Don’t let your mistakes hold you back

Don’t let your mistakes hold you back. Mistakes linked to fear crush curiosity, growth and success.

Your mistakes are part of your tapestry of experience that informs better decisions as you go along. This is how humans experiment with success.

As long as you learn from your mistakes, they are on your way to success, not in your way. Be prepared for mistakes and failures to happen.

We want people in our teams at work, members of our families, and children at schools to show initiative — it’s in short supply, and yet we value it over just about anything. When someone is recommended to us, the sweetest music to our ears is, “You will love how he/she takes/shows initiative.”

Vibrant, innovative organisations and groups are driven by initiative. This means they are driven by people who are given licence to actually use their initiative. However, micro-management, fear and so many checks and balances, often make it difficult for people to take initiative for fear of making a mistake or getting into trouble.

In the group leadership coaching session I was facilitating yesterday, my client (the business owner) said to his team, “I would rather you took intitiative and made a mistake than did nothing. Mistakes are part of the leadership journey. It’s how we grow and do better.”

Here are three fabulous images that explain alot about the importance of making mistakes.

• Theory is important but it’s a small part of the picture.
• You learn more from putting theory into practice; you have to ‘do’ to make it real.
• The more you ‘do’ the more mistakes you will make, the more you will learn, the more you will succeed.

To this point, a young lady was telling me recently that she is studying entrepreneurship at university. I tried not to laugh. As an entrepreneur myself, I know that what you read in books and are taught in theory, doesn’t come close to what you can learn by actually doing, by being an entrepreneur. Fortunately, there is a practical part to her studies and they have to build a small business! 😃

• Experience comes from putting both good and bad decisions into action (of course you won’t know it was a bad one until it doesn’t work out!).
• Learn from your mistakes, tweak the idea and keep moving forward.
• Good decisions come from experience, not from sitting on the couch.

• In the process of making a mistake you might stumble on the recipe for success.
• A mistake repeated more than once, that gets the same positive result, can turn into a strategic decision that takes you places.
• Are you brave enough to try things that you think are going to work even if there is a chance that they might fail?

Human Potential Expert