I find the phrase, “You learn from your mistakes” to be incomplete and mostly inaccurate. The Grasshopper brought me new perspective yesterday when he said, “You learn from the mistakes you notice.”

I know I’ve quoted my brother-in-law before who was in the insurance industry. He said many of the people he worked with had been in the profession 25 years but kept repeating their first year over and over. They didn’t learn from their mistakes; they repeated them.

If you don’t realize you are making a mistake, your chances for correcting it are astronomically low.

To make our chances even lower, some of us won’t correct our mistakes, not because we don’t notice them, but because we are in denial about them. You’ve heard the phrase “an accident waiting to happen.” With the addition of denial, it’s more about waiting for an excuse to be issued.

Seems to me there is a direct correlation between the number of excuses issued to the number of mistakes made.

Perhaps to lessen the number of mistakes we make, it would be more beneficial to notice how often we make excuses. The formula is simple: Less excuses = Less mistakes.

So rather than taking mistakes head-on, it may be more productive to go through the back door and remove the excuses. The excuses are the glue that keep both denial and mistakes in place.

Once the bonding capability of an excuse is gone, denials get weaker and mistakes are more easily noticed.

Start noticing your excuses and, before too long, you won’t be asking as often to be excused for your mistakes.

All the best,

John

I’m not big on “right” and “wrong.” I much prefer “works” or “doesn’t work.”

Our actions in life are often labeled “right” or “wrong” and from my experience, that only sets up a debate. When you objectively observe whether your actions are working or not, you have outlined a path forward, rather than entrench yourself in a defensive position of right or wrong.

Language matters. We have been conditioned to certain words that trigger specific sensations. Unless we recognize the conditioning and take steps to outgrow it, we are at the mercy of our language.

Notice your response to these phrases:

“You’re bringing up your children wrong.”

“You’re doing it all wrong.”

“Right” and “wrong” will close you down in a heartbeat. You will also put others on the defensive when you assert right and wrong.

I have this notion that there is too much “kid gloving” going on in the world. “Kid gloving” means that we make excuses for behavior (ours or another’s) that’s not working. My conditioning says making excuses is wrong, but if I don’t challenge my wording, I have little chance of getting it “right” – meaning “getting it to work.”

I invite you to notice how many times you invite right or wrong into your conversations. The more often you do, the more often the conversations will go round and round as each of you circles the wagons.

We set the stage for a forward direction in our life’s play when we rewrite the dialogue and intentionally let the words “right” and wrong” fade away.

All the best,

John

Most of us can cite change points in our lives. For me, it was the discovery of “I” and “Me.”

It dawned on me that there were two selves – I and Me.

Me only thought there was me. Me is the outer self, the one we talk to ourselves about inside our head. Me is a collection of life’s experiences. To quote Czech writer Milan Kundera, “What is the self? It is the sum of everything we remember.”

The outer self is our self image. “Yep, that’s me.”

What I found out about being me is that there is built in exclusion of other ways, especially ones different from mine. Me takes on the mantle of “the way me thinks is the way it is.”

“I” doesn’t think. “I” observes.

When I discovered there was a thinker and an observer, I began to think less and observe more. One of the things I began to observe was my thinking. It was eye-opening.

I found out there is a part of me that thinks that the only thing there is is thoughts. When I found out I could observe the things I thought were the only things, I found my inner self – the observer.

The observer frees you from your thoughts. You begin to notice these tightly compacted thoughts that pretend they are the only way it is and, like magic, these thoughts begin to unravel. Old beliefs begin to fall apart because there isn’t the glue of thinking to hold them together.

Me takes on a life of its own, never noticing that I is there, until it does.

The way to “I” is to observe “Me.” It’s the observation of this ongoing train of thought that brings you to the whistle stop known as “I.” It’s there that you can hop off and observe rather than pretend to know how things are.

You’ll know you are ready to break out of the cocoon of “Me,” when you observe that there are other ways it can be.

All the best,

John