Do you want to stay energized and inspired in your career? If you do, at some point you're going to need to jump headlong into the unknown and the new (in fact, you'll probably need to do it over and over again).
Without the ability to move into new territory, you'll be stuck repeating the same tired cycle over and over again.Exploring unknown territory is a vital part of the equation of staying fully charged.
The trouble for many people is not so much that they don't want to embrace the new. It's that they don't want to make the mistakes that inevitably come along with it. Their minds play a recurring story about what mistakes mean, and it's always negative.
"See? I'm no good at this. I don't have what it takes. I'm a screw-up. I can't do anything right." There are a bazillion variations on that theme, but they all have two things in common. They are all negative reinforcement, and none of them are especially grounded in reality.
In the excellent book Self-Esteem, the authors talk about different ways that we can reframe how we view mistakes. One of those is to view mistakes as invaluable teachers. They write:
Mistakes are a function of growth and changing awareness. They are an absolute prerequisite for any learning process...
There is no way you can learn any task or skill without errors. This process is called successive approximation: getting closer and closer to successful performance through feedback provided by mistakes. Every error tells you what you need to correct, every error brings you incrementally nearer to the behavioral sequence that works best for completion of the task...
...Mistakes are information about what works and what doesn't. They have nothing to do with your worth or intelligence. They are merely steps to a goal.
Next time you are tempted to beat up on yourself for a mistake you made, reframe it. Ask yourself, "How has this moved me closer to my goal? What have I learned here? Where is the insight this mistake is offering?"
Follow that up with, "Now how can I apply that insight?" Your goal is to use your mistakes as a catalyst for forward motion, rather than a roadblock that shuts you down cold.
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by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst
It seems like the older we get, the less willing we are to make mistakes. If kids were as tentative as many adults are of making miscues, none of us would have ever learned to walk. I recently heard a speaker by the name of Joe Malarkey say that the opposite of success is not failure.
The opposite of success is doing nothing.
Posted by: Jason of Kim & Jason | October 17, 2009 at 07:26 PM