Past mistakes and the fear associated with future potential mistakes is a ball and chain that so many of us wear at the heel, either keeping us in place or frustrating our endeavours.

The good news is, the effect of this ball and chain is tied intimately to our relationship with mistakes and what they mean to us. It’s not an objective constraint, but a self-maintained one.

Understanding mistakes in a deeper light can give us the key to unbound ourselves from fear of failure; by recontextualising it in a more accurate way, we can embrace mistakes and harness them, rather than be imprisoned by them through avoidance or over-compensating in our efforts.

The Nature of Mistakes

Consider a baby that starts taking their first steps; the mistakes are clearly both inevitable yet vital to their learning.

In adulthood, we often forget that the fundamental value of mistakes is that they are actually future success, disguised in the present as an appearance of failure.

Now imagine that there was a baby that gave up on taking steps and stuck to crawling; this pretty much summarises the problematic relationship that many of us have to mistake-making and failure. This relationship is nicely reflected by the concept of the comfort-zone.

There is also the catastrophising of mistakes, but it’s worth remembering that a lot of the time, our fear of making mistakes is inflated; the dust in our eye bends the light of our perception in a way that makes the fearful outcomes seem to be the most vivid and likely.

In such cases, sitting with these fears to come to terms with them and see them more clearly, and then practically, taking new steps and giving chance a chance, are two helpful and powerful remedies to the fear of failure.

Mistakes, the comfort zone, and nature’s reassurance

Our comfort zone is really about control; creating predictable outcomes according to an intention.

There is also an impulse to expand out of the comfort zone, which then brings to light a dynamic tension between two opposing forces:

The future: calls us to a wide range of potentials in our work, relationships, self-knowledge, and emotional experience. Stepping into the future and creating novelty from stepping out of the comfort zone gives humans a range of feelings, including progress, meaning, pride, and joy for example.

The past: calls us to the familiar and experienced, it attempts to replicate these experiences and in this way is the opposite of the novelty associated with stepping out of the comfort zone to change the trajectory of our future.

Evolution, whether looked at on earth or at a cosmological perspective, has both of these features: repetition of the past, and emerging novelty from a creative present, such that both are therefore important and instrumental. What happens now entails an interplay of both forces.

The task of the human being is to harness the best of the past and strive into the creative future in a balanced way; seeing how the past (mistakes and corrections established over time) and creative future are best walked in balance.

Ignorance of either side into an extreme, can put a person into what they will see one way or the other, as a regrettable and even perilous situation.

Mistakes are part and parcel of the majesty of life as it is, and how it will be. So go ahead, get cooking, and appreciate that you will make some stains!