus
Essentially the only thing we really have full control over are our decisions, thoughts, and emotions (and this takes effort and practice). There is no gain by fretting over outside events and to try and take responsibility for them and worry about mistakes.
The current pandemic is a great example. I have talked to people lately, who see the problems their business is in as their fault for not being prepared. Yes, ideally you are constantly prepared for any black swan event and never overstretch. We all know however that in business you often overstretch and take some risks. You cannot blame yourself for not having seen Covid coming. You can learn and make sure you focus on what you can do right now, what you should decide. The longer you take blaming yourself and looking for fault in yourself, the slower you will be in getting through it and tackling the situation. If you are in a situation that is a threat to you and your loved ones, you can only get back up and prepare to fight. And if there is no chance to chance a situation (for example Covid), you can only change what you are in control of, namely yourself. To put it in the words of Viktor Frankl:
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
- Viktor Frankl
Are You in Growth Mindset or in Fixed Mindset?
As we are already at the topic of mindset, there are two more mindsets that are important to understand when dealing with mistakes: Are you in a growth mindset or in a fixed mindset?
They both go hand in hand, and I like to see them as sequential, one follows the other. Many will have heard these terms before that got coined by Carol Dweck in her book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”.
In a fixed mindset you hold the firm believe that we are born as we are. So, you are born with certain talents and traits, that are unchangeable. You are either good at something from birth, or simply bad. In a growth mindset you believe that you can improve on things by working on them. Every failure is an opportunity to learn, every experience hones your skills.
There is no disputing that some are born with talents and others lack them but having talent at something doesn’t mean that you are good at it. If you never practice you will lose to someone with no talent who tries very hard. As you might be able to guess, being in a fixed mindset any mistake is a catastrophe as it makes you doubt who you are and what your strengths are. In a growth mindset you accept that you can change things, and mistakes are part of learning what you need to change.
There are several studies which show that adults or children with a growth mindset have a much higher capability to learn from mistakes and are less likely to repeat mistakes. So in short, get comfortable with a growth mindset, accept mistakes as part of your journey and use the experiences to your advantage.
Building on a growth mindset comes the scientific mindset. In his latest book “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know” Adam Grant dives deep in this mindset. So, what is scientific about it? In science you tend to formulate a hypothesis and then go and try to find proof against it. If you find overwhelming proof against your hypothesis, you will then change it, as it has been disproven. The same can be applied to anything in life. We hold opinions, values, and believes and we will find ourselves in situation where these are proven to be false. Now if you take your opinions and believes as part of yourself, it is hard to accept them as false. If you can distance your persona from these, it becomes much easier to change them.
One of the most powerful mental skills you can possess it to change your standpoint according to new information. In the end you gain nothing by holding onto them and go down with them. By understanding that our knowledge, emotions, opinion etc. are ever evolving, you can gain speed - speed by getting past a mistake, speed in making decisions, speed in implementing and so on.
Are You in the Valley of Despair?
It takes a lot of confidence to own your mistakes and then to go on and solve them. What often stands in our way is an inner voice that tells us that we are not enough and that we are a failure. Understanding the Dunning Kruger Effect and the impostor syndrome helped me with stilling this inner voice.
We are at our most vulnerable psychologically when we are in the valley of despair. Usually after the peak of mount stupid we take a huge confidence buff from misevaluations, miscalculations, misjudgments, basically mistakes which we have made. When reality hits you, you can fall into a deep depression doubting yourself to the core. When this is how you feel, then welcome to the valley of despair. I also hate to break it to you: you will most likely visit the valley of despair several times in your life. Usually, every time you get into something new - from a new career to a new sport to a new relationship.
In the valley of despair, you feel like you know nothing, while in reality you have gained quite a bit of experience and knowledge already. Usually, the more knowledge and experience we gain, the more we realize how little we knew and know. When people who have very little knowledge in the field you are in yourself, see you as an expert, you will feel like you are not. You will feel like you are an impostor pretending to know things but having no clue about them.
I have hit the valley of despair when doing my studies, doing competitive sport, working through a crisis for our family business and when investing. Usually, the only way to get out of it is to start gathering evidence for yourself, that you are not an impostor. Listen to credible people who give you positive feedback, who celebrate the little victories you are starting to have.
Just by knowing that making mistakes is part of life and everyone makes them (even if some people pretend they are faultless), you can work through the DK effect more effectively and faster.
Are You Rewarding Yourself for Your Learning?
A small but very effective method to increase the speed of gaining back your confidence is to reward your learning. In one of my articles I explain how the same method can be used to establish a habit much faster. If you can combine learning with strong emotions, you will learn better. This is often a reason why we remember extremely painful or extremely fun events the best. A high degree of emotion increases the amount of myelin that is being formed when synopses are being reinforced.
While it is important to learn from mistakes, it is equally as important to learn from successes. And there is a biological reason, for why we learn from positive experiences better. Every time we get something right our body releases oxytocin, which is also known as the happy hormone. This makes us happy and reinforces our pathways by increasing myelin production. Practice makes perfect it is said and it is right, especially if it is combined with the right amount of praise and positive emotions.
Make sure that you reward yourself for things you get right, be like a child, that will be happy when it gets something right. On top of that put even more effort into rewarding yourself for learning. Simply try to be happy when discovering the learnings behind a mistake. Thinking back on the scientific mindset; treat it as a joyful moment where you found some new evidence.
Article: “Why we don't learn from our mistakes” on wired.co.uk
Do You Consider Your Strengths and Weaknesses?
When pondering about your mistakes and trying to learn from them, it is quite important to take your personal characteristics into account. Essentially what I mean is, that we are all different and have different strengths and weaknesses. We have different experiences, different skill sets, different environments etc. Logically you will make more mistakes and earn more failures in areas that you are lacking in.
If you are trying to do something in an area where you have no knowledge yet, you are bound to make a mistake. If you are trying to do something that is a known weakness of yours, you will most likely underperform. If you have not acquired the necessary skills yet for a certain task, the task will take you longer and have faults in comparison to your peers who have the needed skills.
You need to be careful to put your mistakes into relative terms and to choose the comparison criteria carefully. Ideally you do not compare yourself too much to others, try to choose objective relative terms based on your personal situation. If you have not had the privilege to receive love from your parents, how can you expect yourself to be able to show love to your partner? Lacking this experience means you will have to learn it, and this will come with many failures on the way. The same applies in business, if you grew up in an environment where you never had to worry about money, you will most likely have trouble with spending. If you make a mistake in an area that you are strong in, you still should not beat yourself up and learn from it.
Anyway, you always have the option to outsource anything you are lacking in and focus more on your strengths. Should you be in a position where you cannot afford outsourcing, do not set the bar too high for yourself. Aim at 5% more than you know you can achieve, that’s the sweet spot (link?).
Do not oversee that strengths and weaknesses also apply to personality traits. If you are not so strong in resilience, it will take you longer to recover from mistakes. This is OK! Take the time you need and improve gradually by decreasing the time to recover and thus increasing your resilience.
A great book on this topic, which I highly recommend is “The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance” by Rich Diviney. Defining our attributes, skills, personality etc. is a science of its own. If you find it a hard time to know what your strengths and weaknesses are, there is a simple exercise: Take a piece of paper, write down what you think your 5 biggest strengths are and your 5 biggest weaknesses are. Keep this for yourself. Next you go to 5 people whose opinion you trust and who have ideally worked with you in some sort of setting (work, sports, school, etc.) and ask them to do the same for you. I promise you one thing, you will be dumbfounded. There will be attributes you believe to be a strength to appear on the weakness side, there will be attributes you believe to be a weakness to appear on the strength side and there will be things missing all together. Also make sure the people you ask are people not afraid to hurt your feelings - you need candid answers.
In short: Be careful when choosing how to evaluate a mistake and what criteria you evaluate it against. Remember your strengths and weaknesses!
How to Analyse Your Mistakes
In order to learn from a mistake and improve thanks to it, you should analyse the mistake. Really look into what happened and why it happened. Be meticulous in trying to draw up the timeline of your decision making and actions that happened. Have a think about who else was involved and what agendas they had. Once you get a clear overview, you can then go into looking at the data and draw conclusions from it.
In my personal experience I have beat myself up for many mistakes way too hard. Once I went through the process to actually try and learn from the mistakes, I often realised that at the time I made the decision I was missing crucial information, skills or advice that I would have needed to make the right decision. By looking at your own mistakes objectively you immediately see where you can improve and how to improve. The flowing paragraphs will show you some criteria that I find helpful for mistake analysis.
As mentioned above you have to find out if an event is your problem, your responsibility, your fault. Taking responsibility for mistakes, doesn’t necessarily mean that the mistake is your fault. If you are in a leadership position any mistakes made from one of your employees is your responsibility. When I read “Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win” by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, the concept of taking responsibility really opened my eyes. I started doing just that afterwards, but without knowing the difference, between what is my fault and what is just my responsibility.
Macro vs Micro
First of I start by looking at a mistake and evaluate if it is a question of the macro or the micro. Does the mistake I made had a big or a small impact? Was the mistake a detail or rather a major component?
As an example, let’s say you buy some real estate and later find for yourself that it was a mistake. OK you - I have been through this after buying real estate - regret the action of buying said real estate, let’s say a flat. But what exactly do you regret here? Is it the act of buying a flat altogether, or is it buying this specific flat?
You would rather have used your money to do something else with? Your you realize that you don’t enjoy owning real estate? Those are just 2 examples of a macro mistake, so you regret the action on a macro (strategic). Some questions concerning the flat on a micro level are, that you might regret the location of the flat. You regret choosing the tenant, who is causing trouble. You regret the size, etc.
This is an important point to look into, to make sure we know what we can improve on. Often, we make a mistake and say to ourselves “I will never do this again” and in order to decide if that reaction is a good idea you need to be sure if a mistake was in the macro of micro.
Effectivity vs Efficiency
The next point to investigate is effectivity against efficiency. Boiling it down to simple terms, you want to see if your mistake is a question of you doing a task in a non-efficient manner (=doing it wrong) or if the task in general was not effective (=doing the wrong thing).
Efficiency means, that you can improve on doing something faster and better with less effort. And for it to be an efficiency mistake, it needs to be a decision or task that you should have done. This kind of comes back to what your strengths and weaknesses are and what your resources are.
But not only that, often we make mistakes in things that are just not important to us or that we really hate to do. If that is the case, you should ask yourself if those are things that you might just want to drop doing altogether. Are those things that you can outsource or ignore? Here you can use the Eisenhower matrix well to help you in the analysis. Put the task/decision against your goals and think deeply if you are the right person for it.
Gravity and Compassion
How grave was your mistake? How much damage did it do? Often, we beat ourselves up from making minor mistakes, which have little impact. I sometimes find myself falling into this trap. Minor mistakes are not worth fretting over. And even if the mistake was a major one you should try and be self-compassionate. Just as you ought to be compassionate with someone else making a mistake.
If it is a mistake, you have made multiple times already, it is a case where one tends to get angry with oneself. However - coming back to the point about efficiency and effectivity - if you keep making the same mistake, you should ask yourself if you really should do the given task. A condition for this is of course, that you have tried to learn from the previous mistakes.
When things get hectic and stressful, we tend to push on without pause to think about mistakes. After all, if you have a deadline, you need to get things done. For some of us the pressure never stops thou, so you need to take a break from work, not only to rest, also to reflect. Essentially, check how grave your mistake is and then be self-compassionate. We all make mistakes; they are a great learning opportunity.
Task Focused Feedback
Giving yourself feedback can be a tricky exercise. Giving feedback to others is already not the easiest thing and giving yourself feedback can be extremely difficult. There are a few tricks I find helpful, which Adam Grant suggests and that changed the game for me.
The first one is to make sure you are task focused. Now what do we mean by task focused, and are we not always task focused while giving feedback? When you look at most people giving feedback to others and themselves it is rather person focused. Person focused feedback focuses on personality traits, on physical appearances, basically on the person making the mistake. When I make a mistake, it can still happen that I fall into this with thinking things like „I am not made for this”, “I am such a slob”…
This kind of feedback is not helpful. That’s why you should focus on giving feedback on the task itself. Say you held a presentation or speech and realised that the audience did not catch onto some of your points. That doesn’t mean that you as person are flawed; try to figure out how you can improve your delivery.
And this is where the second trick comes in. Try to word your feedback as advice. Don’t ask yourself too much about what went wrong, rather ask yourself how you can improve. Try to give advice to your future self on how to do the task better in the future. After all we cannot change the past, however we can change how we do things in the future.
As a side note, please use these tips when giving feedback to others too. Stay on the task with your feedback and try to word your feedback as advice on how to do things in the future.
Humble Inquiry
Edgar H. Schein introduces us to a concept called humble inquiry in his book of the same name - “Humble Inquiry the gentle art of asking instead of telling”.
Humble inquiry means that we listen to others and that we are truly interested in their reasons and interests. We use open questions to inquire their thoughts and beliefs. Applied to ourselves: We often tend to not ask our past selves the questions we should be asking or don’t go deep enough with our questions.
If we try to apply this to ourselves, it can be a very powerful mindset to get into. In essence we want to ask our past self, why we did something. What were our reasons behind a decision, what were our assumptions and beliefs at the time? Did we make decisions due to unconscious reasons? What was out emotional state? What else was going on in our life at the time? Did we ignore our gut feeling? How did these beliefs, assumptions, subconscious feelings, and emotions affect our decision making or our work?
When you assess a mistake, you should really ask yourself these questions to put the mistake in perspective. Only once you have put it in perspective will you be able to truly learn from it. Go deep with asking yourself these questions. Find out the reasoning behind what you did.
Analysis Paralysis
Analysis paralysis is one of my favorite points. Why? Simply because I fall into this quite regularly. My business coach keeps reminding me of this whenever I fall into it.
So far there is a lot of content on how to evaluate your mistakes etc., so it can be easy to spend too much time and energy on this. Make sure you don’t get stuck analysing. You need to act on your own feedback and move on. The larger the mistake, the larger the learning opportunity, the longer you can spend time to think it through and learn from it. Take as much time as you need, but as little as necessary to get the diamonds out of it. For me a good sign to know when to stop is, when I realise that I am just spinning the same thoughts around in circles.
Yourself vs Others
A very popular measure to determine whether we are doing our job well is other people. When measuring ourselves against others we usually look at successful people. You are just starting out as a realtor and are looking up to the most successful realtor in the field. The problem here is, that when you measure yourself against people who already “have made it”, you are bound to only see your failures. On top of that, we have different strengths and weaknesses. In order to measure yourself against someone else, you would have to find a copy of yourself. I doubt that this is a very effective way.
What we also tend to oversee when we try to evaluate our failures is the distance we have already covered. Often, we set goals, that we want to achieve and all we see is the long, long way still ahead of us to reach the given goal. It sometimes is worth having a look back at where we came from and what we have achieved. We already left a long distance behind us with all the challenges we overcame. Everyone is different and has to face his own challenges. Some have harder challenges than others, and often we just do not see the challenges someone had to overcome; be it psychologically, physically, socially, economically etc.
In short, try to evaluate yourself against your past and future self. Decide who you want to be and remember where you came from. Never measure yourself against other people. That being said, it is fine to have role models, with the aim to learn from them, or to go out and ask someone to be your mentor to get access to their knowledge.
4 Tools for Learning from Mistakes
In the following paragraphs I will share some simple tools for learning from mistakes. Most of the points above have been mindset focused. While philosophical thinking is a very much needed base for anything in life, it is important to have some practical tools at your disposal.
Set Up Your Personal Learning Process
The first and most important tip is to try to set up (formalize) your personal learning process. You should think about the frequency (weekly, monthly, yearly), the amount of depth you go into and the kind of questions you want to ask yourself. I personally try to do short weekly session to just think about my effectivity and then a yearly deep dive into the past year.
It is often helpful to get an outsider to help you discuss your mistakes. This can be a mentor, a work colleague, or a friend. Here you can set formal mistake analysis sessions and talk to them about the mistakes you wish to analyse. It is also helpful if you become a mistake buddy for someone else.
Another thing to be wary of when you formalize your learning process is to choose the right place and environment. Is your office or your flat the right place? Do you need a quiet place in order to concentrate, or do you prefer a place with a buzz?
A friend of mine has formalized his learning process into a 50-page document full of questions and exercises for his end of year reflection. Mine is much shorter and I would not be able to go through such a long list without giving up in the middle. So be sure to choose a process that fits with you and who you are and what you want to focus on.
We have all heard of Pareto and it falls into the whole effectivity and efficiency question, which we discussed earlier. In essence you want to make sure you accomplish any tasks which bring you 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. The detail work you can outsource or do when it is necessary. I try to have a Pareto session every Friday, where I make sure I look at what I was doing in the week and if I was doing the right things. This way you can get a stop doing list. This process saves you the problem of fretting over mistakes that are not important in the future. Essentially you look at the “mistake” of doing the wrong things and make sure you learn from this on a weekly basis. I found this the best way to incorporate the effectivity and efficiency question into my week.
As mentioned earlier we do an end of year reflection, where we go through the year, project by project and look at our failures and accomplishments; ask ourselves, why we did what we did and if the results are satisfactory. Then we see what we can learn from it.
Usually we will have stop doing lists, checklists, new habits, principles and values as a result from it. We can then update our goals for the coming year and update decision making processes and our internal principles and values. The stop doing list does not only apply to tasks, but also projects, business partners, habits, former friends, whatever we wish to stop having contact with.
The process is exhausting to say the least, as it is intense to go through a whole year of mistakes and successes in a short period of time (we try to get this done within 2 weeks). Usually, you will need a week’s rest after, or at least I do, so do not try to do this in your holiday time. Set 2 weeks at the start of the work year aside to do this; this is for you to improve professionally. You, yourself, your company, or employer will benefit greatly from it. Take the time and use it wisely.
Choose a Mistake Buddy (Wisely)
A mistake buddy is a great and important resource for you to learn, you cannot only have aid in analysing your mistakes, but also a person that can act as an accountability buddy to accomplish the changes you decide on.
Make sure you choose the right person. The last thing you want is a people pleaser. A person who will only tell you things you want to hear is not the right fit for this exercise. You want someone who is not afraid to be disagreeable, either in telling you if in his opinion you did not make a mistake, or if in his opinion a mistake is larger etc. You need someone whose opinion you value and with whom you can have a discussion on an equal level.
Any good supervisor will do an end of year reflection on your performance. If your supervisor allows it, you can try to add certain topics and questions to your end of year review with them. However, I do suggest getting someone outside of work, with whom you can also discuss personal projects, relationships, and life in general. You can make mistakes in all areas of life. And often the ones outside work are more important to learn from than the ones you do in your work life.
Create a Psychological Safe Environment
An important aspect that has been researched greatly is psychological safety. Many organizations, relationships and families lack this. In a psychological safe environment, you can voice your opinions without repercussions, and you can discuss and make mistakes without immediate consequences. Psychological safe environments have the teams with the highest performance (google did a study on this).
Try to find environments with psychological safety, where you can openly discuss mistakes. If you are constantly scared of making mistakes, you will try to justify mistakes and hide them. This is not only bad for the organization/relationship you are in, but also bad for your learning process.
The same applies to the relationship you have with yourself. If you are scared of your inner self and do not want to discuss mistakes with yourself, how would you learn from them? Reflecting upon your failures, requires you to feel safe with yourself. Your current, past- and future-self need to respect each other and be comfortable to have a discussion. This might sound a little strange, however I often found myself to be my worst critic, not only in what I expect of myself, but also in the ways I would talk to myself and give myself feedback.
In short, look for environments where learning together from each other’s mistakes is valued highly, so you feel psychologically safe. And make sure the same applies to yourself with yourself.
Integrate after Action Reviews
An after action review is a great tool used by the military to improve and build upon experiences. My coach has recently shared this with me, and I am trying to regularly implement it into my days. So far, I am loving it. It is simple and builds around 4 questions, which you ask yourself after every action. This can be a meeting, completing a task, a phone call, or a negotiation. It is most powerful, if used on a regular basis and ideally daily. So here come the questions:
What did we intend/expect to happen?
What actually happened?
What should we sustain about what happened? (What went well and why?)
What can we improve about what happened?
You should run through these questions ideally with everyone involved, at least with your team. This is an open discussion focused on improvement for the future. The questions are simple and straight forward and help put you in the right mindset to analyse what happened and think of improvements. Treat it like a brainstorming session. This session should be in proportion to the action, but not overly long. Twenty minutes should suffice to go through the questions and make the session worthwhile.
