One of the greatest barriers to taking action is this fear of making mistakes and it’s really a sum of many fears if you think about it.

Fear of looking bad in front of others when you make the mistakes, fear of loss of time and resources spent, fear of self confidence taking a hit, fear of a downward spiral, it’s a whole bunch of fears all wrapped in this one big fear of making mistakes.

So how do we overcome this?

We have to take the stigma out of making mistakes.

How do we do that?

Very simple.

By accepting the ROCK SOLID INDISPUTABLE ONE BILLION PERCENT FACT OF LIFE THAT YOU ARE DAMN WELL GOING TO MAKE MISTAKES.

You’re going to make them.

Period.

Feel the weight lift off your shoulders.

Feel the “lightness” of it all and how easy it is for you to press forward now.

Realize too that it’s natural to make them.

You are not a perfect individual so it only makes perfect sense that the actions coming from an imperfect individual will be imperfect as well.

No need to make it a big deal out of it each time you make one, because it’s not about making mistakes.

IT’S ABOUT MAKING ADJUSTMENTS.

The mistakes signal you as to what to do next. That’s what the mistakes are for. If you have a fear of making them, there’s no way you’ll know what you need to do to get to where you want to go.

Some might say that’s all good and well in terms of dealing with the technical aspects of the fear of making mistakes but what about the SOCIAL aspects?

The social fears of being ridiculed in front of others when you make these mistakes?

How do you overcome THAT?

This is where one of my favorite quotes comes in from Teddy Roosevelt.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." Taking this quote even further, if you think about it, it’s those who make mistakes who are the ones who inevitably grow because they learn how to adjust to new situations. They deliberately take sticks and poke at their goals which inevitably creates various new situations and they start adjusting to those various new situations, to the point where it equips them VERY well to be able to weather the storms of life that come right out of the blue, which WILL come.

Those who don’t dare to make mistakes will get hit HARD when these storms come and because they haven’t exercised their “adjusting” muscles, will fare far worse than those who have.

Making mistakes is training for life itself, only this time YOU are in the driver’s seat. You are the one deliberately making these mistakes, testing the waters, making life react to YOU, instead of the other way around.

It instills a powerful locus of control within you.

There’s also obviously the courage that’s created when you have what it takes to overcome the fear of making mistakes and to get your hands dirty and that courage begins to overflow into other areas of your life.

It’s infectious. You find yourself normally doing things you never would’ve dreamed of doing in the past and that opens up whole new situations for you to learn and adjust to.

Pretty soon, you’ll feel like you’re not making mistakes.

You’ll feel like you’re LIVING.

What’s there to ridicule about all that?

You’re far better off playing ON the field than you are sitting by the sidelines. Those who sit by the sidelines and criticize and judge - they are the ones missing out. They are the ones missing out on the valuable experience of adjusting, of developing the kind of courage that can’t be developed any other way, of the powerful feeling of INITIATING, rather than always REACTING to life itself.

To live is to make mistakes.

To grow is to adjust to those mistakes.

There is nothing to fear.

There is only to learn.

And to grow.

The dead are the only ones who don’t.