To err is human. To learn, smart!

When people intentionally or inadvertently make mistakes, and when the mistake comes to light, it puts them through a range of emotions such as embarrassment, anger, shame, guilt and extreme sadness. It is not the easiest experience; sometimes it can be just downright awful. But do you know that the best learning happens when these emotions are consciously removed out of the experience? If we succeed, then we develop an insight that we are not and can never be perfect. First, it helps an individual in taking responsibility of where he/she went wrong and how to fix it to the best of their ability. Secondly, by sharing our mistakes and learning with others we can get past them and grow.

We all take many decisions, which we regret later. But understand the difference between feeling bad and regrets. Feeling bad is the range of emotions after the event. Regret is when we wish it never happened. But both don’t help undo what has happened and there’s no guarantee it won’t happen again.

Another fact is, not everyone learns from their mistakes. Some people continue to do it for the rest of their lives. They will feel miserable, have regrets and sometimes even feel victimised. Hence, not repeating the mistake is an important learning. Of course, mistakes are just one way to learn, but not always the best.

We need to be aware that people will always see us from our past mistakes and judge accordingly. And so, it is important that we see the positive sides of our mistakes. We do live in an era of hard knocks society. Sometimes the knocks are gentle, at other times they throw us out of gear.

Is it possible to learn from our successes? I wonder if there is any quote with regards to learning from success as we have in learning from our mistakes (Example, “To err is human and we learn from mistakes”). Have we conditioned ourselves by saying that we learn only from our mistakes?

We should also learn from our and others’ successes, I believe this would elevate us.

Mistakes are a result of wrong decisions due to insufficient facts, pressure or poor judgment. Hence, it is important to determine the urgency of a decision, whether decisions are irrevocable or not as well as the areas it would affect (in reference to the facts). In this form of analysis, do you notice all the above has nothing to do with emotions and they are based on our logical and analytical abilities? Let’s not deny the fact that we have made better decisions today than we did in the past. We just need to keep up the great work n

— therapist.saras@gmail.com