We have always wished how we had a time machine so that we could turn back time and beat ourselves up for the mistakes that we have already made. Well, even if we didn’t make the mistakes on our own, we have surely heard our friends saying “If only…”
Hang on! Life is all about making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. It’s easy to look back with a heart full of regrets, but what’s courageous is shrugging your shoulders and move on. We are all creative thinkers. In that case, what if we told you that instead of sitting back and not willing to make more mistakes, you could celebrate your mistakes?
This may sound very weird, but this is also an art. How did your parents handle your mistakes when you were a kid? Or maybe, how do you manage your own mistakes? Perhaps you don’t, and that’s when you hide out of shame.
Anyway, here we are with a handful of lessons on how you can love your mistakes and move on with life. This article is going to be stellar!
- Look for the Silver-Lining
There are always two sides of a coin. If you are going through pain and failure just because you made one mistake, chances are that you’re focusing on the negative side of the situation. It may not be easy to find the silver lining, but you can always make a sense out of it. Learn to become more matured, understanding and grow from whatever mistake that you’ve made.
So, if you have failed or made a HUGE mistake that’s potentially costing you money, time or even relationships, think about the silver lining. Yet if you have come across a situation where you feel that someone has wronged you and you did not see that happening, what do you think you have benefitted from that?
Now your answer might be obvious; null. Let us open your eyes. Look at it from a deeper understanding and magnify the major mistake that you have made just so you don’t go on making the same mistake again in the near future. And that’s not it.
Again, let’s come back to the silver lining. Mistakes offer a fork in your road. If you hadn’t made some of the “biggest” mistakes that you think you made in life, you wouldn’t have benefitted in the tremendous way that you did over time. And of course, you wouldn’t be where you are today. You just didn’t realise it back then.
You see, life runs at a course of mistakes. From one to another – learning, moulding and shaping all along the way. While we suffer through the pain, it’s hard to catch a sight of the forest through the trees, so to speak. But when you look back, it’s way easier to discover the silver-lining.
You have either gained a new perception, or your mistake has led you to another direction in life that ultimately brought you happiness and joy – there you have the silver-lining. Use this mistake to guide light through the tunnel so that you can forgive yourself.
- Re-evaluate Your Goals
How can you reduce your pain from your past mistakes for a better future? One way is to re-evaluate your goals. What you ultimately learned from your mistake will show you a direction, and thus you can use those lessons to see things differently.
It’s always a good idea to use your experience from past mistakes to guide you through towards your goals. Even if something didn’t go just like the way you planned, improve your goals and move in another positive direction.
We fail. Every one of us fails in life. When it becomes hard to forgive yourself, just use it as a leverage and reshape your goals and work towards something in life. Hark back to how the stressful situation has helped you grow and become so much of a better person than you were yesterday. There’s no shame in this.
The best way to move towards something new is to note it down. Literally, write it down somewhere where you can see them daily. What are you up to achieving and why? How you utilise your past mistakes and motivate yourself to do better says a lot about you.
It’s not always about making more money or buying expensive stuff; it’s about achieving something meaningful. If your goals aren’t meaningful enough, you won’t work enough to achieve them. However, by leveraging the past mistakes, you will be adding more fuel to the fire and meaning will stoke those flames.
- What Do You Value Most and Why?
If you’re really looking forward to forgiving yourself for your past mistakes, reassess everything that’s valuable in your life. Mistakes, failures and pain will help you do that. What do you value the most? Money? Freedom? Relationships? Security? Career?
Use the pain to help you determine what’s important and move forward. For instance, if you have made a mistake in your past relationship for which your marriage fell apart, how can you reorganise the values so that it serves you better in your near future?
Often, we make the mistakes of not reassessing things that are most valuable to us. Your subconscious mind may denote some value of it, but it’s not always in our best interest due to infighting that is continuously occurring the psychic apparatus; the three-part interaction of ego, superego and the id.
This is precisely why you need to write down your values. It needs to be listed according to its importance. And as you move forward, you will be able to realise you can fall back on those values to prioritise your energy, time and activities.
As long as you don’t keep on repeating your mistakes over and over again, you will surely be able to move ahead with a positive and honest intention for growth, contribution and add value to the world.
- You Do Have a lot of Things to be Grateful for
One way you can learn to love your mistake is by focusing on gratitude. Ask yourself, and you will surely find the answer to what you have to be grateful for. The problem? You always look for things that you don’t have instead of the things that you already have. That’s actually not your fault, that’s how the society has pre-programmed your mind, to emulate the haves rather than the have-nots.
Where the biggest problem lies is, you always compare ourselves with the people around us and the status quo. If you have clean running water, you wouldn’t be grateful for that. But we all know how much of the world doesn’t have clean running water.
Well, the problem here isn’t about the clean running water. It’s about what’s around you. We are surrounded by things that we are not grateful for. You can be thankful for our intellectual, our ability to read and write, speak a certain language, hear and perceive and a trillion other things. But then you choose to focus on something that you don’t have. Therefore, your mind moves from a state of lack to a state of abundance.
No matter how bad things may get, or what of a bad mistake you might have made, you have to be grateful for what you have rather than something that you don’t.
- Shift Your Priorities
Whether you believe it or not but at times, you live our life on an autopilot mode, where it’s easy to lose sight of what you prioritise the most. Either you are sacrificing your time, money, energy and values for someone else or you are living life in an overdrive situation where you are forgetting the most important task: to take care of yourself.
If that’s what’s happening to you, you are building up stress over yourself, and this anxiety could become overbearing. The weight that you’re putting on your shoulder could cause you to implode and collapse.
One piece of advice: don’t forget to take care of yourself; mentally and physically.
Even if it takes to shift your priorities, do so. It’s not called being selfish. You need to love yourself, tick the boxes off for your wellness and health. If you don’t, who will? It’s always nice to take care of others, but it’s not okay to do so without taking care of your own.
Make some time for yourself. Do things that you enjoy. Life is not all about winning and achieving or even about impressing people. Care for yourself. Even if people are talking behind your back, which they would do anyway, ignore them. Shift your priorities and focus on what’s in front of you.
It becomes so much easier to forgive yourself for your mistakes when you are not worked to the bone. Let go and move on. Don’t stress yourself all the time or live in a constant state of anxiety and fear. Don’t take things so seriously. What’s gone is gone, and you cannot change anything from the future.
- Chill, breathe and let it go!
Sometimes, all you need to do is make a mocktail for yourself, relax, breath and let it go. The thing is, what you are going through or have been through, you’re not alone. Millions of other people have been through the same thing and will continue to go through in the future, too.
As we said this, it may not have made you feel any easier, but it sure does send a powerful message. Your problems only seem bigger because you are facing them. What if your friend comes up to you with the same problem, what’d you advise them? You will surely tell them that everything’s going to be fine and that it’s not their final destination.
How about you took the same advice for yourself? How much when it’s our turn it seems like the end of the world already? That’s why we’re saying, relax, breathe and learn how you can let it go. Give it to Allah or God or even out of the world. Just let it go.
It’s far worse to hold onto pain and anger than to forgive and let it go. It’s even more important to forgive yourself first. No matter what has happened, it’s all going to be fine at one point. Look at some of your problems and mistakes back from 5 – 10 years ago. How important are they today? Perhaps those mistakes actually shaped you. Maybe they guided you to the brighter future you are living today.
Take a deep breath and be brave enough to move past everything. Just make sure to learn and grow from the mistakes to a better person than you were before. That’s all that matters.
Final Words
Even though we try our best to avoid making mistakes, we still make the slightest of it. And there’s no break from making mistakes. It shapes us and makes us what we are finally meant to become. What’s important is to stick by our intentions and moral compasses. It doesn’t matter how we try our best, we will never become perfect.
Even if you feel like a failure, you lost your job, your insurance rates went up, or your driving record is tarnished, remind yourself of the things that helped you get some perspective.
So, are you trying to get right on track and move past your mistakes? Bingo!
Let us know how you felt about this article, we’d love to know your thoughts.