“Help people use their mental erasers to forgive and forget what went wrong…Teach them to go from saboteur to cheerleader, remind them to be tolerant with their own mistakes, it’s how we learn and grow.” This reminder from my new Shortcuts to Success book is incredibly important since most of us often think we’re defined by what we do rather than who we are. Then, when we fail at something, our self-esteem crumbles, causing a downward spiral of frustration and stress.
Recently I did something I rarely do, fail to please a client. In my 25 years in business this has almost never happened, and my ego jumped in immediately, reminding me if something didn’t work the way it was supposed to, then I was a failure. In Buddha’s Brain, a wonderful book on letting go, the author Rick Hanson reminds us that when someone says or does something to hurt us, it’s as if we’re hit by an arrow. However, when we continue to remind ourselves of what went wrong or how we’re feeling, those are all self-inflicted arrows, and we can control them.
Eventually I’d had enough of my little reminder jabs, and I decided to create a new solution, to allow myself to put my error into either Door Number 1 or Door Number 2, and then erase the memory and move on. Here’s the difference between the two doors. With Door Number 1 we analyze what happened, realize there was something we should have/could have done differently, and then respond. If we were short with someone in a meeting, for instance, we can now have the courage to contact that person, apologize and then move on. And do it the same day, as we were reminded in the great little parable The One Minute Manager.
Door Number 2 stands for mistakes where nothing can be done; we did our best, asked for feedback and got none, and now we get to choose an actionable strategy. We can either choose to erase/cancel what we’ve been focusing on, or we imagine it had a different, positive outcome, and then erase the memory. Either way this door represents mistakes where there is nothing that can be done. To rehash mistakes is an opportunity to wallow in self-pity and get nowhere. To acknowledge something didn’t work and take action, frees us to use our energies for new and positive outcomes.
