When we know we did something right, we feel good. We are in the safety of our comfort zone where everything is familiar. Making mistakes is often viewed as a sign of incompetence or not being good enough, but this is not the case. Your ability to learn from your mistakes is all about mindset, your belief in learning and intelligence.

Do you know what your brain thinks about while making mistakes? When a mistake is made, synapses in your brain fire. These are electrical signals that move between parts of the brain when you learn something new. The times when we are challenged are actually the best for brain growth.

Your environment plays a crucial role in how you perceive the making of mistakes. Psychologists compared the environment of mistake-friendly and mistake-unfriendly classrooms. What they found is that in the mistake-friendly classrooms, students are not afraid of making mistakes and tended to increase their effort put in their work. The fear of being wrong can be paralyzing. When you create an environment where mistakes are a natural part of life, you actually increase your chances for success. In the mistake-unfriendly classrooms, students do not dare to take a boat to reach their goal and tended to be blocked because they are afraid of what others may think if they fail.

Nonetheless, sometimes we should plainly consider where we may be wrong. On the opposite side of fear of failure, we have overconfidence. When a person is overly confident, he or she does not put as much effort into learning anymore; because he or she thinks everything is already OK! Whether it is fear of failure or overconfidence, none of these two mindsets will help you learn or achieve success.

Creating an environment where failure, errors and mistakes are seen as a natural part of learning is crucial. But how exactly can we do that? It all starts with each one of us! What did you use to say to yourself after you made a mistake? Do you say: “I am stupid” or “I made a stupid mistake”?

What does make those two statements different exactly?

The first one is tearing down your self-confidence and attacking your personal identity from being a smart and capable person. If a person is stupid, he or she cannot be smart anymore. What the second statement does is admitting the mistake. Once again, it is perfectly human to make mistakes. Perfection is not only subjective but also highly overrated.

The ability to learn without fearing judgement from anyone else or even yourself is what makes you into a smarter and more capable person. Of course, it is not about trying hard in the first place or seeking to make as many mistakes as possible. Instead, it is all about trying to give yourself the privilege of making a mistake from time to time and see what you might discover after.

Source: Lifehack, Young Mathematicians