Mistakes… what causes them?
Today is a day when I am mistake-prone. The source of 99% of all my mistakes have been caused by a phenomenon that I see in everyone I speak with… so I am not alone.
The biggest difference between different people is only the frequency with which the incidents occur, no one is immune to this mistake.
I noticed that when I have worry or greed (eager is a version of greed) present, they make my vibration incoherent. I make this type of mistakes far more often. Even my dyslexia is tripling in symptoms when I am incoherent.
Please pay attention because the biggest cause of your errors can be countered successfully with just a little bit of mindfulness, just a little bit of awareness.
First, let me talk about incoherence, and how it comes about
The circumstance: you have a task in front of you. It can be as simple as making soft boiled eggs, mailing a piece of mail, or pouring yourself a cup of coffee…
When you are calm and collected, there are no emotions going on. Rare, indeed. The moment there is eagerness, hurry, impatience, fear, worry… (and we could list the 40 Bach Emotions which pretty much encompass all the emotions that are the building blocks of the feelings you know), your insides go into turbulence, and your nerve cells are misfiring. This happens more often when you are also multitasking which is so fashionable nowadays, given that none of the things you do seem relevant enough to give it your full attention. You’d be ashamed to be caught giving your full attention to an article, a video, a movie, your husband, or Facebook… Instead, to prove that you are bigger than that, you multitask: cook, exercise, text, answer emails while you are doing those things.
What happens when you are incoherent? Your IQ drops and you go into automatic. Your automatic is mind. Mind is a storage device, and it only “knows” what was fed to it. It is not present, so it gets its “information” from the past… unaware of any changes that happened.
Without looking at reality, without checking, your automatic tells you that you already know… and act. Wrong action. You already have a teabag in your cup, you already put sugar in your coffee, you already moved the stuff…
The mind doesn’t know what is outside. If you have the thought of pressing your shirt, the mind thinks it’s done. Result: mistakes galore.
Another type of mistake is “Oh my god, I won’t be able to pay my rent!” But you haven’t checked your balance… how would you know it? The mind seems to know, you have been fretting about it.
Or: I still have a lot of money in my credit card… but you don’t. The last purchase was totally unconscious and the mind didn’t get to know about it.
Or you hear a buzz word, and whirr and click… your answer is ready… bam, wrong answer.
When you make too many mistakes, minor, unimportant, and yet, as you are looking dumbfounded that you made that mistake again, your self-confidence erodes, and you are going to approach life with more trepidation, with more eagerness, with more worry… so the incoherence gets more frequent and more severe with every mistake.
What is the solution? How to stay astute, calm, and intelligent in a world that has gotten too fast?
- Take your remedy! Religiously. The 40 Bach Energies will at lest weaken your emotional response to tasks, and you’ll make less mistakes
- Don’t multitask. If you are not proud to do what you are doing, don’t do it. Drop 90% of the stuff you do, and just do the 10% that you feel good about doing. The level of incoherence will be reduced dramatically, guaranteed. The better you feel about yourself, the less eagerness, the less trepidation you’ll experience, because you know yourself as someone who can.
- Get into the habit of overriding the automatic. As soon as you feel the eagerness or trepidation (it is very tangible!) just say “let me look again!” or “let me look before I leap into conclusion!” If that means that you have to stop for a second or two, so be it.
Change your concept of “smart” from quick to mindful
I once had a friend who decided that he was slow, not very bright. He equated smart with quick.
Quick is not smart. Quick is shooting from the hip. Quick is full of mistakes.
Pause. BEFORE you open your mouth.
I have a student who instantly starts talking, but slowly. What she says doesn’t make sense, because she didn’t do her thinking before she opened her mouth.
You have the right to think before you speak… You didn’t think so, did you? Your life, the hasty actions, the mistakes, the wreck of a life is proof that your quickness is not a good policy.
It is simple, it is not easy to remember.
But it can become second nature… guaranteed.
I am so bad about that. Always in the rush. I’ll be working on it. Thank you for such a good article.