Why you need to be Comfortable Making Mistakes

Are you afraid of making a mistake?  Maybe you’re afraid of making a mistake in your marriage or in your parenting?  Maybe you’re afraid of making a health mistake.
A financial mistake.
A career mistake.
Maybe you’re afraid of making a mistake at school or with your coworkers.
I’m afraid to make mistakes.  But what if the challenge isn’t that you’re making too many mistakes.  It’s that you don’t make enough. 
If you’ve been here awhile, you’ve seen my mistakes: 

• Like my purple coat mistake where I did more harm for the school then good
• Like my worst mistake when I spammed thousands of schools and churches in 2018
• Like my funniest mistake when I called Facebook “Faceboob” in an email I sent out last year. 

I could have given up after each of those mistakes: 

• I could have given up on helping our school because our winter clothing donations had made things worse for our school and not better.
• I could have stopped creating this community when I was spamming people.
• I could have stopped with the Facebook typo because as funny as it is, why send out another email if I can’t catch the most obvious of typos?!

You don’t quit after a mistake.  You can quit if you’re not having success. 
But don’t quit after a mistake because mistakes are wen you grow. 

• The purple coat story changed how we donated items to our school and helps us advise others on donation drives. 
• My spamming mistake was a big one, but I learned just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should. 
• And the Faceboob mistake gives me a great story for my answer to the what’s your most embarrassing moment question! 

Here’s two truths when it comes to mistakes:

• First, your mistakes often lead to you making better mistakes.  Just last week I made a mistake with this email and accidentally sent people new to this community two welcome type emails- whoops!  If that was you, I’m sorry!  But I don’t get to make this welcome email mistake without making the spamming mistake.  If I don’t learn from the spamming mistake, maybe Gmail shuts me down.  I don’t get to make the welcome email mistake because I’m done.  The multiple welcome emails is a better mistake to make.
• Second, the more mistakes I make, the easier and quicker it is to get over them.  To move on from them.  To learn from them.  With the email mistake, I learned from it.  I momentarily thought I sucked but then I got over it.  Yeah, I didn’t know how to exactly do this and so I had to figure out some things.  Doing that allows me to make better mistakes in the future rather than repeating the same old mistakes and never learning from them.

Whatever goal you’re pursuing today, whatever change you’re pursuing, become more comfortable with making mistakes.