Making Mistakes

You’ve heard it before but I’ll say it again - Everyone makes mistakes. We’re all human and we aren’t perfect. Occasionally we make a silly error, or read a situation wrong, or get forgetful about something. What’s important to think about is the perspective around those mistakes.

Maybe this is top of mind for me today because I made too bigger mistakes lately. In the last interview I recorded I had the microphone turned around backwards, so the audio quality was worse than usual. Whoops. And then with a live presentation I was giving on Zoom, I didn’t know until the end that my slides weren’t changing. My bad. 

The unfortunate part to making mistakes is that there are real consequences to the action. It feels bad because you either let someone down, you feel vulnerable, or it hurts your confidence. However, people are usually pretty tolerant, because everyone makes mistakes, and if you acknowledge the error you can quickly make things better.

An important piece to this too - If you’re in a position to make a mistake then you’re trying! You’re putting yourself out there in a situation that you aren’t 100% confident in, and you’re giving yourself the opportunity to grow. With the lessons in your mistakes you become more self-aware, start seeing some of your blindspots and hone in on what are your strengths. Just like you can perceive rejection as one step closer to a “yes”, you can view a mistake as one lesson closer to understanding.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, mistakes are good - When you let them serve their purpose.