How to Stop Fearing Mistakes and See Them as Allies (BKI 55)

Hi, this is Diana. Bright knowledge instants give you one thing you can do today to move your creativity ahead. And today I'd like to talk about mistakes. They are something that we tend to be quite, quite frightened of. But in fact, mistakes can be your allies, just like deadlines can be your allies. And they're also something that we tend to be afraid of. Sometimes mistakes are actually a sign that you're growing and learning.

If you are not making mistakes, you're basically rehashing what you already know or having lucky accidents. So there's really not much evolution in that situation. Instead, mistakes help you move forward in your creativity and in your learning. They are allies because they point out directions for improvement. They point out exactly where the issue is. They're helping us out. If we think of mistakes as drafts, rather than a final word or some kind of indictment against us personally, we can really make friends with mistakes and not have them be such a traumatic thing.

We tend to fear making mistakes ourselves so much more than we feel about other people making mistakes. It's something we take, again, as almost an indictment against our soul. So what if we see mistakes, instead of being enemies, as being allies or as James Joyce said, portals of discovery? Many mistakes turn out to be lucky accidents in that they can also give us inspiration for a new word, a new song, a new way of being, a type of evolution.

And they can also create discovery in the sense that, well, hey, if we get stuck on a mistake, reaching out for help, community building, giving someone else the opportunity to help you and feel good about that and shine so that every, everybody can grow together. One of the main symptoms of perfectionism is fearing making mistakes. If we can make friends with mistakes and see them as the allies that they are, I think we can chip away at our obstacle of perfection that many of us fall under.

So how about making friends with mistakes today? Let me know how you feel about this.

Bye.