Many anecdotes, proverbs and sayings reflect the view that learning and success come from making mistakes. You must make mistakes during your training. I believe that your rate of learning and success depends just as much on making mistakes as it does on positive learning experiences.
There are three key points that influence the impact mistakes have on your learning and success:
· Your attitude towards making mistakes.
· How you react when you do make a mistake.
· How effectively you learn from your mistakes.
Let’s look at these points in more detail. While some of these suggestions may be more relevant for higher risk activities such as flying or medicine, you can find ideas to apply in any field.
No matter how good you are, you must make mistakes while you learn. Accept this. Your attitude to making mistakes has a big impact on how you firstly deal with the mistake when it happens, and secondly how you learn from the mistake.
Good training programs should let you make safe mistakes. You should have a safe environment so you can explore the boundaries of your topic. Also, avoid trying to be right all the time. Stretch yourself while you are learning. This is the best time to make mistakes as you have someone who can help you correct them and ensure you don’t get into trouble.
Consider this example from flight training. You are an instructor and you have two students that are getting close to their first flight alone. One of them has made close to a perfect landing every time. This student has not bounced, landed hard, been too high or too low on approach, or been too fast on touchdown. The other student has done all of those, but is now doing reasonably good landings. Which one would cause you more concern?
I’d have more concern about the first student. Why? The student has not had to correct many mistakes. If one day the first student does bounce a landing, are they going to recover correctly? Perhaps, but the second student has had to recover several times from a bounce on landing. The second student probably has a better chance of a good recovery.
While this may be an extreme example, it shows that part of your training is learning how to recover from mistakes, even if some are not your fault. So get out there, make safe mistakes and don’t feel bad about them.
Note that this is not a license to go out and take unnecessary risks though. Don’t deliberately make a mistake that puts you in danger.
The next consideration is how you deal with mistakes when they happen. You don’t want to be sitting there thinking, “Great, I’ve made a mistake! I’m closer to my goal!” Depending on the circumstances, you may need to act immediately. Here are some guidelines:
· Accept the mistake. Once you realize you have made a mistake simply say to yourself “I’ve made an error. Now let’s work out what to do next.” Don’t linger too long on the reasons for making the mistake, or the thought that you are a bad learner, or that it’s someone else’s fault. Accept it and move on.
· Act immediately if needed. If the mistake you’ve made needs an immediate response, do it. Don’t waste time. If it’s an event you’ve trained for, then make a firm decision to follow the response your training has taught you.
· Plan your response. If you have made a mistake that doesn’t need immediate correction, then you are usually better off taking a few moments to plan your response. Often pilots put themselves in worse trouble by reacting to a mistake without much consideration, even when they have time. Take a moment to plan your response, and then act.
Note that some mistakes may need both an immediate and then a secondary response. For these mistakes, do the immediate response, and then plan the secondary response.
· Verbalize it. Once you have corrected the mistake, simply say one or two positive assertions to help you do it correctly next time.
· Make a note. Whether it’s a large or small mistake, make a small note of it somewhere (if possible). Add it to your review later. This links to the next section on effective learning from your own mistakes.
· Don’t try to hide it. If you are with your instructor, you are usually better off admitting the mistake. They probably know anyway. If you are not with your instructor, I recommend letting them know afterwards. Explain what happened and your response, rather than trying to hide the issue. You may find that you chose the correct response, or you could have chosen a better one. Either way it’s helpful to your learning.
Capture those opportunities for further learning as they happen, and then work on how to avoid them in the future. The review technique, described in the eNquire step of the Memletic Process, is a key technique for achieving this.
The technique works better, however, if you make a note of issues you have so you can come back to them later. You may quickly forget the small mistakes along the way, only to continue to make them. Many accidents are due to small mistakes adding up into a bigger one, so capture them early and capture them often. Your training may not be as serious as this, however attention to detail often controls how fast you progress.
The review technique description includes most of the points I would make here, however here are a few more:
· Ask for help. If you are unsure of whether you dealt with the mistake correctly, ask for help from someone who knows.
· Replay scenarios in a simulator, or simply visualize. If you made a mistake and you want to ensure it does not happen again, try replaying the scenario in a simulator, or writing a brief script. Look at the causes of the mistake, and then replay the scenario making the right decisions.
· Consider your fears. If your mistake comes partially from a fear, such as a fear of failure, do some further work to document your feelings. Record what happened, why you think it happened, and how you feel about it. Give some thought to the lessons learned and what you need to change. What will you do differently next time? Add to your review notes and do some work to better understand your fear.