How to Turn Your Mistakes Into Valuable Life Lessons

It’s impossible to go through life without making mistakes. At one point or the other, there definitely will be an err here or a slip there. But you know what? There are valuable life lessons to be learnt from your mistakes.

There are times you would have sworn to yourself not to repeat a mistake. Good as it may be not to want to go down that path again, there definitely is something or a few things that can be learnt from that blunder of yours. Mistakes are there to teach us the right way to approach a problem, not necessarily deter us from achieving our goals. So if you let a mistake hold you back, then it’s definitely on you.

We would be reviewing some of the steps to take to turn those life bloopers into valuable lessons that would come in handy when navigating the labyrinth of life. This way, the mistake won’t be as hurtful as it usually should be.

To learn from your mistakes, you have to:

Admit Your MIstake

This is the most challenging part of the process. Whenever an error is made, the human minds first instinct is to look for whom to blame. Taking the blame for the mistake is usually a hard pill to take. But you have to accept it. Accepting the mistake is accepting yourself.

Before you can learn from that error, you have to take full responsibility for your actions in the scenario’s outcome. Tell yourself, “I did this”. Only when this has been done can you then get on with the process of learning from it.

Review the Mistake

You have made a mistake, so no use crying over spilt milk. It’s time to review the mistake and take out the lesson it was meant to teach you. Okay, so a few questions should be in place. “What was the problem”? “How did I approach the problem”? “What did I do wrong”?

With these questions, you should pinpoint when and where exactly you went wrong in the whole approach to the problem and then nip it in the bud. Also, reviewing and asking these questions would help you retrieve the lesson the mistake was meant to teach you.

Create A Plan

Ok so, the mistake made – check, review what caused the error – check, now is the time to create a plan. In learning from mistakes, there are usually two approaches to it. You either know not to make them in future or learn new ways to tackle them when next you face them.

So whichever it might be, creating a plan on what next to do when similar scenarios are faced is the next point of call. Create a personal approach to such schema. You can even simulate the scenarios and test out your action plan if it works. This way, you can learn from your mistakes fast and solve them on your own.

Put the Lesson Learned into Practice

At this point, you are going to make it more difficult to mess up in the future. Put all that you have learnt from the previous error in practice to ensure that even when caught unawares, you dont err. And as they say, practice makes perfect. So the more you practice with what you have learned, the more difficult it is to be on the offending lane anymore. Practice what you have learned, and you will find that you would be better off at tackling similar problems.

Review Your Achievement

If you have done all this, the chances are that you have gained new wisdom from the mistake you made. Take it from the top all over again. Review what caused it and how you were able to tackle it up until this point. Also, review variants of situations you might be in and when you are are sure you have done an excellent job, move on with your newfound wisdom.

A wise man learns from others mistakes. You mustn’t make the mistakes to apply the above to learn from it. You can take case studies from others, find out how they went about it and create your way of navigating it if it happens to you. Learn to turn your mistakes into valuable life lessons; it saves you a whole lot of stress.