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A healthy recognition of failure helps you grow. It can be hard to admit failure, but if you run from it, you lose out on the chance to learn from it. Admit the mistake to yourself or the person it affected, so you can re-examine how it happened and do better next time.
If facing your errors makes you anxious or frightened, remind yourself how normal this is: Every single person makes mistakes. Most failures are temporary setbacks, rather than absolute disasters. People who achieve great things often had great failures along the way. Method 2. Mistakes are both unavoidable and useful. Your brain has powerful, split-second tools to protect you, and those tools learn from your errors. By untangling what actually happened and what you could have done differently, you turn a mistake into a setup for success.
Method 3. Give yourself credit instead of beating yourself up. While acknowledging mistakes is valuable, too much focus on the negatives can make you "shut down" and avoid thinking about what happened.
Spend some time giving yourself the credit you deserve: Make a list of everything you've overcome and all your successes. Write down qualities about yourself that you value. If you have regrets about a complicated situation, identify the actions you took that improved it or stopped it getting worse, even if they didn't fully succeed.
Method 4. Quiet your inner critic when it grows too loud. People with perfectionism or depression often hyper-focus on mistakes. If you struggle to praise yourself or see your value, make being kind to yourself a top priority. Overcoming these struggles doesn't mean you will never criticize yourself again; it means shaping that internal critic into something more realistic, kinder, and less central to your sense of self.
If praising yourself is difficult, try talking to yourself as though you were talking to your best friend. Come up with counterexamples to prove them wrong.
Method 5. Set yourself up for success in concrete ways. You can't just shout at yourself to do better and expect it to magically happen. Approach your difficulties with a realistic mindset and take steps in advance to stop old patterns from playing out again. Here are some examples: If you regularly miss the due date of bills, make a large, visual reminder ahead of time.
If you keep ignoring warning signs in your romantic life, ask your trusted friends to vet your dates and speak up if their alarm bells go off. Method 6. Examine your life for behavior patterns you'd like to work on. If you're caught in a loop making the same mistakes, it's probably because you have a blind spot in how you're viewing the world and behaving within it. Reflect on your unconscious habits and how they relate to your life: [10] X Research source Try to face the hidden motivations behind your behavior.
Do you game for hours because you are avoiding the people in your household? Do you jump on and off diets because of low self esteem? You may need to focus on the root cause before the surface-level behavior changes.
Don't take on too much at once. Close friends of mine moved to a new house in a new city several years ago. Life happens as it does, and the next time I went to their new home I did the same thing. What happens next may not surprise you. It has been several years, and I still make that wrong turn more than half of the time I visit.
What is happening? Pattern development. Why would my brain do that? A couple of reasons. No harm, no foul. The consequence is minimal so the need to learn a new pathway is diminished. Changing an established pathway and learning a new one can often feel more difficult than learning something new. People on the whole are averse to change so why go through the discomfort of change for something so small.
The problem is that this phenomenon applies to big things as well. This is why individuals continue to choose an abusive partner, or companies stick with failing business strategies, and many other such examples. This is not particularly accurate though. Slowness alone does not make individuals more likely to be right.
In fact, they may make the same or worse decisions because they are using weaker information in their process. It tries to figure out, why did this error happen? Did something about the world change?
Is there something wrong with me? How do we avoid this? Oddly, among the participants asked to recall past successes, those who remembered more examples were willing to take on about 21 percent more credit-card debt than those who remembered fewer. Perhaps, Haws speculated, they struggled to remember all 10 and then questioned their self-control.
But the participants who remembered times when they had failed to rein in their expenditures—regardless of how many instances they recalled—racked up just as much debt as those who reflected on 10 successes.
The fact that they had wasted money in the past had little effect on their willingness to do it again. Seeing yourself as a failure, Haws explained, can get you down. The study participants watched a collection of moving dots on a screen, and then used their eyes to indicate the direction in which they thought the majority of the dots were traveling. Both humans and monkeys took longer to make their next decisions after a wrong answer, with the effect more pronounced for difficult choices than for easier ones.
It tries to figure out, why did this error happen? Did something about the world change?
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