The Grasshopper was channeling Captain Obvious the other night when he said, “Not paying for a mistake makes it more likely to happen again.”

If you haven’t yet paid a price for a mistake, you will get several more opportunities because the inevitable repetitions will set off an alarm at the piper’s house. (Cue the overused cliché: “Karma is a Bitch”).

If you have skated by, unscathed, up to this point, don’t be doing, as my mother used to say, “a fan dance” because the music will run out and there won’t be a chair for you.

The ideal remedy for avoiding future mistakes is to notice them before they happen again. That rarely happens. We usually aren’t aware until the mistake has happened again. The key is to notice the mistake while it’s happening, so you can correct it in midstream and have a better chance of not drowning in your own do-do.

“Paying” in this context is paying attention.

We all know what our mistakes have been and we’ve all knowingly repeated them. If you would like to get out from under a specific mistake start paying attention. That means you have to get off of auto pilot.

How many times have you had the same argument with someone? It goes the same place each time. You can avoid the mistake of arguing with them again by avoiding them but, that’s just not practical.

The next time the argument scenario comes up (yes, it will come up again), pay attention to how you are about to automatically react and just wait until that reaction passes by and select a different response. There are other responses waiting in line but we, in the past, have automatically selected our first one which causes us to respond in kind, which is anything but.

Start paying attention to how you respond. You have no say in what another person will say or do but you have the ability to notice what’s about to come out of you. Just noticing yourself about to go into reaction mode is often enough of a wedge to keep you from making a familiar mistake.

Noticing will trigger a bevy of other responses just waiting for their chance to come out and play, keeping the piper and his collection purse looking elsewhere for mistakes that pay.

All the best,

John