Why Beating Yourself Up After Mistakes Kills Your Success

When you make a mistake, how do you normally respond? In this video, I want to share with you how to think about your mistakes, why it's super important that you decide very intentionally how you're going to think about it when you make a mistake, and how to move forward to extract the value that you can from that mistake. So stay tuned. I'm Natalie Fisher. If you don't know me, I am here to help professionals land their 6-figure jobs and thrive in those roles and learn the skills they need to advocate for themselves. I have my YouTube channel, which you might be watching this video on. And I'm also pretty active on LinkedIn. And I have a Get a Six-Figure Job You Love and Thrive podcast, as well as a program called the Six-Figure Curriculum, where we go deep and talk about that stuff. So the main mistake that I see is people's initial reaction to a mistake when they make a mistake is to feel really bad about it, right? Like to feel like they're blaming themselves and like, oh, I shouldn't have done that. And oh, I'm, I'm terrible. I'm stupid. I shouldn't have done that. Right. And it just occurred to me just now because I was straightening my hair that I left the hair straightener on. And I was up and I smelled something and I was like, oh, that smells like I left it on and I'm done with it, right? So I just went into the bathroom and I just unplugged it, right? And it made me think that the way that we normally think about mistakes is that we think like, if I had gone into the bathroom, seen that the hair straightener was on and been like, okay, well now I need to burn myself with it to really ingrain the fact that I shouldn't leave it on and that that was a mistake and that there could have been a fire. And that if I just burn myself with it, then that will help me learn the lesson. But it actually wouldn't. Here's what would happen instead. If I burn myself with it, now I'm in pain, right? I've caused myself self-harm. I've punished myself, right? Now I'm going to be very afraid to leave it on again. Right. So I maybe won't even use it. I might be like, you know what, forget it. I'm not even going to bother to straighten my hair because I don't want to leave it on and I don't want to make that mistake again. Right. And throughout the, throughout the day, I'm just feeling like in pain. I'm in pain all day from doing that. Right. And me being in pain has not made me more empowered. It has not made me better at what I do. It has not made me more successful. It has just caused me pain. So what most people do is they will talk to themselves in a negative way after they make a mistake. So tell me if that's familiar to you, like, ah, I shouldn't have done that. I can't believe I did that. And so one of the big life mistakes that I've made, and I wanted to share with you and how I've used this mistake to actually make me much more successful and a better person in all areas of my life. Is I was in a 10-year relationship for 10. I was in a 10-year relationship that was with a narcissist. It was emotionally abusive and neglectful, right? Not physically, just emotionally. Okay, and when I finally got the courage to leave that relationship, it would have been very easy for me to tell myself, and I did do this: Why did you stay so long? Oh, why didn't you realize that sooner? You could have left so much sooner. That was a really dumb decision. How could you have done that? You could be— you could have been so much better financially if you had just left sooner, if you would just listen to the people that told you. And that would have led to like embarrassment and shame and thinking, you know, I should have— like, people were trying to tell me, why didn't I listen? And why did I stay for so long? And all those things, right? And Talking to myself like that is just not helpful. It doesn't serve me to then go out and live my best life, right? What it does is it makes me feel small. It makes me feel stupid. It makes me feel scared and ashamed and embarrassed, right? And when one is feeling like that, then I would be blocking all the value and all the lessons And all the wisdom that was in that experience, right? I couldn't reach that if I'm talking to myself like that. And every mistake is full of wisdom, right? It's full of value. It's like a gold mine that can be that can be dug up and extracted. So after having done that work, this is how I now talk to myself about it. And I'm going to give you some. Steps as to how you can check in with yourself when you make a mistake. And this could be a, a big long-term mistake, or it could just be a little mistake, but I'm going to share with you, like, something you regret, something that if you were to go back again and, and do, you would say, no, I would definitely not do that again like that, right? So this is how I look at it now. Now I look at it as seeing it as— I think to myself, you learned the equivalent Of what a relationship PhD would would teach you. You took everything that you did, and you learned how to handle it with grace. You took things that you didn't like. You took words like you received words from him that could have been very hurtful, and you decided to empower yourself instead of allowing yourself to be your confidence to be eroded. You learned to have your own back through that relationship like you never could have learned. Otherwise, you created stronger values for who you are and who you want to be and who you want to stand for through that experience. That experience showed me so much contrast, right? It was like when I when I heard a thought from him, or I thought I heard his perspective, or I saw the way he was being. Once I started to develop my skills, my brain management skills, I decided that I could really empower myself to choose. differently and decide, you know what, I don't wanna be like that. I don't wanna approach my life like that. I disagree with that. And you're, of course, you're entitled to have your opinion, but I am empowered to have my own. And I had to do that for myself. And I would've never learned to do that to the degree that I have learned to do that if it hadn't have been for that experience. So this narrative you can see is so much more empowering, right? And it's created so many better results and returns in my life. And it was because this new narrative that I chose. So I, I continue with it by saying I left a financially tied situation and I cut all the ties and I strongly supported myself through every single one of those actions. Even though at the time I was losing out, I strongly empowered myself because I knew I would be able to rebuild it. I didn't engage with any of the petty arguments when we were doing the separation. I took the high road and I just Allowed things to separate, and I allowed myself to do that without being angry or resentful, and owned my choice in every single one of those steps and every single one of those moments. And I owned that I was there for ten years. Nobody forced me to be there for ten years. I made that decision, right? And so when he told me to go back and figure something out, when he when he called me an idiot or when he called me stupid, I learned to have my own back so strongly. And I said, "You know what?" Maybe he has a point. I'm not going to agree with the fact that I'm stupid or that I'm an idiot, but maybe he does have a point, and I'm going to go and research that and figure that out. It made me a stronger troubleshooter. It made me a better thinker. I learned to be smarter, to be faster, and I learned to create these narratives in an empowering way, not a way where I was a victim. Okay, I decided to reinvent myself as a person instead of crumbling to the level that he wanted to keep me at. I decided. That I was gonna make this a growth experience and into something that people would look at and say, I want to be that. I want to do that. I decided to make it an inspiring experience instead of an experience of blaming, right? Because the easiest thing would be to blame him and say, you did this to me. You did this to me. And I, I didn't do that. I really, really strongly believed that I was responsible for being there and for staying there. Mm-hmm. So now I have a lot of mistake stories that I talk about. I have ones from work and ones from my family now, and ones with my daughter and all these things that I do that are not always the way that I would wanna do them. I would look back and say, yes, I made a mistake. I'm gonna own that mistake and I'm gonna extract the value from it. And so whether you have made a mistake in your life at work, whether it be big or small, you can have the decision. You can take the decision. Mm-hmm. To create a narrative for it that is gonna be so powerful for you that it is going to help you grow. It is going to help you become a better person, a smarter person, a faster person. It's gonna do— it's gonna have the opposite effect that it would have if you left it unmanaged, if you left it unlooked at. So here are some steps that you can take to make sure that you are extracting the value from your mistakes. And getting the most out of them because failure is a, or success is a crappy teacher. Failure and mistakes are where you do get the most value. So step number one, you have to have your own back. So you need to talk to yourself as if you were, as if it was like your best friend talking to you or your mom or your dad or someone who deeply cares about you and loves you. That's how you need to talk to yourself. So think about it if your best friend made a mistake. Or the same mistake that you've made, right? How would you talk to that person? How would you show them that you have their back? Okay, you need to talk to yourself that way. 2, notice unuseful emotion and how it can block you from the lessons and the wisdom. So if you have an unuseful emotion, that might be like shame, or because shame will block you from any curiosity that you could have, right? Because you're just in the shame, right? And I'm not saying don't have these emotions. I definitely had them. And the next step is to process them, but it's to notice how staying in the emotion can actually prevent you from having the breakthrough that you need to have from the experience. So shame is one, embarrassment is one, um, regret is a big one. When you're in regret, you're not going to be able to see very clearly the lessons that you have to extract and to harvest from that experience, right? Number 3 is to process whatever emotion that you have and remember that it's only going to be temporary. You're not going to be in that emotion forever unless you practice that emotion and decide it, but you don't need to be in that emotion forever. Although it's natural that it would come up, right? I had all those emotions during my experience. You know, I was embarrassed that I didn't leave earlier. I was ashamed that I had stayed for so long. I was regretful that I lost like telling myself that I had lost so much from the decision, right? And as long as I stayed in those emotions, I wouldn't be able to create the new narrative, not to its full extent, right? Number 4, take full responsibility for extracting the value from the mistake. Take responsibility for getting the lesson and using it to empower you. Number 5, create the new way you want to be from now on. Anchor in The new value that you want to have from the experience. Anchor in the new, the new reinvention of yourself. And this is going to mean that, for example, for my relationship, I decided that from now on, I will not be with somebody who is going to who is going to say things like that to me. Like they're not going to be able to disrespect me because that's just not something that I'm going to allow or be available for in my life. Right? Not I'm not going to choose it. Right? If it happens to me, I will have my own back. But I'm going to be intentional in choosing. Who I'm around, and I will be like I decided. I'm like this situation, this relationship situation is going to make me the best partner to someone who really deserves that. Like it's going to make me so considerate. It's going to make me so thoughtful. It's going to make me so like my brain is is performing at such a high level that now I'm going to be able to to be in this relationship, and I'm going to be able to have all the difficult conversations and respect the other person through their opinions and all that. And it's because of the experience that I had and that, that very deep learning that I had to go through. So I have a 3-day series coming up if you want to get deeper on this. Now, I talk about career and job hunt. A lot of the parallels that I share and the stories that I share are very intertwined with how you're going to land your next 6-figure job or how you're going to do the next thing in your career that you want to do. And so in my 3-day series, I help people create their best careers. I help them choose environments where they're going to be valued and appreciated and they're going to be respected as well as highly paid. And I do that in the first step is my 3-day series where I take you through a series of behaviors, a series of mindsets that will set you up for success with that. This is the first step of my paid program. And then I have the Six Figure Curriculum if you want to continue to go deep and actually get coaching from me and develop, develop these skills as a person at work and in the rest of your life. Because I have lots of people that tell me they apply these to other areas of their life as well. So I'd be happy to share that with you. Get your— get the link below. You can sign up for that. And beating yourself up just is not useful. So I hope to see you there. I can't wait to connect with you. If you are watching this on YouTube, give me a thumbs up if you like the video. If you don't like the video, give me a thumbs down. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. I really appreciate every subscriber, every comment, every thumbs up. All the support. I really appreciate it. I'm so happy to be here with y'all, and I will see you on the training. Can't wait to connect. Bye bye.