Driving on auto pilot

The thing I find myself saying most these days is “there is no such thing as failure, only feedback”. We live in a high- pressured society where mistakes are often punished so harshly that it's understandable that we are reluctant to make them. We are constantly bombarded with messages from the media that it is not okay to get things wrong. Who wants to be vilified in the press for wearing the wrong frock? Or laughed that publicly for believing you can sing?

Moreover, we are so dependent on others for the various elements of our lives; we often fear failure because we fear that we will not be able to live with the consequences. For example our homes are tied to our finances, which are tied to our jobs or businesses. So a mistake anywhere along this chain could have disastrous effects - it could result in us losing the roof over our heads! So each time we are presented with the opportunity to try something where we are uncertain of the outcome we run these scenarios in our minds and the fear of getting it wrong immobilises us.

However I have learnt that there really are no life experiences, apart from death itself, that we do not have the capacity to bounce back from; to restart smart and move on to greater and better things, if we have self-belief and unshakeable confidence in ourselves.

Hence, there is no such thing as failure only feedback, which means all activities have the opportunity to afford us new knowledge and new insight. Often when things go wrong, we learn the most from the feedback because by nature we are more attentive when we are out of flow than when things are ticking along smoothly.

When things are going smoothly you stop paying attention. Your brain goes into automatic pilot and uses the routines and patterns established over thousands of repetitions to reduce the effort needed to maintain that process so that it can go off and do something else. Despite what the average male may believe, human beings are natural multi- taskers. Our systems are set up to multitask and pay as little attention as possible to the majority of things we are doing.

A classic example of this, if you are a driver, is driving on automatic pilot. Have you ever driven on automatic pilot?, i.e., you been driving and although you are concentrating (I'm sure the police and many a driving instructor may have another interpretation of the word “concentrating” in this context) you're not actually thinking about what you are doing. This happened to me when I was driving home one day. My brain heard the word “home” and went to the library cabinet marked “home”, pulled out a roadmap and proceeded to navigate there. What I had failed to notice (because I was on automatic pilot ) was that there was more than one file with the title “home” and rather than picking the one related to my current address, my mind had selected the one that, I assume elicited the strongest emotional attachment. It wasn't until I had made the fifth wrong turn that I became aware that although I was indeed driving “home”, the “home” I was driving to, I had not lived in for 15 years - three “homes” ago!

When we become too familiar with our patterns we stop "thinking", stop paying attention and we only really come back into focus when we make a mistake. Hence, never be afraid of getting it wrong, making those mistakes, because somewhere within your mistake there will be new knowledge and new insight that you would not have learned without it.

What has been your funniest mistake to date and what lessons can you share from it? I look forward to reading your feedback and comments.