Reframing Mistakes

There’s nothing quite like a good mistake to remind us of our inadequacy! Mistakes can activate our emotional brain and makes us feel anxious and or depressed.

A surge of negative emotions can arise after we make mistakes, which can result in behaviors that impair our functioning. Is there a way to make our relationship with mistakes/failures into healthy coping mechanisms rather than avoidance, maladaptive behaviors, and just suffering?

What is your relationship with failure/mistakes?

Do you put yourself through negative self-talk after a mistake? And does that negative self-talk help you make positive changes, or does it discourage you from trying? How we treat ourselves in the privacy of our own mind colors and shapes how we see life. No one else is there to help manage your thoughts when it’s just you and your mind. Where did that voice that punishes you in your head come from? Can we tweak that voice to be more compassionate?

Often when I see clients with impairing levels of negative self-talk, we can eventually change that inner voice to be more kind with consistent practice. It’s like unlearning a habit that was born in childhood.

Reframing Mistakes

Mistakes are proof that you are learning! You couldn’t have known it was a mistake until you realized it wasn’t correct! Despite the first line of this blog, mistakes are not proof of your inadequacy. It just means you don’t know how to do something yet. It is indicative of somebody who is still learning.

Let me throw a hypothetical at you. A 6-year-old shows you her crude drawing of her and her family. You can tell she worked hard on it, but It’s hot garbage by any artistic standard.

Would you say that to her face? Does this 6-year-old have the expectation to be a professional artist right now? No, of course not, to place that expectation on this child would be unfair and undeserved. What kind of unfair expectation do you place on yourself when you are trying your best, given the circumstance?

Failure in something simply suggests that you don’t know something yet or aren’t able to do something yet, not an indication of your worth.

Dispelling the myth that feeling bad for making a mistake is necessary for learning.

If someone wants to learn something new or improve, then it does not necessarily require them to feel bad before making the change. If I misspelled a word right now, I don’t need to tell myself I’m an idiot before fixing the word. I simply fix the word without much thought. The question of my adequacy did not enter the mind space to fix that misspelling.

Here’s the thing: guilt and shame has its ability to produce change in a person, but it can also contribute to mental health issues and suffering without change. The key is to be able to identify how much of the shame and guilt is helping you make positive change and how much is just causing unnecessary suffering.

The healthier coping mechanism in question is to take mistakes as useful data for growth and learning rather than for self-hatred and measuring worth. Easier said than done! Especially, if you’ve grown up in a culture where mistakes and failures warrant exclusion and ridicule over patience and kindness. The good news is that you have influence over the only domain that matters, your mind! We can slowly chip away at the pre-conceived notion of self-hatred from mistakes with time and effort.

This blog can’t go over everything, but if these ideas bring about questions and wanting to know more, consider therapy to help you facilitate the process of positive change and growth.