Don't fear mistakes

“You screwed up, Dude!”
“You shouldn’t have done that”

Do these words sound familiar?

These words are spoken, normally, after we messed up something, somewhere, somehow, and always according to someone else.

These are words most of us fear for one or other reason. Maybe it’s not the words, as such, that give us the shivers, but rather what customarily shadows these words. When you were little you might have been scolded by your parents or, if you were raised by more conservative parents you might have experienced a serious burning sensation on your rear, caused by something a bit more sinister than you hoped.

As humans we consider mistakes as being evil. That’s what we are taught in school, after all. Worse is the fact that the more we mature the more serious our mistakes become and, obviously, the more intense the consequences of such mistakes. Some lose money, others lose their jobs, some lose spouses – which some aspire to - and then there are those who lose everything. Now, that’s not a pleasant place to be, but also it is not to be considered as the end of the world.

What I’d like to bring home is that mistakes aren’t all bad and if we are not prepared to cherish them, every now and then, there will never be another Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Anton Rupert or Anthony Robbins …….. Don’t let the fear of making a mistake keep you from achieving your dream. You owe this to yourself.

It is whether we get up after that fall; after receiving that blow and whether we have learnt from that mistake that makes the difference. Some of us tend to stoop in a corner, moping our way through thoughts of being a failure. And you are what you think you are.

If we take a mistake, dissect it and see how we could do it differently the next time round, then we are on a learning path. That’s how we grow. That’s how Donald Trump did it; his Companies filed for corporate bankruptcy four times before making it big time. If we look at Robert Kiyosaki he also lost a huge amount of money investing in the “wrong” property. Did they let their mistakes stop them? If they did they wouldn’t have achieved “celebrity” status now, would they?

Kiyosaki says: “Simply put, the number of failures you experience is a reflection of the degree to which you’re putting yourself out there; and having the courage to put yourself in a position to fail will ultimately lead you to success. If you never try, you’re never going to fail. But more important, you’re never going to succeed”.

Don’t hold back. Go all the way. Make your mistakes, you are human after all, but don’t let the fear of making mistakes keep you from being all you can be. And as Zig Ziglar would say “…..then I’ll see you at the top”