Mistakes are allowed: it's the path to wisdom

Making mistakes is allowed, yet you may feel that making mistakes is terribly bad for you. You may be incredibly anxious about making mistakes and what consequences they may have for you. While you are human, and if there is one thing humans do, it is make mistakes.

In the process, making mistakes can help you learn useful things and life lessons.

Making a mistake means that you have performed certain actions where you expected to have a certain outcome, only that specific outcome has not happened. Often, then, something completely different happened than you expected.

Mistakes make consequences

Making mistakes has all kinds of consequences. For example, did you know that making mistakes is more important to how companies learn new things than when they achieve success? It is sometimes said that success is born when making a mistake[1].

Unfortunately, a company that has all the good things in place to learn from mistakes can still be awkward for the individuals in the company who made a mistake. For example, your colleagues may begin to think you are not good at your job and you may have fewer opportunities for rewards within the company.

However, there are also companies that know how to change these kinds of beliefs, for example by introducing “The Mistake of the Month.” Then, making mistakes (not on purpose, of course) can once again be seen as a way to help a company move forward. Over time, such a company often performs better as well (source 1).

Of course, there are fields where making mistakes has serious consequences, such as when you are a doctor and patients die because of a mistake. But for most people, mistakes are not that serious.

In your personal life, it is especially important to send signals to your loved ones about wanting them in your life. If you don't do this properly, it can cause relationships to fail in the long run or even break up, but in the short term, you can make quite a mistake. If you can talk about this well with your loved one, it can actually strengthen your relationship[2].

Fear of making mistakes

So making mistakes has bad consequences and quite a few good ones, only this is not what you learn when you are small. From a young age, on the contrary, most people are told that making mistakes is not good. You hear this from your parents, you hear it at school. After all, you get a reward when you make as few mistakes as possible. You then take those beliefs with you into the rest of your life.

In addition, focusing on the mistakes you’ve made yourself often isn’t good for your self-confidence. So you’d rather not dwell on your own mistakes, which isn’t helpful for learning from them.

Also, thinking about mistakes you've made can make you feel like you can't do something. Again, that's not helpful, because you just couldn't do it "yet.

Because confronting yourself with your own mistakes is not really fun to do, so you may also get the fear of making mistakes (source 1).

If you really hate making mistakes, you may also suffer from neurotic perfectionism. On paper, it might seem like you’re doing very well—you get high grades—but in reality, you’re doing this mainly out of fear. Your work or school then causes you a lot of stress, which prevents you from truly enjoying what you’re learning[3].

Learning from mistakes

To learn from mistakes, it is important to first identify the mistake. For example, companies have business goals, and if they are not met, then a mistake has been made. In your personal life, you may also have (had) certain goals, and if they are not achieved, then you may see the behavior with which you hoped to achieve your goal as a mistake.

Then you can talk about it with someone or analyze for yourself what you may have done wrong.

Especially in companies or in collaborations, it is important to resolve conflicts properly so that people always feel free to talk about mistakes and present their ideas for improvement (source 1).

Once you have analyzed what went wrong, you can devise a plan for how to deal with similar problems or goals in the future.

Looking to the future

Another pitfall you might face when making mistakes is that you tend to dwell on the mistake you’ve made. As a result, your thoughts are essentially stuck in the past, which can prevent you from seeing new opportunities.

So stay focused on your future. You learned from the mistake; now you get to let it go and refocus on the rest of your life.

Changing beliefs about mistakes

As mentioned, it’s better for many companies if people realize that it’s okay to make mistakes as long as you can learn from them. However, changing that mindset about mistakes is often easier said than done.

Fortunately, hypnosis can often help you quickly change your beliefs about whether it's okay to make mistakes, so you know it's okay. It's okay, after all, you can learn from it.

Cognitive behavioral therapy, combined with hypnosis and hypnotic suggestions, has long been used to change people’s (subconscious) beliefs. This is particularly effective when beliefs lead to maladaptive behavior[4], such as in cases of neurotic perfectionism.

There are multiple techniques that can be used. Sometimes ridiculing a belief is good enough.

Just say in a very distinctive voice and while walking around and putting your fingers in your nose, "I can't make mistakes." Do this until you find it so idiotic that you have to laugh.

Regression

Another way to change such awkward beliefs about being allowed to make mistakes is through regression. With regression, you go back to the first moment when you figured out that you are not allowed to make mistakes. These are often moments in your childhood, because that is the moment when you determine how the world works and how you are supposed to function in it.

With the help of a hypnotherapist, you then go back to that moment to reinterpret it, but with the knowledge of the life you have now. After all, many beliefs you simply hold in your subconscious, without double-checking how logical such a belief is. With regression, you can do that for a while and get help to do so, so you can let go of awkward beliefs.

Once you've managed to let go of the "I can't make mistakes" belief, it's helpful that it doesn't just leave a void.

Repeat Suggestions

You want to fill that very one with a new belief, such as "mistakes are allowed." You can then, of course, often repeat "mistakes are allowed" yourself. This can certainly help, and it often works even better when you do this while you have hypnotized yourself.

In addition, you can also repeat some supportive suggestions besides "mistakes are allowed," such as:

"You can learn from mistakes."

"Mistakes make you human."

"Improving mistakes makes your life better."

These are just examples. Depending on why you find it difficult to think that making mistakes is allowed, you may get other suggestions from a hypnotherapist.

Shifting focus to the future

In addition, it can also be helpful to stop remembering your mistakes all the time. After all, wandering in that closet full of memories of mistakes is not so nice.

In that case, you can also perform a progression. With a progression, you precisely imagine an ideal future and take a step back each time to the moment of hypnotherapy. The hypnotherapist helps you with this.

This ensures that your subconscious has a clear plan for the future, giving you renewed motivation to take chances, maybe even make mistakes and learn from them.

Making mistakes is something everyone does and yet many people find this to be a big deal. This is often due to ideas you have been taught at home and school, whereas learning from mistakes is the way for yourself and businesses to become more successful. So making mistakes is actually making opportunities.

Learning from mistakes can already make you feel less bad about making mistakes, and hypnosis can help you gain the belief that making mistakes is allowed.

Would you like to learn more about how hypnosis works? Then join a free online masterclass.

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