Owning Our Mistakes, Can Change Us for the Better

Owning Our Mistakes, 

Can Change Us for the Better

Blaming the world for what is not going right and praising ourselves for what is going right, is something we Indians have learned from our childhood days.

 

When you were a very small kid, somewhere between the toddling and running stage, if at any time you fell down and cried, your mother would have picked you up, comforted you and in order to pacify you and stop you from crying, she would have acted as if she was beating the floor on which you tripped, twice or thrice, saying that “I have beaten the floor, now you don’t cry”. Somewhere deep in our mind a message was engrained that tripping down was not our fault, but the fault of the floor. Because the floor was punished, when actually we made the mistake of running carelessly, our mind learned whatever happens to us, is a plot of an external force and not our own mistake. This act of dis-owning our mistakes keep continuing in our growth stage as well.

 

For example, while we are walking and we accidentally stamped over a thorn, we would say, “the thorn pricked me” whereas an English man would say, “I ran over a thorn”. Just think of it. Is it not true?

A few more similar examples:

• 
  When we miss a train, we brood “the train left before I arrived” rather than saying “I was late to catch the train”.

• When our shirt does not fit, we say “the shirt has become short”, instead of saying “I have outgrown the shirt”.

• When a pen slips from your hand, we say “the pen fell down” instead of “I dropped the pen”.

It is time we learn to own responsibility, for our mistakes. It is only by owning our mistakes, we can change for the better. It will give us an opportunity to assess where and how we went wrong, and give us a way ahead plan. Because in the end of the day, what the world will count is not the number of your excuses but the amount of your achievement.

 

These are just a few of the many wrong statements we use in our day to day life. These communication patterns which we form unconsciously, affects the way we perceive life and our life situations. This in turn has affected our growth and success rate in our life. As we tend, to justify our failures, by blaming the external situations, we don’t genuinely try to understand what really went wrong, when we face a failure. Unless we develop an unbiased view and try to figure out, what went wrong, we cannot find a positive solution to the problem. The problem will keep repeating, again and again.

 

Robin Sharma, in his book “The Saint, the Surfer and the CEO” gives a very thought provoking statement which goes like this. “Life is a growth school. Everything that happens in your life, happens for a reason and there is some lesson that life is trying to teach you. We need to quickly learn the lesson, failing which life will continue to bring the same problem again and again until you have learnt the lesson.”

 

 D. Senthil Kannan,

 Managing Trustee, PALMS, Tuticorin.

 Author of "Transformational Thoughts" - A Journey of learning 

 Email: senthilkannand@gmail.com