How to Stop Making Mistakes
Well, first up, you can’t. “What?” You can’t stop making mistakes…
Hang on, haven’t you just called this piece, How to Stop Making Mistakes?
Yes, but you are designed to make mistakes in order to learn. However, because the word mistake has such a disempowering effect on us, there are a couple of things you can do to stop this effect. When you can stop the disempowering effect it becomes…….well, empowering. Remember, everything is, and is it’s absence, or opposite. See Taoism.
Reframing
In NLP there is a technique called reframing that tells us if we reframing the content we change the experience. For this technique to work, what if we changed the word Mistake to Learning, or Learning Experience? Or what if we made it Feedback (no Failure only Feedback)? This has a much more empowering effect on our psychology.
In order to have a more successful psychological condition and therefore more choices we should reframe all the words that disempower us.
Stop Explaining Our Advice
This is really the main learning. I had this learning experience the other day when I was giving advice to someone about something I had a lot of experience about and felt I could give her the benefit of that experience. When we give advice we should ask ourselves, “Has it been asked for?” and “Am I simply showing how clever I am?”. If the first answer is yes and the second no, here’s the thing we really have to watch out for and what I learned.
When we have done something for a long time and are good at it, we can’t help but develop some beliefs around it. The problem there is, these are OUR beliefs, they work for our organism and map of the world, but may not for someone else. In my case, all I did was project what I found to be the problems for ME. The other person may NEVER have this problem, but as soon as I projected them, they took them on board as reality. I created the problem for them!
Let me give you the example. I have played a few thousand gigs, and had been jamming with a new artist who had not played any. We got our first gig. I unwittingly said, “On first night performances, one usually finds a 10%-15% drop in ability. Because of this we need to do extra rehearsal to make certain we know it inside out.”
The second part of that sentence was good advice, the first part unnecessary. Therefore, my learning, IF SOMEONE ASKS, is to simply say its good practice to make certain you know the song/s inside out before your first gig.
Summing Up and Using Maxims
So, how to stop making mistakes comes down to this. Identify when you are attaching your belief to the conversation about an experience and ditch the belief part. Reframe the word mistake. Only give the advice part and don’t project.
All that said, let’s get a personal, practical example. Relationships.
Common ‘mistake’ – I always go for the wrong type. Easy fix: drop the whole story about why you pick this sort or that sort and only use a maxim that you know is empowering and will work with the person you really want to be. The one I adopted was; NEVER sleep with anyone you wouldn’t want to be. Couldn’t be simpler. And I’m not meaning if they’re a woman and you’re a man sort of thing – more their values and life practices.
You can apply this to lots of areas. Use maxims rather than stories. Stories are dripping with personal beliefs. Live to maxims like, Punctuality is the Politeness of Kings. This shows you respect others, when you respect others you respect yourself. How annoying is it when someone keeps you waiting and then acts as its no big deal.
There you are friends. How to Stop Making Mistakes is easier than you think. By changing a few practices and living by maxims that are in line with your core values, you can make life a lot easier. You can also be in an empowering place much more often.
Enjoy
