How to Turn Your Mistakes Around and Use Them to Your Advantage

The art of coming back stronger

6:30 am. My eyes were alternating between the cold and unforgiving blue digits of the clock and the huge line of cars that had formed in front of us. Traffic was going slower and slower. It was about 6:50 am when it came to a halt. Not good, I thought.

By now, we were barely making any progress. Stop-and-go, but with a lot of emphasis on the stop and not so much on the go. When we finally arrived about twenty minutes later, I jumped out of the car, quickly said goodbye to my then-girlfriend, and ran like a mad man towards the check-in counter.

Unfortunately, to no avail. Boarding for my flight was about to close and it was way too late to drop off my luggage. Long story short: Missing a flight and having to rebook will cost you several hundred dollars, but teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.

How in the world did this happen? I had never missed a flight before. Close calls, yes, but never too late — despite being a rather frequent flyer.

At first, I was quick to push responsibility towards someone else. Damn girlfriend. If she didn’t take ages with her makeup, we would’ve made it before L.A. traffic got the better of us.

But 24 hours later, on the next available transatlantic flight, I had plenty of time to think about the incident. And this time, I didn’t simply push the blame onto someone else. Sure, you probably could’ve repainted the whole Golden Gate Bridge quicker than it took her to finish her eyeliner. But I knew that beforehand. Same as I knew that L.A. airport traffic was going to be a bitch.

So in the end, if I blamed anyone, it should have been myself. I could’ve anticipated both. But it was too late now. My wallet was already significantly lighter, so all that was left for me was to admit I had messed up and learn my lesson.

Messing up is inevitable

The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.

— Stephen McCranie

Mistakes can be uncomfortable. Awkward. Painful, even. But they can also be a powerful way to become better. In his world-famous bestseller Psycho-Cybernetics, author Maxwell Maltz argues that not only are mistakes inevitable, but they are also our main source of progress and learning. Let’s face it: We all have messed up before. You, me, and the rest of the world. And we all are going to mess up in the future as well. Nobody’s perfect after all.

So if we all are bound to make mistakes many more times, why not learn from them? Why not use them to your advantage instead of beating yourself up?

Learning from your mistakes isn’t rocket science. But without a clear, straight-forward thought process you won’t get much out of them.

So instead of letting all your potential learnings go to waste and make the same mistake over and over again, let me show you how you make the most out the inevitable. Let me show you how to use your mistakes to your advantage, so you come back stronger and better.

Insight comes before learning

This might not come as a surprise to you, but the first thing you have to do is to admit where you have been wrong. No way around that. If you try to talk yourself out of your mistake by blaming other people or minimizing your responsibility, you’ll rob yourself of the chance to improve.

To find out what role you played in the whole thing, ask yourself two simple questions:

• What went wrong?
• Could I have done something to prevent it (given the information I had at the time)?

When you look at your mistakes, two things are crucial.

Be honest with yourself. Take some time off alone and think about the incident. Often it’s hard to admit our wrongdoings while the wounds are still fresh and other people are putting pressure upon us with their sides of the story. You have to come up with these insights yourself, else they are worthless.

Focus on what you did wrong, not how you are wrong. Your goal is to learn from your behavior and use your mistakes to your advantage, not beat yourself up about them. You have to look at your mistakes detached from your personality. If you see yourself as a failure, this will quickly raise your subconscious defenses and not only lower your self-esteem, but also diminish any chance of you admitting your mistake and learning from it. In my example above, this is the difference between calling myself a careless idiot and thinking Man, you really didn’t think things through this time.

Using your mistakes to your advantage

Once you have admitted to yourself what you did wrong, you have already taken the most important step. Congratulations!

Now, let’s look at how we can take our mistake and turn it around. You can use it to your advantage in two ways. First, by admitting it to other people and owning it and second, by learning from it and making sure you won’t mess up the same thing twice.

Show some true courage and apologize

The best thing you can do after you realized you did wrong is to own your mistake and apologize to anyone affected or involved. I know that this can be a very hard step and takes a lot of balls. But it’s always worth it.

Not only does this give you a clear conscious and other people the opportunity to forgive you — but it also allows you to actually take advantage of what you did wrong:

• You can set the stage. By admitting what exactly you did wrong and apologizing for it, you can set a clear frame. Instead of passively waiting for someone to call you out, you can draw clear boundaries between what was your fault and what wasn’t. By doing so, you steal people’s thunder. It’s a lot harder for them to push even more onto you when you already admitted what you did wrong and apologized. Take the first-mover advantage.
• It frames yourself as a responsible and grown-up person who is willing to learn. These are the qualities everyone is looking for in an employee, business partner, significant other, and friend. People have an inner desire for harmony and solving conflicts. Show them that you are a person they can do that with.
• Tons of brownie points. Everybody likes people who can leave their egos at home and admit where they were wrong. Nobody wants to deal with someone who clearly has messed up, but won’t admit and apologize. It’s a pain in the ass and a huge one at that. Humility can be a powerful tool, so use it to your advantage.

Mistakes are an awesome opportunity to take your relationship with someone to the next level and make you more likable. But you have to have the guts to show some vulnerability and apologize first.

Mistakes are your best opportunity for learning

Not only are mistakes a way to improve your relationships with others and how they see you, but also a great opportunity to improve yourself.

To learn from your mistakes, you have to ask yourself some important, yet tough questions. They won’t be particularly easy or pleasant to answer, but they are the way to go.

• What did I do wrong? If you were honest with yourself when you admitted your mistakes, you have already answered this question. Again, focus on what you messed up, not how you are messed up. Stick to the facts and refrain from too much interpretation.
• How could I have done better? Draw a clear distinction between what is and what isn’t in your control. If one of your coworkers shows up late to a meeting, that is out of your control. But what is within your control is the fact that you called them out in front of the whole team and made a really bad impression because you got angry. Instead, you could have kept your cool and criticized them in private later, with much better chances of them showing understanding and bettering themselves.
• Why did I behave the way I did? This is where the money’s at. Without answering this question, you’ll severely limit your learning. Here, you’re connecting the dots between what you did wrong and why. By examining your underlying motives and mechanisms, you can get to the root cause of things and fix them instead of simply fighting the symptoms. Maybe you didn’t get angry because your coworker was late and that upset you, but because you took out the anger you had stored inside of you since the fight with your wife this morning. Your coworker being late was merely the trigger. What you have to improve is your ability to distinguish incidents that have got nothing to do with each other, or at least your ability to separate your work from your private life.

When you think about these questions long and hard, you will come up with new insights about yourself, the person you are, and the person you want to be in the future. Now it’s time to put these insights into practice — that’s how self-improvement happens.

Use your environment to avoid future bloopers

“You can never make the same mistake twice because the second time you make it, it’s not a mistake, it’s a choice.” — Steven Denn

When you’ve made a mistake, you want to make damn sure you don’t repeat it. Sometimes that’s easy because it’s a very specific situation — like trying to pull something out of your backpack while you’re riding your bike free-handed and falling on your face. The next time you want to do so, your brain will recognize that this happened before and tell you that this definitely isn’t the best idea you’ve come up with this week.

Other times, the situation won’t be as obvious or you don’t recognize it. Even though you vowed to not make the same mistake again, in the heat of the moment, you can quickly forget about the goals you set for yourself. Turns out life’s hard sometimes — but you can make it a lot easier for yourself. I’m a huge fan of using your environment for support. Making sure you don’t repeat your mistakes is no exception.

So how can you use your environment to your advantage? I’ll show you.

• Set yourself reminders I used to be about 15 minutes late. Always. I often blamed it on bad traffic or unforeseen circumstances. That was until I asked myself the tough questions mentioned above and finally figured out what my real problem was. It wasn’t bad traffic. It wasn’t that I got a call every time I was just about to leave, although that happens quite often. No. It was simply that I underestimated the time it took me for getting ready — showering, getting dressed, etc. So I would play around on my computer right until the last minute, and then bolt around like a ferret on speed trying to make it in time. Do you know what fixed about 90% of my being late issues? A simple reminder in the form of a sticky note that says “Get ready first” glued to my screen. If there is time left before I need to leave, I can spend it doing whatever I want, because I’ll be ready at a moment’s notice.
• List your reasons for why you don’t want to make the mistake again Sometimes, you know you are making a mistake, but it doesn’t seem so bad at the moment. Eating a donut although you’re on a diet. Answering your abusive ex-boyfriend’s call. Buying a new pair of shoes although your bank account is close to zero. When we are tempted, it is easy to throw all concerns and resolutions out the window. One donut won’t hurt. He isn’t good for me, but he always says he loves me. I can use my overdraft — they’re on sale, after all. In these situations, it’s important to remind yourself again of why these behaviors are a mistake in the first place. So, in a moment of clarity, write down the specific reasons why you don’t want to indulge in a certain behavior anymore. When the craving gets too much, look at the list and remind yourself why you don’t want to give in.
• Get an accountability partner This one takes some guts but can save you tons of trouble if done right. By design, we humans have one fault — we can only see the world through our own eyes. That is why we sometimes need another person’s point of view to think clearly. Yes, it isn’t easy to tell someone about your flaws and where you mess up. Even more so to ask them for help. But if you explain that you struggle with something and want to better yourself, any at least halfway decent person will do what they can to support you.

Avoiding mistakes is already hard. Each and every person on this planet struggles with it. So why don’t you outsource some of the efforts by having your environment work for you instead of against you?

Nobody is perfect

“Perfectionism is the enemy of happiness. Embrace being perfectly imperfect. Learn from your mistakes and forgive yourself, you’ll be happier. We make mistakes because we are imperfect. Learn from your mistakes, forgive yourself, and keep moving forward.” — Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

You can’t change the past, but you can learn from it to ensure a better future. Mistakes are normal. They are a part of life. We, as humans, could only develop because nature produced billions of faulty mutations and evolution learned from them and moved on.

So don’t beat yourself up about your wrongdoings. Happiness doesn’t come from making no mistakes at all, but from accepting and making the best out of them.

Nobody is perfect, after all.

Everybody makes mistakes. But not everyone is aware of them. Sometimes, we need to point people towards what they did wrong. Here’s how to do that:

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