How Do You Feel About Making Mistakes?

What you do with them will have a huge impact on your life

Photo by RACOOL from Freerange Stock

Recently, I was talking with a friend. We were discussing the fact that I hated having anyone listen to me play or practice when I was a kid. There were a couple of reasons for that, but one of the biggest was that I was afraid to make a mistake.

Over the years, this would show up again and again in various aspects of my life, often to my detriment — because of course, as soon as you try to be perfect, you’ve already set yourself up for failure because we’re human. We can’t be perfect, no matter how hard we try.

Fearing making a mistake, or perfectionism, can have various roots. In my case, it had its seeds in being taken from my 15-year-old birth mother after a few weeks, then stuck in foster care (not sure how many “mothers” I’d have bonded with during that time — at least one) — then adopted at about 6 months old by a mother who never liked me from Day 1.

So with at least two broken “mother bonds” and then having a mother who was rejecting and unloving, that little girl deep inside me was primed and ready to feel like she was flawed. Defective. Damaged. If no one wanted her, there must have been something wrong with her.

Of course, the next step was to think that maybe if she was perfect, she would be loved. Maybe if she was perfect, she wouldn’t be sent away. Again.

Amazing how the subconscious works, isn’t it? Even in a baby who doesn’t know actual words, these are the feelings that manifested deep in a little soul, and ultimately they would play out in self-destructive and unhealthy behaviours for decades.

With that at the core of my being, my mother added to it with frequent insults. I was ugly. I was stupid. Oh, stupid. I heard that one a lot. That, and “You’ll never amount to anything.”

I wasn’t a perfectionist in all aspects of my life but it certainly showed up in ways that were ultimately detrimental to my overall happiness and wellbeing. Like when I was a single mum with three kids and studying social work. I’d got divorced and being a high school drop-out, I needed to do something so I could get a decent job and support myself and my kids.

I’d been getting straight A grades throughout the program and had somehow managed to avoid one particular instructor who was notorious for giving even top students Cs and Ds. Every semester, I heaved a huge sigh of relief when miraculously, I’d avoided his classes yet again.

Then I got married in the spring before the last year of the program. Rather than risk the humiliation of his grades and trashing my perfect 4.0 GPA, I quit the program, with my excuse being that I wanted to stay home with my children. To be fair, that was always my preference. But it was kinda dumb to have worked that hard and got that far, only to throw it away because I feared those awful grades.

Sometimes that perfectionistic streak was just plain ridiculous. Like when I studied homeopathy several years after the social work debacle. During the entire 4-year homeopathy program, there were something like 160-ish assignments. I got an “A” on every one of them except two, where I got an “A-”. I was horrified. Embarrassed. Simply could NOT cope with that.

Fortunately, we were allowed to redo assignments if we weren’t happy with our grades so I took the little bit of “oops, you could have added or done this” feedback, ran with it, wrote stellar essays and got rid of that bloody “minus” on both of them.

I look back at that now and laugh.

In the many years since that time, I’ve continued to work at healing those deep wounds going back to my earliest existence. I’ve chipped away at facing the damaging beliefs, and creating better ones. I’ve dared do all sorts of terrifying things and proved to myself that I’m anything but stupid. In fact, I’m highly intelligent and capable. I’ve gone from having zero confidence and absolutely hating myself to seeing and respecting my strengths, talents and natural abilities.

I’ve come a long way in building self-esteem, self-respect, and finally reaching a place of self-love.

It doesn’t matter a damn who loves me — or doesn’t — as long as I love myself.

Then there are those “life mistakes” —the ones where we’ve made a decision that didn’t turn out as we’d hoped, like oops, marrying “the wrong person.” Accepting “the wrong job.” Hanging a left when you really wish you’d have hung a right in whatever aspect of life that happens to be.

Do you view these as mistakes? Do you look at them with regret? Or do you see them as opportunities to learn? Do you take forever to make a decision because you’re afraid to get it wrong?

Do I like making “mistakes”? Nope. But I can shrug them off now. Some of them might sting for a while — even a long while. But it’s still okay. I see them as being outcomes I hadn’t expected or wanted, and keep moving forward. Will I make more? I hope so. It’ll mean I haven’t given up and stopped living. It’ll mean I’m still doing stuff, trying something new, or that I took a risk. Nothing good ever happens unless you’re willing to take risks.

Being perfect is impossible. Attempting to be perfect doesn’t make you happy. And it sure doesn’t get you loved. And if that’s someone’s criteria for loving you, you can absolutely do without that person, no matter who it is.