Learn from your mistakes

Forgiveness of self and others is the linchpin of my therapy and coaching. So many times in my seminars I use the metaphor of burning your hand on a hot stove as a two year old. Even if it may scar you physically for life – I have a tiny scar on my left wrist which did develop from burning my wrist on a hot stove – it will not scar you emotionally.

I do not go around blaming my problems on the stove. I’m not an ACBBS (adult children burned by stove – as opposed to ACA = adult children of alcoholics). And don’t get me wrong, I’m not belittling the effects of dysfunctional families and childhoods. I was burned only once. It was a single occasion learning and the stove did not attack me. So I’m not blaming the victims.

I’m suggesting that as adults we can take responsibility for mistakes and failures and discover what went wrong and learn from those mistakes and then move on. After enough time has passed that we no longer feel extreme emotions about the event (there are ways that one can actually make this time period much shorter – I’ll write about these later) one can review the event with all concerned with no attempt to blame but to learn.

We can potentially make a check list to make sure such mistakes do not happen again. We can roll play and rehearse the situation and do it better the next time. We can find people, or institutions which do the thing we made a mistake in better and we can model them.

For example I had to change my hosting company recently thanks to a mistake that I made. Sure other external situations contributed to this and I still have not managed to restore all my website. The fact is that I suffered (I burned my hand on the stove) and after my immediate grief (and in reality blaming myself and others at first – that is natural – do not attempt to do a post mortem until you calm down – allow yourself to feel the emotions at first) I analyzed the situation and hopefully will not make the same mistakes again (the universe is so large that we might as well learn by making new mistakes and so long as we are alive we will make new mistakes – the only problem is making the same mistake again and again).

I’m writing an iphone/ipad self improvement app. I need you help:
Please email me with suggestions of features you would like to see in a self improvement app.

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