Mistakes can Make you a Master!
Everyone does it.
Everyone will keep doing it.
Some people think they never do it.
And some people do it all the time.
What is it? It’s MAKING MISTAKES! We all make mistakes!
I made a huge one this morning. I totally forgot a meeting. I work with people all over the country so I’m not taking a lot of local meetings. But I had scheduled one with a guy in a very similar business so we were excited to meet. I even confirmed with him last night!
What happened? I woke up and didn’t feel good. I had a headache. It was raining. My car wouldn’t start. My dog ate my homework. It doesn’t matter what happened, it happened!
And I felt HORRIBLE!
Is it the first time I’ve done it? Unfortunately NO. I’ve done it before. Will I do it again? I’ll say, that I HOPE not, and will guard against it EVER happening again and now will make SURE it won’t happen again…
How can you be sure?
Well, when you make a mistake and you feel bad, you basically DON”T want to feel bad again. We’ve all had those things that years later, run through our minds about a time when we screwed up, lost the deal, the job because of saying or doing the wrong thing! I don’t know about you, but those things can plague me for DAYS.
So now, what can I do to eliminate this mistake from ever happening again?
I assigned it to my assistant!!! In addition to having my calendar, I’ve now given the assignment to my assistant to call and text me every morning to remind me. Plus I’ve now set up alarms on my phone to remind me. Why didn’t I do that before? I didn’t have enough pain about it. Now I do!
Sometimes we just NEED to feel enough pain in order to change our habits.
Most people walk around blind to their habits and don’t even realize how our own mistakes are hurting ourselves. Most people aren’t goint to have others be so bold to point out our blind spots, so we keep running in circles making the same bad decisions, or defects.
I have a guy friend who longs to be married again and wants to be with a woman he can love and adore. But in a recent conversation he told me that he often uses SARCASM. He said, “You better be willing to take it if you can dish it out”. It stopped me in my tracks and I told him, “well, if you want to be the man of someone’s dreams.. then you BETTER DROP the sarcasm! Sarcasm HURTS and love can not THRIVE in an environment of pithy statements that hurt!”
It was a sock in the gut. He got it. He never even realized that this tiny little mistake he was making was hurting people. He thought it was funny, not painful.
What could his life been like if someone would have pointed this out years ago? Or what if he did a personal inventory and found out himself what mistakes he is making that cause people to not to want to be close to him?
Mistakes are necessary because we’re supposed to use them to learn so we can then become MASTERS. We are supposed to learn FROM them. We are supposed to GROW from them. And mistakes happen every day. We need to forgive ourselves and forgive others when they are made. But we need to also NOTICE them and CORRECT what we do when we find them.
What mistakes have YOU made? Have you improved from them? If not, that’s your first mistake. If you have, then you are on your way to becoming a MASTER!