In my work as a coach and educator, I call upon a wonderful metaphor to help my students and clients learn from their mistakes. It's a story about a guy who must go down a particularly dark road in order to get where he absolutely must go. First time, down the road, he falls in a hole. It hurts, and badly, and more, it hurts thinking about having done it. He's so deep in there, it takes a long while to climb out, but eventually he succeeds in extricating himself from the hole.
Next day, he is walking down that same dark road. Somehow, he fails again to notice the hole, and falls in. It hurts, even more, because he remembers that this happened before. He climbs out and keeps going on his way, cursing at himself along the way. Next day, he’s walking down the dark road, and he gets distracted at just the wrong moment, and the same thing happens, he falls in. And the day after that, and now he’s really cursing out loud about it.
It really burns him up inside. He gets mad at himself, mad at the hole, mad at the road, mad at the dark. But his anger doesn’t protect him, and neither does feeling bad about it after the fact. Somehow, he keeps falling in. Only this time, when he is going down that dark road, he is aware that there is something to be careful of. But he guesses wrong about the hole's location. And, he falls in again. And the next day. And the next.
One day, he’s walking down the road and he knows there’s a hole in it, and he notices there’s a hole in it just in the nick of time. He stops. He looks in. And as he stands at the edge looking in, he somehow still falls in. He climbs out. He’s furious. And the next day, notices it. Falls in. And the next day.
And then one day, he notices the hole, goes right up to the edge of it, gets a really good look at it, and almost as if he’s seeing it for the first time. And he doesn’t fall in. He stops just short of it, just in the nick of time. And he goes around it. And now he goes down that road all the time, and never falls in.
Nobody changes because they feel bad. But wrong is instructive. Wrong is nature’s feedback mechanism, a way of signaling to you, THERE IS A HOLE IN THE ROAD! NOTICE IT, AND YOU HAVE NEW CHOICES TO MAKE.
Our nation keeps going down a dark road and falling in a hole. Our leaders form committees and make policy about falling in holes. People talk about the holes around their water coolers. You’d think, with all the discussion, we would go around the hole for a change. We’re in a dark road right now. There’s a hole in it.
How do you keep from falling in a hole? How do you keep from repeating the same mistake over and over again? Notice it. Pay attention as it happens, or right after it happens. Be grateful/glad for the feedback, because that feedback is part of our self correcting mechanism for remedial change. Glean feedback from this, learn from this, extract the value of it. Appreciate your ability to learn from your experience (nature’s design for you, for all of us). If you get another chance, commit to a new course of action.
Buckminster Fuller spoke of the value of NO answers, the kind of answers we get from life when we make bad choices. He said we actually increase our development more from these NO answers than we could from YES answers (from positive choices) because the NO answers give us valuable feedback that we can learn and apply. YES answers tend to lull us into feeling successful when we were merely lucky, so no learning occurs.
The more you have screwed up in life, the more mistakes you have made and learned from, the smarter and stronger and more functional you can be.
SO join me in celebrating the many blessings in our lives that we have gained from our mistakes, and then, as we go down this dark road together, you and me, a couple of real screw ups, let’s notice the hole and go around it this time.
Dr. Rick Kirschner is a bestselling author, coach and educator. He's author of the 'Insider's Guide To The Art Of Persuasion, and the blog at drkblog.com . You can listen free to his $49 audio on dealing with people you can't stand, by visiting LearnToPersuade.com
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