This is why you've never made mistakes in your entire life

THIS IS WHY YOU’VE NEVER MADE MISTAKES IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE

So, do you want to stop making mistakes?

Have you heard of the saying that “hindsight is always 20/20”?

It’s always much easier to look back on the past and think you could’ve made wiser choices, no?

Well, I have this belief that mistakes don’t exist!

Check out the article below to see if it applies to you too, and listen to the podcast that’ll help you stop making mistakes!

We make our decisions based on the best information we have at hand at any given time, so we are always trying to do our best. We judge ourselves after the fact, but that is only because after the fact we have more information.

So stop beating yourself up, relax in knowing that you are always, naturally, doing your best in every moment, take a deep breath and let’s chat about your passion: LEARNING new skills.

You may think that you can’t easily learn something different to improve your life.

Statistics say that, in this day and age, people are changing careers on an average of 6 times.

That means that every time we switch, we have to learn new skills in order to stay competitive in the workforce.

But are we learning fast enough for each change?

Especially after we start a family, we can’t afford the time (and money) to stay in school for a long time.

Therefore, we have to develop learning skills that are fast and reliable for each change.

Languages, sports, sciences, arts are some of these skills that can improve our résumé, life and lifestyle.

Are we learning differently when we are adults than when we are children?

The question should probably be: should we?

Before the age of 7-13, our brain is in Theta brainwave state. This means that we absorb like a sponge the information around us, without any judgement (not that we wouldn’t judge, but at that age we are not equipped by mother nature to do this) in order to survive. The information is not filtered by the conscious, but it goes directly in the subconscious, for the long term.

Now let me tell you that learning is the process that we use in order to place the desired information into our subconscious.

What does this mean?

Did it ever happen to you that your fingers knew better to dial a phone number, but your brain couldn’t remember the correct sequence of numbers?

That comes from the subconscious (sense memory, muscle memory, however it is that you like to call it). Which means that all the repetitions, practice and other exercises that we do are meant for one and only goal: to send the information into the subconscious. Well, this is what we do naturally before we turn 6.

After the age of 6, the Hell comes upon us. We start judging what we hear and compare with what we already know, slowing down the process of learning progressively. The more we learn, the more our brain compares with existing information and the slower we learn *new* skills.

Unless we learn how to learn.

Let me give you an example.

I volunteer at a French catholic school and the age I love most in my children is between 4-5. These little guys are geniuses – little cute Buddah’s, from whom I’m learning every day. I’m learning how to be an ‘empty cup’, how to have the ‘beginner’s mind’, in order to open myself to new approaches and to learning skills that I’ve never done before.

These little guys don’t yet know how to zip their winter coat, for example. What a regular teacher does is to ‘help’ them by zipping the coat and getting on with the next activity.

What happens this way?

The zipper becomes the new enemy of my lovely lil’ Buddah, and with this bloody zipper comes the idea that s/he can’t zip the coat.

THE one thought that all adults fight day in and day out, on autopilot is that they can not do ‘it’.

What I do with the children is to tell them: “I want to see you try 3 times, then I’ll help you.”

It doesn’t really matter what you try, to zip your coat or learn astronomy. As soon as you try, and you don’t succeed, you have already gone through the steps of the learning process, up to whatever point you get stuck.

But once you try, then when I give you the explanation (or when I zip my little buddy’s zipper), then you are really going to see and listen, because you’ve been there.

So when I’m going to explain to you the steps, then you’ll go through them in your mind like that: “OK, so I’ve done this one, alright, then I’ve done that other one… Oh, here’s where I got stuck, now I get it!”

So you will deconstruct, reverse engineer if you will, your own process, and then you’ll identify the one step that kept you from succeeding. Whereas when the teachers explain, lecture or give complete instructions, you may not even hear everything, because your mind can stop at different points in the presentation and you will not hear everything.

When I help you after you tried, that’s when you become an interested audience, you want to hear my solution. After you try a few times, you become very motivated and a ‘hot’ audience for my coaching.

If we take for example French, when my students can’t remember a word, for instance, I ask “Give me 3 guesses.”

It doesn’t matter if they are right or wrong.

In my experience, 95% of people find their own answer after 3 attempts, even if they thought at the beginning that they don’t really know the word, but for someone who has been exposed to the language, this method works wonders.

But what I want to see as you go through the 3 guesses, is what are those 3 guesses. They could come from the same family of words, from the same theme, they could be connected logically (that means that you have a logical memory), or the words look similarly (then you are visual learner), then I’m telling you why you came up with that specific sequence of words when you guessed, why in that sequence and why you didn’t remember the word you were looking for in the first place.

This exercise is also meant to make you attach an emotion to it. Either get bored, frustrated or you like it, the more emotion you attach to a topic, the better you will remember it.

Remember: ‘mistakes’ are your own way to make generalizations based on prior knowledge or habits.

Now go ahead and dissect your own natural learning process and come up with 3 guesses every time you get stuck. You’ll be amazed how much better you’ll see, hear, understand the right answer when you find it.

NOW IT IS YOUR TURN!
Tell us in the comments below, what are your techniques to stop beating yourself up for making mistakes, that help you learn French faster?

Let me guess.

Do you constantly have the feeling that you can’t hear what the French say and you don’t know how to read all the French words because they are written so much differently than they sound?

Learn 3 secrets that will help you be self sufficient in the way you pronounce French words – even if you don’t know what they mean – so that you can read that sophisticated menu in your favorite French restaurant.