The approach to growth requires a mindset, a shift from the view of the majority, a mindset that cherishes mistakes.
This is my whole approach to teaching, this is my whole methodology. The methodology for exponential growth.
But first you need to find the mistakes and look at them… That is against our current culture that only wants to deal with what is “good”. 1
I remember when I first saw the words on a label: “New and improved”. I was thinking that it meant that it was still not good… it still had mistakes, and I stopped buying it.
I was much like you: I avoided even the idea of mistakes.
Like you, I wanted to celebrate my successes, what is good about me, and avoid even looking at my mistakes.
One of my students comes to every call talking about what she loves, what she has accomplished. And while it is really important to acknowledge growth, to acknowledge success, if that is all you are paying attention to, you will experience diminishing returns, and an eventual reversal of the trend: you will experience no results and no success.
The path to success that was so wide and so exhilarating in the beginning, slowly but surely starts to close in, get narrower, and then it disappears.
I get people reporting about this all the time: this is real and this is an overwhelming experience in, especially, self-help. Good results in the beginning, no results after a while. In meditation, in healing, in growth.
Why would success lead to no success?
I will liken it to driving a car.
Your life isn’t going anywhere… You are sitting in your car in a parking lot, not going anyplace. When, after so long, sitting in a stationery car, waiting for it to move, you finally figure out that the pedals are some kind of levers, and you put one foot on the break and one foot on the gas, the car will finally start to move.
Amazing, isn’t it? Amazing, was my first experience driving: feeling intoxicated by the feeling of my power: the car is moving because I am pressing a pedal with my foot. For me that was my first real experience of having any power. I was 3ö years old.
So you drive around, drive around, unconscious about the left foot, the one that is sitting heavily on the top of the brake pedal.
Why haven’t you moved your left foot? Because you don’t even know it’s there.
It’s an unconscious mistake at first.
If somebody enlightened you, you’d have to change, change your position, and everything, but more importantly, you would have to deal with the fact that you did something stupid. That there was something you didn’t know.
Correcting mistakes, eliminating mistakes causes change and you are afraid of change
Most people cannot deal with change too well, so they deny the mistakes instead, and continue pressing the brake pedal in their lives.
Driving the car with its two pedals is, of course, a simplistic visual, because there are hundreds of pedals in your life that you don’t know you are pressing.
Eliminating mistakes, misconceptions, habits that don’t serve you are the shortcuts to what you say you so fervently desire.
Each mistake eliminated has the same value to your growth towards happiness and a fulfilled life as 10-100 success principles.
Using now another analogy, putting together a jigsaw puzzle
It is like this, you have put together a picture, the picture of a happy and fulfilled life with the wrong puzzle pieces, and it looks the way it looks: not very happy and not very fulfilled.
You have your moments, but that’s it.
If you don’t ferret out the pieces that are the wrong pieces not fitting the final picture that’s on the puzzle-box’s cover, you’ll be stuck with the wrong picture, forever. 
Because the new pieces you get from “other people” don’t fit. They are pretty, but your picture is already built… so the new pieces don’t fit your life. They are now extracurricular activities… and there is only so much time, so much energy for extracurricular activities, so your results are so-so or none at all.
When you, instead locate a piece that is at the wrong place, you can remove it, and replace it with the right piece… Little by little, piece by piece, you’ll arrive to the picture that you wanted to build, that is on the box cover.
This is my methodology. Finding mistakes.
The first mistake you need to get is that mistakes are good… they are the shortcut to what you want, really. Instead of them being thorns in your side, instead of them being something to avoid.
You can try doing this on your own, or you can join one of my coaching program the Playground.
Republished from 2ö14
The method Japan learned from Deming, the small steps improvement method was all based on mistakes, and caused Japan to be a leader in industry, in spite of it being destroyed in WW2 by the Allied Forces. Since their rebuilding Japan has become more like Americans, and are now losing their leading edge…
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The method is called Kaizen, and it is simply: finding a mistake, an error, an improper piece, and improve it… Very different approach from how you live your life…
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it is not you who comes to the calls talking about what you have accomplished… you crack me up… lol.
I see that in our culture, truly embracing mistakes is a revolutionary idea. I am there, but only in my intellect :).
The rest of me goes into pre-programmed paroxysms of shame, anxiety and defensiveness about mistakes. I had not realised this until I started working with you, and I feel that first catching the shame and anxiety, and then seeing the behaviour change is now a real possibility, where there was none before, if I can stick with it. Who knew it is one of the hardest things that a human can do? (at least this human)…
Btw, if I am the student that comes to the calls talking about what I have accomplished, I am even more clueless than I realised :(. Darn! Ouch …
When you said that ‘you results are so-so or none at all’ could I just include ‘or going backwards’, which seems to be in my own case.
So, what I am taking from this at the moment is that mistakes are not only good but necessary… almost ‘compulsory’. If nothing else ‘unavoidable’ and I am not so special after all! Many thanks.
So very true. I just told my step daughter a few days ago, when she was worrying about a new job she will be starting in January, “If you learn anything from me, understand this; mistakes are things to embrace and learn from, not something to worry about making. If you don’t make mistakes, you’ll never learn, the faster you embrace them and see the lessons, the faster you’ll grow”. I of course don’t always take my own advice, but I’m doing better.