Why can't I learn from my mistakes?

A woman I coach described thirty seconds on a train.

She got on, went to her seat, and somebody was sitting in it. So she said it to him. "Excuse me, this is my seat." A few seconds later she noticed her seat was the next row along.

I just noticed how painful and how much shame I just felt in that situation. Even if my logical mind was telling me, come on, it's not a big deal, it's normal, it happens to everyone — what my body was signaling to me was something totally different. It's huge.

a woman I coach, on getting something wrong in front of a stranger

There was nothing at stake. No money, no outcome, and a stranger she will never see again. Her mind had the mistake in proportion and her body treated it as huge.

Now put that same reaction on something that cost you.

Why do I never learn from my mistakes?

Because you never get as far as the review. Learning from a mistake has a step in it where you go back over what happened and figure out what you did, and getting it wrong brings up shame, so you look away. The next attempt starts instead, and it starts with the same information you had before.

You can't learn from something you can't bear to look at.

She said it about her life in general before she said it about anything specific: "I'm avoiding to take any kind of failure in my life. I'm avoiding to have this kind of feeling of being a failure." Asked what it feels like when it happens, her first answer was that it doesn't feel good. Pressed once, she got to shame and guilt.

So for three years she went again. Five or six attempts at the same thing, each one failed, and after every failure the urge to fix the discomfort by starting the next attempt as fast as she could. Money gone each time. She called it a double negative spiral, the discomfort of failing and the shame of wasting money, and she could see what it was costing her: "Since I didn't take the time to go through this learning process, then I failed again."

Three years of attempts, with the step that converts a failure into information skipped every time.

Why do I keep making the same mistakes?

Because a mistake you have not examined is still whatever you felt about it on the day. Go back over it and it becomes information you can use. Run from it and it stays a verdict on you, and a verdict gives you nothing except a reason to avoid the subject.

Who taught you that failing was shameful?

Daniel Lawson

There are three things people say to themselves after it goes wrong, and only the third produces anything.

The first two feel very different from the inside and they do the same job.

A man I work with arrived with the second one after a week that went badly, and he had three explanations ready for why it had gone badly, all of them about other people being around him. What I said to him was this.

you're giving a reason for why you failed, rather than owning the way that you showed up.

Daniel Lawson

A group member had the first, over a decision that was not a failure at all. He read it as having messed up, "almost like a punishment", and he knew as he said it that it was his ego talking. A few sessions later the thought he used to shut down before it finished forming had been allowed to finish, and it was an empty thought.

And a woman in a group I run did it to her progress. In her first week the reaction ran the show and she could not see it. The week after, she saw it as it happened and still could not change what she did. That is the step working, and she experienced it as failure. Should have is the phrase she uses most, always pointed at herself, while she gives everybody else in the room real encouragement.

What do you see when you go back and look?

Repetition. From outside the review it looks like a run of separate disasters, each with a different reason. From inside it, the same few things keep showing up. That is what the shame has been covering, and it is also the good news, because something repeating is something you can interrupt.

She went back through hers. All of them, as a project, once they were finished and there was nothing live to rescue.

I'm just reviewing them like — I don't know — like a scientist, with a lot of curiosity and open mind.

the same woman, on going back through her failures

At least seventy per cent of them were the same mistake repeating. Her reason for not having seen it before: "I was totally unable to see it before, because I was so obsessed — oh my god, I'm failing, it's so shameful." The information had been sitting there for three years underneath the feeling.

When I have released most part of this emotional burden, it feels like my eyes have opened in a totally different way.

the same woman, on what changed

Three things made that possible, and more method was not among them. Many of the people I work with are excellent at methods already, and that is what they go to when something hurts.

She went back to the ones that were over. A live failure cannot be reviewed, because every minute you spend on it is a minute you could be spending rescuing it. The finished ones are free to look at, and they are the ones carrying the pattern.

She went looking for what happened, not for a verdict. Curiosity is the instruction. A man in one of my groups put the same thing about the people he had been talking to: "I'm not judging them. I'm like, what's the word I'm looking for? I'm re reviewing them."

She went through several together. What repeats across five is invisible in any single failure, which is why reviewing only the last one tells you so little.

I also give people the other direction, which is to get it wrong on purpose where it is cheap.

Set yourself up to fail. And then be in the position of going — well actually, that's a win, I just failed and I feel okay.

Daniel Lawson

Because the mistakes do not stop. When my partner started filming she kept getting things wrong and said it was dumb, and what I said to her was, "well, it's not going to be the last time you make that mistake." Camera goes flat, memory card is full, you forget to put the memory card in at all. After years of doing it, we're still figuring out these bits.

Common questions

How do I review a mistake without beating myself up?

Pick ones that are finished, write down what happened rather than what it says about you, and go in looking for what repeats. Beating yourself up is the first of the three voices, and it is the one that makes you look away, so it is working against the thing you sat down to do. The woman I mentioned at the start set herself an attribute to build for exactly this: "When I fail I face it with curiosity to learn what went wrong."

Why do I keep making the same mistakes when I can see them coming?

Seeing it coming and changing it are two different skills, and seeing it first is the step working rather than the step failing. Often it can be that you see it earlier each time for a while before anything changes in what you do. Count the earlier seeing as the progress it is, or you will read your improvement as another failure.

What if I already know what went wrong and I do it again anyway?

Then the review has given you the information and something else is in the way of acting on it, which is a different question. Why do I know what I need to do but still not do it? is the one to read next.

How far back should I go?

Far enough to see more than a single instance. Three years of them is what made the repeat obvious for the woman on the train. If that is too much, start with the ones you remember least clearly, because those are usually the ones you got away from quickest.

If this is you

If you have failed at something and gone again, and then again, you already have what most of this needs, which is that you keep going. What comes next is slower, and it is the step that has never been taken: the failures you have already paid for are sitting there with the information still in them, and going back through them with curiosity is where the next attempt stops starting from scratch. Saying what you found to somebody else is what takes the shame off it, because once you have heard another person describe their version, it stops feeling like it is only yours. And then you get a next attempt that starts from what you know rather than from what you are trying not to feel.

The Reconnected Man and The Reconnected Woman are the group where we have these conversations together.