How to Embrace Your Mistakes (8 creative tips that work)
Embrace your mistakes, they said. It’s simple, they said. Well, easier said than done. But there’s definitely a ton of benefits and opportunities for learning by owning them.
So welcome to my top tips on how to start embracing setbacks and learning how to grow from them.
I’m psyched to have you here, but let’s skip the small talk and just dive right in. Let’s start with some inspiration – the benefits of mistakes.
Some Sweet Benefits of Making (and Embracing) Mistakes
Before we jump into the core tips, let’s grab some quick inspiration. Embracing your mistakes offers a ton of sweet benefits. It’s mentally healthy and fosters growth and innovation for starters.
But there are definitely more perks.
Developing a healthy relationship with mistakes can:
Give us clues about where to focus our attention and how push forward
Strengthen problem solving and critical thinking skills
Keep you humble
Make you more process-oriented
Cultivate a growth mindset
Improve memory and retention
Build new skills (rather than plateauing)
Support tinkering and leads to refreshing and innovative ideas
Make you mentally stronger and happier
How to Embrace Your Mistakes: 8 Key Tips That Really Help
Learning how to embrace mistakes is a modern skill. So let’s crush it with some awesome tips.
These are things that have helped me personally – and ideas that I’ve stumbled across in my research (and the countless rabbit hole deep dives).
So let’s get it.
1. Acknowledge and Accept Mistakes As Normal and Natural
This first one isn’t anything groundbreaking – it’s borderline cliche. But it’s important nonetheless, and deserves mention.
The first step is to accept and realize that mistakes are normal and unavoidable. In fact, it simply means you’re pushing yourself and trying new things.
It’s one of the biggest indicators of future growth and potential. And every successful person, book, podcast, coach or leader will tell you this. It’s a right of passage – that never goes away.
So embrace them as normal parts of any process.
On the brightside, with time, you’ll likely get better at managing mistakes and finding solutions for them quickly.
2. Develop A Growth Mindset (Mistakes Are Exciting Opportunities)
This has been one of the best mindset shifts for me personally. It’s completely reframed how I experience mistakes and failures.
I simply see them as super exciting opportunities. It’s as if they’re clues and doorways that will lead me to the next higher skill level. I just need to find the key.
Getting comfortable with troubleshooting problems and warmly accepting mistakes as exciting opportunities is a growth mindset. It’s incredibly beneficial to practice this way of thinking.
Here are some tips to strengthen your growth mindset:
Study others and their path to success (and their many setbacks)
Focus on (or find) your purpose, goals and values
Practice mindfulness, gratitude and meditation
Study neuroplasticity and realize that our brain’s have innate abilities to change and adapt
3. Take Back Control: Have the Right Mistakes
Do we have any control over the types of mistakes we experience? Not always.
But! We can start taking back some control and improve the likelihood of experiencing the right kind of mistakes – we just need a little strategy and intention.
The idea here is to focus your main work and attention on things, goals and tasks that are within your zone of proximal development.
The zone of proximal development is the area of skills just beyond your current knowledge and expertise. It’s the perfect balance of using what you already know and challenging yourself with new things.
For example, if you’re a complete beginner but you're trying to accomplish advanced tasks and goals, then your mistakes will likely start to pile up and you’ll probably start to feel overwhelmed and burned out.
But if we instead focus on beginner-intermediate tasks first, then we’ll be way more likely to succeed and embrace our mistakes as the learning opportunities they are.
This type of scaffolded learning will build up your skills in a sustainable way, from beginner to intermediate and eventually advanced.
4. Stop Aiming for Perfection
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, perfectionism is gross. It robs us of our creativity, happiness and potential.
Trying to be perfect creates a lot of stress and overemphasizes our mistakes in the worst way.
So here are some quick tips getting rid of perfectionism:
Focus on your uniqueness and unfair advantage
Focus on quantity (not quality)
Focus on your why
Prioritize fun and fall in love with the process
5. Redefine Success
How you define success can have a big impact on how you view mistakes.
We’ve already tackled the importance of limiting perfectionism, having a growth mindset and controlling the amplitude of your mistakes (i.e., the zone of proximal development).
So now we should also consider what our macro and micro goals are and redefine success.
Here’s a simple rule that I like to follow: aim to be at least 1% better every day.
This is not a new idea, and I can’t recall who said it first. It definitely ties back to the earlier ideas on having a growth mindset and avoiding perfectionism.
But it’s a low stress and attainable strategy. It shifts focus away from comparison to others and puts the spotlight on comparing yourself only to your past self.
It’s much healthier and very doable for most of us. So as long as I’m getting at least 1% better every day, I see my days as a success – regardless of the mistakes.
But usually, I design my workflow to address weaknesses and mistakes – so I’m chipping away at these every day.
So redefine your success.
You can try my 1% rule – or find something similar that works better for you, your goals and workflow.
6. Zoom Out and Remember Your Strengths
It’s all too easy to put way too much focus on our mistakes while completely forgetting our strengths and how far we’ve really come over the years.
So zoom out.
Write down your strengths and recognize your awesomeness. If you have old recordings, writings or examples of yourself from years ago, look at them.
This can really highlight just how far you've come. Because for whatever reason, it’s easy to forget or not fully realize our own progress.
So zoom out, and remember those strengths (and lean in on them for problem solving).
7. Plan Ahead: Have a Mistake Action Plan
Creating workarounds and next best actions for when you experience mistakes is super helpful. It’ll seriously help you embrace them more.
After all, we’ve established that mistakes will never go away (and that’s a good thing) and we’ve gotten some ideas for better controlling them.
So let’s take things one step further and strategize on how to resolve them when they inevitably pop up.
Here are some tips for creating a mistake action plan:
Define your end goal(s)
Break up the mistake or bottleneck into its component pieces
Identify potential causes for the mistake
Trial and error solutions for each component piece
Reach out for help
8. Know When to Ask for Help (or Outsource)
At the end of the day, we’re only one person – we can’t do it all.
Now is a good time to review your goals, strengths, weaknesses and values. Now compare those to common or current mistakes and bottlenecks.
Isolate the things that don’t excite you or don’t bring you closer to your values and goals. Try to find ways to outsource or automate things if you can.
Of course, this can be difficult in the beginning, especially if you don’t have the budget to hire a team.
Still, this is something to start thinking about and planning for. Luckily, there are more tools and automation solutions than ever before.
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