For example I bought some water pistols last weekend for the kids, when they were playing with them they started to leak oil everywhere, and I mean black nasty oil which ruined their clothes. I was astonished that a childs toy was full of oil and phoned the toy shop on Monday morning.
They immediately apologised for the problems, they admitted exactly what the problem was and what they had done to stop it happening again, and then offered to buy new clothes for the kids and give me a full refund, therefore I am one happy customer even though they originally made a mistake. So to break it down they...
1. Admitted they had made a mistake.
2. Learnt from it by charemoving all the stock from their shops to stop it happening again.
3. Apologised and moved on....
The key thing here is that if you make a mistake there is no point in feeling guilty about it, or more importantly, beating yourself up about it as you can't change the past. You can only shape and create your future. So when you make a mistake then the absolute key thing is to take the learnings from it and not the emotion!
I see a lot of people who perceive that they have "cheated" when it comes to their diet or weight targets but actually you never cheat, you just make a choice!
In hindsight you might well have made a mistake, but I see a lot of people who repeat the same mistakes, week in and week out and never actually learn from those mistakes and change their behaviours to get a different final result.
Another problem is the dieter who thinks because they have made a mistake that they might as well just eat as much, or whatever they like as they have "blown it". The reality is that one mistake is never going to make you obese, but repeating the same mistakes without ever learning from them will do.
Let's look at children! What if the first time they tried to stand up and fell over they thought "Well that's a mistake so i'll never do that again...." , then they would never get anywhere.
Therefore they will try again, and this time use the knowledge they gained of what went wrong to do better the second time. Eventually after a few more mistakes they will learn that using a table or a sofa to help them is a good idea, but then they may make a mistake and fall down again, but by learning all the time and not beating themselves up (never seen a 9 month old call itself a failure!) then guess what? They eventually stand, walk and you end up with a four year old daughter who can outrun you for fun :-)
So whenever I am working 1-2-1 with a client and they have made a "mistake" and are sitting there telling me how useless they are, and how they are a failure then I will always ask "What did you learn?". Regardless of what they say it will be a positive, as they will have learnt something from it, for example I had a lady say "I have learnt that actually I eat out with my friend because it allows us time to have a gossip", therefore she realised it was a mistake to eat with her friend but realised that she had loads of other options available for them to have a gossip without the "mistake" next time.
So next time you make a mistake then just think, Ok that's cool!! That is absolutely fine, now what can I learn from this that next time means I will be more successful than I was this time.
And then GO FOR IT!
