28th February 2025
Do you ever find yourself endlessly mentally replaying situations in which you have committed a mistake or a blunder and wish you’d performed differently? You wish you hadn’t said that dumb thing.
You wish you’d volunteered for that project that’s now winning accolades.
You wish you’d spoken up.
You wish you hadn’t dropped the ball with that potential client.
And then you try to cover up the mess & end up creating a bigger mess.
A mistake doesn’t necessarily spell disaster. What does spell disaster is not owning that mistake and thereby freeing yourself from it. We are bound to make mistakes more frequently than we would probably care to.
The danger is not in making the mistakes, but in thinking there is freedom from them in hiding them.
The real resolution comes, as always, in owning what is yours – no matter how difficult it is.
What better way to highlight than a small story about not trying to erase your mistakes.
“When I started using a pen in my primary school, and I made a mistake, I would try hard to erase it before submitting it to my teacher.
Sometimes, I used chalk to clean my mistake but it used to re-appear later.
So I began to use saliva, it worked at times, but only to leave holes in my books.
My teachers then used to beat me for being outrageously dirty.
But I used to wonder, all I tried to do was to cover my error.
One day, a kind hearted teacher called me aside and said, ‘Anytime you make a mistake, just cross it & move on” .
He said further ‘Trying to erase your mistakes would only damage your book to nothing.’
I told him in protest that I don’t want people to see my mistake.
My loving teacher laughed & said “Trying to erase your mistake will make more people know about your mess & that stigma will be for life.’
A great lesson indeed.
Have you made some mistakes in life?
Each of those mistakes is a sign that you truly challenged yourself to push beyond your comfort zone.
Don’t expose yourself as a result of trying to cover your mistakes.
A mistake should be our teacher, not our undertaker.
A mistake is a delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Better things are ahead of you.
Don’t try to erase your mistakes, learn your lesson from it, then just cross it over, move on and stay blessed forever.