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I always talk about the quote: “take chances, make mistakes, get messy.”
It’s from Mrs. Frizzle of The Magic School Bus series by Joanna Cole.
It’s one of my mantras.
But, I’ll be honest, I struggle with embracing my own mistakes. My inner critic likes to come by and pound on the door until I answer. I’ve written and recorded about my relationship with my inner critic (I call her Marsha).
Then, the other day, I heard a quote during a guided meditation and it was light a lightning bolt of realization. A new way to define mistakes. And, it’s changing my perspective already!
Take a listen and let me know what you think.
How will you look at your mistakes differently now?
Episode Transcript:
I really wanted to share with you today one of this, these incredible mindset reframes that I came across the other day.
I was listening to a meditation and I was starting to space out. And I caught this phrase: Instead of thinking of your faults, errors, blunders as mistakes, think of them as miss-takes. You are the leading actor, the leading actress in your filmography of life. And each one of those blunders gets to be a blooper on your reel.”
I kid you not, when I heard that, something just… it was like a lightning bolt through my body. I am somebody who is so hyper-critical of myself, who completely ties my self worth, and my ego, to my ability to please others. And to do the “right thing.”
So making mistakes does not come easy to me. And yet, I’m also a trained scientist. And so I love tinkering, and experimenting and learning, and growing.
But it’s a lot harder when it comes to learning and tinkering and growing personally. So when I heard this phrase, it was like this incredible mindset change, I get to choose to see these mistakes as miss takes.
Let me learn from them.
Let me find another way to say what I meant to say.
Let me choose another path to get me to the place that I want to go.
All of it is opening up the world to trying something new to experimenting to do take number two, or take number 5002.
This happened yesterday, I want to share this story because I made a mistake on… I was planning some social media content. And I, in my social media content planner app, I put the image that I wanted to share and then I just put one phrase under it, it was just like: does this sentence resonate with you? Because it blew my mind.
That’s what I wrote. And it was a holding place for me. Because I needed to go do something else. And I was going to come back to it. Except I forgot to come back to it. And yesterday, that social media post went live. And I saw it and my eyes widened. And I was just like, oh my gosh, this is not good. I cannot believe I just put that out there it is people are gonna think that I’m stupid. People are gonna think that I don’t think or plan. I had these whole self-critical stories.
And then I remembered that phrase. This is not a mistake, it is a miss take.
It gave me that space to breathe.
And the funny thing is, I got so much engagement on that post, people really resonating with the quote, it’s from Ron Paul, it said, “Your fear of looking stupid is holding you back.”
And what I realized when I gave myself that space and time to step back, was that was the perfect post to mess up on. That was the perfect place to look stupid and to see it go out there and to engage with people because every single one of us makes mistakes and is sometimes so afraid of making mistakes that we hold ourselves back.
So looking at that through the lens of that’s a blooper that I get to put on my blooper reel and how fascinating that the universe brought me these, this experience at the same time that it brought me this mindset shift in this meditation.
It’s not a coincidence.
So my exercise for you is to sit down and think about those mistakes that you made and what you learned from them.
How can they be viewed as a miss takes? And then, go out and create an entire blooper reel of more mistakes – more miss takes – where you get to learn from and grow from and laugh about and maybe even share them with your children and with your friends and with your community so that you can also inspire people to know that it is amazing to make miss takes.
Have a great rest of your day.
Transcription by Otter.ai – Disclaimer: this is a referral link. I get extra minutes added to my account if you sign up for one yourself.
About this “playcast”:
Life is messy. Kids are messy. Parenting is messy!
But, messy can be good.
To paraphrase Mrs. Frizzle, it means you’re taking chances, making mistakes, and learning.
Creative Spirit, Playful Discipline is a mini-podcast – a playcast! – for parents who want to embrace their uniqueness, shatter the “shoulds”, and find a rallying cry for their families so they can create fun, magically messy memories to last a lifetime.
