Mistakes Are Our Greatest Teachers

It’s a common adage that making mistakes is how we learn. But how we react to those mistakes is seldom discussed. Mistakes can be how we learn… if we’re willing to. However, making mistakes can feel so embarrassing to us that it may make us want to pull further away from even trying at all.

I have never liked making mistakes.

I am someone who feels a constant need to make sure that I am doing everything right. There was a time in my life where nothing felt as humiliating as making a mistake.

My fear of making mistakes went so far that I actually missed opportunities to be right because I was too scared of being wrong. I remember in one of my early Irish lessons my teacher asked our class if anyone remembered a vocabulary word from the prior lesson. I had spent the week painstaking memorizing every word I had hastily copied into my notes. Of course I remembered. But I stayed silent. Because what if I was wrong?

Looking back on this memory, I know I should have spoken up. Not only for myself, but it would have signaled to my teacher that her lessons were effective instead of staring out onto a sea of blank faces, all who chose to remain silent. Furthermore, at that point confidence was hard for me to come by. Taking that chance and being right surely would have made me feel more empowered to speak up more in the future.

In those early days of learning, I have a lot of memories like that. There were times I even said I didn’t know something because somehow, seeming totally unaware still felt safer than trying and failing.

As time went on, I was wrong less often and I made fewer mistakes. It began to be easier for me to handle them when they did happen.

I found that this fear of doing something wrong and avoiding any possible mistakes plagued me in my relationships with others as well. I would worry so much about doing the wrong thing, accidentally upsetting someone, or god forbid, making a mistake that I would end up upsetting people with how hard I tried not to.

I thought I would be more likable, better, easier to accept if I never made mistakes. Eventually I realized, that in itself was the biggest mistake I was making.

As I began to heal that part of myself, with the help of a very patient and caring friend, I began to see mistakes differently. In the past, if I did something I didn’t like or even that went against someone else’s preferences or opinion, I was quick to label it as a mistake. I never allowed myself to really understand what had happened. I never gave myself grace and understanding for the circumstances at play, nor did I ever perceive that maybe I wasn’t always the one at fault. I created a set of impossible, rigid standards for myself to follow which made nearly everything I did feel like a mistake. With that mindset, I always was hard on myself. Mistakes weren’t lessons to be learned from. They were reminders of my flaws. They were something to be avoided.

With support and time, I started to learn from my ‘mistakes.’ I started to come out of difficult situations and conversations having learned something that I could take with me as I moved forward in life.

This shift in my outlook didn’t just impact the way I interacted with people in my life. I began to be less hard on myself in terms of language learning as well. I was a complete beginner in Polish. I was back to square one after years of speaking Irish comfortably. Every word that left my mouth was somehow wrong either in pronunciation, usage, or both. But this time, I wasn’t mortified by my lack of knowledge.

How could I possibly get everything right when I had never formally studied Polish for a day in my life?

As time went on, I began to notice myself doing something new in Polish, something I had never attempted in Irish. I would confidently make mistakes. I would use a word I thought might be right, even if I wasn’t certain. Either I would be correct after all, which would be a pleasant surprise and boost my confidence in the language. Or, I would learn what the word I was looking for was.

I did this naturally. I hadn’t decided to turn over a new leaf and embrace my growing confidence. It just happened.

And sometimes, being wrong is more fun than being right like when I accidentally said in Polish that I would be going to my kitchen’s birthday party that weekend. (I meant cousin.) Or when I mispronounced the Irish word for news and accidentally said ‘naked programs’ instead of ‘news programs.’ Both times I was too busy laughing to be worried about being wrong.

When I decided to learn Irish, I did so with the hope that some day I would change how my brain worked, that someday I would be able to think in a second language. I never could have imagined that I would have changed how my brain worked in a deeper way as well.

The only true mistakes, I’ve learned, are the ones we are unwilling to learn from.

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More from Foghlaimeoir:
Irish translation of this article
I Have Been a Beginner for Two Years

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