Six Ways to Get a Positive Experience from One’s Own Fails
You probably heard about making failures and learning from them to be the best way of achieving perfection. It is much easier to say about that than to do it. Sometimes, society punishes a person for their mistakes hardly. Being able to get some life lessons from them is the pure art that nobody can teach you. You have to study it on your own. Here are six ways to do that, learnt by expert essay writers.
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1. Be Prepared to Claim Your Fails
When people think about themselves, they are rare to accept their being mistaken about something. In your mind, you are always right.
Understanding that you are mistaken is painful. It confuses you and makes you feel yourself silly. But things go even worse when you make mistakes and then start thinking out different excuses for you not to feel guilty. The wish of feeling yourself always right makes you addicted. This addiction does not allow you avoiding mistakes and learning from them to prevent them from happening in future.
The first step towards your “treatment” needs you to claim that you were wrong. Say: “I am wrong”, and then pass through the discomfort that accompanies that phrase. People around you will perceive such behavior as the mark of your intelligence and honesty.
With the ability to accept your mistakes helps you stay conscious: notice your actions and understand when they lead to failures.
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2. Prevent Rumination
The discomfort mentioned above is temporary. Scientists say, one needs to practice adaptive self-analysis instead of constantly thinking about failures you made.
This is about that you should find time to think over a mistake and change your behavior so it could not happen again when future comes. Can’t you distinguish when you think the same “recorded” thought and when the adaptive self-analysis happens? Here are two questions that can help you figure it out:
- Does it hold me in my past? – If yes, then it is that “recorded” thought (“rumination”, psychologists call it);
- Does it help me get new positive experience and grow? - If yes, then that is the adaptive self-analysis.
The best way to practice it is to put right questions.
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3. Put Right Questions
To reflect the mistake once made, you need to put some serious questions for yourself. Here they are:
- Is there something that can fix the mistake?
- What can be saved in this situation?
- Is there a possibility hidden in the mistake?
- What was the reason of a mistake?
- A mistake was in the strategy or in the method chosen?
- Did you make a mistake while completing a plan?
- What can be made differently?
- Were there any warning signs that you missed?
- Have you supposed something that happened wrong as a result?
- Did a mistake show something you couldn’t know before making it?
- What worked? What didn’t?
- Did the mistake show you lack skills? Or practice?
- Did the mistake show your feature of character that was pulling you backwards? For instance, inflexibility of thinking or arrogance.
- What should you do to avoid making this mistake again?
Study your mistakes by analyzing your answers carefully.
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4. Sympathize with Yourself
As soon as you’ve put right questions and determined lessons that can be taken from the mistake you’ve made, let all the remaining negative feelings go; give yourself your own sympathy.
Scientists from California University of Berkley provided a research that showed sympathizing with oneself can be very useful. They found out students who made a mistake in a test and then were given a possibility to feel pity on themselves, dealt with negative emotions and started studying again faster.
What did they do? Just spoke affirmations out. Here are some phrases you can use next time you make a mistake:
- My mistakes do not determine my personality;
- Nobody ever reached success without making mistakes;
- Mistakes are parts of human being;
- I’m proud of myself having a try;
- I’ve made a mistake but I’m not going to guilt myself for it for too long;
- Now I’m prepared for the next try better;
- I’m thankful to this failure for making me better;
- I’m going to understand where the mistake was hidden and to try again once more.
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5. Learn from Mistakes and Go Further with no Fear
The worst thing for you to happen: is if you let your past mistakes to influence your further actions.
Life filled with mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than one spent for doing nothing. You have to be afraid of a lack of actions, and not to have a fear to fail. Mistakes will happen sooner or later, even if you planned it all carefully and avoid them. They are normal.
Be ready to make conclusions and try once more being armed with new knowledge.
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6. Try Your Life Out
The world is unbelievably complicated. Nobody, even the cleverest person in the world can’t know what will happen tomorrow: there are too many factors influencing the nearest future. A trial and error method is the best technique of problem-solving for all times:
- Once you meet a problem, decide to use several various approaches;
- Create a systematic way to determine what works and what does not;
- Analyze the data you receive, introduce the required changes and try once more.
Remember, life requires brave, constant experiments. Never stop.