Are you afraid to make mistakes?

Are you paralyzed because you’re
afraid to fail?

Well, fear no more!

Go ahead and make all the mistakes
you want – you’re golden.

Fail away.

It’s Ok.

Just….

Make sure you learn from your mistakes!

Understanding why you make mistakes can move you closer to your goal.
For example, here’s a study that someone recently sent to me. It was conducted
with three groups of people:

Group 1: They discussed their personal problems and went home immediately.
Group 2: They discussed their problems and then went over the mistakes that
led to their poor choices.
Group 3: They just moved forward instead of dealing with their mistakes. They 
discussed what they would do differently in the future.

Which group do you think had more success? The group that didn’t do anything,
the one that looked backwards or the group that moved forwards?

You might think it was the group that moved forward, but the most significant
improvement was the group that looked backwards and examined their
mistakes.

Learning from our mistakes can make all the difference!   We just need to
take the time to go over them.

The catch….

You must first believe that you can learn from your mistakes.

This next study I found was from
Scientific-American. It deals with how
we look at our mistakes.

It says that there are two types of people,
those who believe they can learn from
their mistakes and those who don’t.

Which are you??

It also states that there are two theories
of intelligence dealing with mistakes:
incremental and entity.

An incremental theorist believes intelligence is fluid. If you work harder, learn more, apply yourself, you will become smarter. Failure is only a learning opportunity.

An entity theorist believes intelligence is fixed. Try as you might, you will remain as smart as you were before. Failure is something that cannot be remedied.  

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Dweck repeatedly found that how someone performs, especially in reacting to failure,
largely depends on which of the two beliefs he espouses…

From the data, it seems that a growth mindset, whereby you believe that intelligence
can improve, lends itself to a more adaptive response to mistakes – not just behaviorally,
but also neurally: the more someone believes in improvement, the larger the amplitude
of a brain signal that reflects a conscious allocation of attention to mistakes. And the
larger that neural signal, the better subsequent performance…..

That suggests that individuals with an incremental theory of intelligence may actually
have better self-monitoring and control systems on a very basic neural level:their brains
are better at monitoring their own, self-generated errors and at adjusting their behavior
accordingly. It’s a story of improved on-line error awareness—of noticing mistakes as
they happen, and correcting for them immediately.

The way our brains act, it seems, is sensitive to the way we, their owners, think….
we have an uncanny ability to influence how our minds work—and how we perform,
act, and interact as a result.

Once again, what we think affects more then we know. It always seems to
come back to that.

So, you no longer need to worry about making mistakes. You’re just learning -
make mistakes, get feedback, make adjustments and keep moving toward
your goals!

Fail forward!