Celebrating your mistakes and learning how to be a fool – CBT

Your guide to the eight reasons to celebrate your mistakes

The general population is haunted by the fear of failure. Most people fear making mistakes because they think it will be like being held responsible for major breakdown. We fear that mistakes may lead to failure in relationships, jobs, grades and so forth.

To overcome such fear it pays to take on a new attitude to change how you feel about mistakes. Rather than fear your mistakes, celebrate them. We can revel in our redundancies, frolic in our failures and glory in our goof-ups. We can marvel at our mistakes and laugh aloud if we blow it. A creative environment is developed in failure that is not fatal. A business that strives to become the next cutting-edge of competition, desperately seeks innovative changes, yet innovation requires risk-taking and along with it is the chance of failing.

This is not idle talk – some real life places celebrate their mistakes, including Pizza Hut, Temps and Company and so on.

1. Celebrating helps us to notice our mistakes. Celebrating mistakes gets everything out in the open. Mistakes that are hidden cannot be corrected. When we shine light on our mistakes and examine them, we can fix the problem. If we do not examine our mistakes, it leaves room for blaming others. It burns our energy, which could be channeled on correcting mistakes.

2. Mistakes offer us valuable feedback. A manager in a company made a mistake that cost the company $100,000. Assured that his boss would fire him, he asked. His boss replied, “Fire you; I can’t afford to do that.” I just spent $100,000 training you.” Mistakes are a part of the learning process. Our mistakes are usually more interesting than our successes and more instructive.

3. Mistakes demonstrate that we are risk-takers. People who play it safe will make fewer mistakes. Making mistakes provides us proof that we are stretching to the limit of our abilities, risking, growing, and learning: Fear of making mistakes can paralyze us. The fear may frighten us into inaction. We may become afraid to do anything for fear of blowing it. Celebrating mistakes, then, helps us to move to action and get things done.

4. Celebrating mistakes help us to see that it is OK to make mistakes. We can use our mistakes to remind us that we are not bad, just human. We are not recommending that you go out and make mistakes deliberately, but that you realize that mistakes are not the end in themselves. When we make mistakes, we can admit it and correct it.

5. Celebrating mistakes include everyone. It reminds us that the Perfect Performance Society Club has no members. All of us make mistakes. When we notice our mistakes, we can work as a team to fix our errors. When we blame others, it hinders us from improving our situation.

6. Mistakes occur only when we aim at a clear goal. If we do not have a target or purpose in sight¸ then there is no concern about missing it. Making mistakes affirms something of great value and shows that we have a plan.

7. Mistakes only occur when one commits himself to make things work. Any system will work when people are ready to be held accountable. When one openly admits his or her mistakes, that builds accountability. Imagine you are in a business where everyone comes in late, the financial advisor never gets payment sent out on time, and the workers fail to complete their intended tasks. In this environment, there is little room for mistakes, since no-one cares. Mistakes become obvious only once people commit to improve the quality of their business, or life. Thus, mistakes work in conjunction with commitment and quality.

8. When one celebrates mistakes, it makes their problems smaller. Usually when a person makes mistakes, they feel remorse, regret, or worry. They may desperately cover up the mistake hoping no-one notices, but for those who own their mistakes they accept accountability and regret, worry and remorse heads out the door. When we put our anxiety about making mistakes behind us, we can get down and dirty to correct our mistakes.

Now that you have a basic idea why celebrating your mistakes is good it is time to take a Master Mind Exercise:

Master Mind Exercise

Memory builder – Create your mind map without looking back at the content in the eight reasons to celebrate your mistakes. The intention is to help you see how much information you have retained. You may find that you retain more information than you thought. If you cannot retain much of the information, do not beat yourself up.

Once you finish with the mastermind map – go back over the eight reasons why you should celebrate your mistakes. Do not spend more than 10 minutes reviewing the eight steps. Now, based on your review of the eight reasons, revise your mastermind map to make it more accurate and complete.

Now – are you ready to be a fool?

A powerful individual has the ability to be a fool. The person that thinks he is not a fool is the biggest fool of them all. We are all fools. Don’t be mad; all of us are fools at some point in our lives. If you doubt that, think back to a time in your life when you did something stupid. Think about something stupid you did in the last few days. You know what I am talking about, that embarrassing thing you did last week that you tried to hide. We all try to pretend we are not fools when we do something out of the ordinary. People who persist that they have never been a fool are probably the biggest fools of them all. We are all imperfect. Part of the problem that many people face is the unwillingness to accept that we are all fools sometimes. Not a single person is fooled even though you we try to hide it, even to ourselves.

People spend their lives trying to be something they are not. They miss the best part of their lives as a result. For example, many people will not dance because they fear they will look ridiculous. They may not be wrong; they may look ridiculous but that is all part of being a fool. It’s OK to look like a fool while you are dancing. It is also OK to sound ridiculous when you sing, or even be absurd. Being absurd all the time is not OK. Being a fool sometimes is OK, but being a fool all the time means we are trying to escape responsibility for our actions. Being a fool doesn’t mean that you go out and get drunk and make a fool of yourself, either. Disrupting the classroom to get attention is not a way to be a fool.

Being a fool rather means that you recognize your foolishness as well as your courage, dignity, graces, clumsiness and cowardice, as well as other human qualities. We all have this much in common.

Thus, you may as well risk being a fool because we are all fools already and nothing you can do will change that fact. So why not enjoy the moments when you do act like a fool?

Take for example a person who is afraid to dance, yet another person is out on the basketball field kicking the ball every time it is thrown at the person. If you say that this person looks like a circus clown in the court, the person may agree with you. “So what,” the person may say. “I’m not a pro player like Michael Jordon.” This person would be right. The person instead is willing to look foolish just to enjoy the game.

The person who doesn’t dance because of her fear of looking ridiculous is missing the fun of dancing and expressing oneself. Most people who think they look ridiculous after giving it a shot will find that they do well. Furthermore, looking ridiculous on the dance floor is about as fun as looking like a circus clown on the ball court.

If you fear being a fool, there is one sure way to avoid it and that is by avoiding life.

Writers who do not want to write because they fear getting a negative review miss the opportunity to learn and grow. Those negative reviews just might be the ticket to learning how to write an effective dialog. The person who sits out of a ballgame or missing a trip to some special place they wanted to travel and thinks that he or she is safe from errors are missing the most critical parts of life.

To increase your chances of success, increase your chances of being comfortable with making mistakes, i.e. being a fool. The person who does this has the best chances of succeeding.

We must be willing to take risks

We are not happy at striving to do badly. Mediocrity or weakness is not a goal. The point is, when our willingness to master a problem involves doing something new and although we may fail, it is a part of learning. We have to make corrections to achieve our goals. In addition, we may even make the same mistakes twice or even more often. Thus, the only way to become good at something, is to be willing to make mistakes.

Revised clichés to consider –

Anything that is worth doing is often worth doing wrong the first time.

Practice makes improvement.

If you fail the first time, try it again.

Professionals aim to make fools of them. Comedians in particular strive to be foolish. We see this when the comedian is standing on stage in front of a large group of people who show no response to their jokes. The comedian as well as others look and feel like fools. A comedian who thinks that he must be funny all the time is setting himself up for rejection because we all must fail to succeed. We must show courage to be foolish.

Courage is seen in people –

People who return to college in their late 40s and older are showing courage: a child who waves bye to her parents on her first day of school is showing courage. These people are showing a willingness to take risks and perhaps fail.

Your willingness to be a fool by taking risks are experiments that help you build new skills, which in turn helps you to grow. Rewards that come from risk-taking and making mistakes is creativity. Our creativity advances when we learn from our mistakes. We also feel more satisfied with ourselves and can enjoy self-expressing and richer joy. Are you ready to be a fool with an experiment?

Practice

The next time you do something silly or stupid allow yourself to experience the feelings. Do not try to hide it or deny it. Observe everything about the feelings, including the thoughts and physical sensations that follow. Acknowledge your foolishness. Allow yourself to be precisely who you are. Explore all of your thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations and images that surround the experience.

Next, remember that you have the power to act independently of your feelings. Courage is the not the act of banishing your fear but the willingness to act even when you feel fear. For example, we may feel homesick, but continue to travel. Some people may fear singing on stage, but go to the microphone anyway. Others may fear talking in public or giving public speeches but they go on stage anyway. When a person completely experiences it, one’s fear of being foolish losses its power, which gives us the inner strength to learn and grow. Thus, be willing to be a fool!

Summary

We have helped you to see that it is important to celebrate your mistakes and be a fool sometimes. Now it is time to reform the way you think by helping through Psycho-Education Reinvented therapy.

Help is available online - use the links below to learn more or to take a test.