How To Avoid Repeating Mistakes

This simple framework will help you learn from mistakes and avoid repeating them.

In last week’s Friday Forward, I praised the aviation industry for consistently learning from failure and discussed how leaders in all organizations can ensure their teams do the same. But for many, the most painful mistakes come in our personal lives, not professional, so I wanted to dig into how to apply this lesson outside of a professional context.

It’s one thing to make a mistake, but it’s another to make the same mistake again and again. Few things are more painful than the realization that you failed to learn from a previous shortcoming.

In that context, let’s revisit the three steps I shared in Friday Forward, adapting them slightly to the personal domain:

• First, we must objectively acknowledge what went wrong, setting aside the urge to assign blame and instead pursue the truth, whatever it may be. In a personal context, this means accepting that you alone bear responsibility for things that go wrong and have agency to fix them.

• Second, we need to concur on the improvements that could have prevented those mistakes or mitigated the damage. In a personal context, this means thinking through your actions and identifying areas where a different choice may have made the difference.

• Third we need to then alter policies and protocols and ensure the necessary people are trained in them. In a personal context, this means creating a system for tracking your mistakes and learnings and reviewing them at a consistent cadence so those lessons stay front of mind.

Here’s a simple tool for three steps: the Personal Mistake Log.

As you’d expect, the Personal Mistake Log is like a system a company might use to track errors and learnings, applied to your individual life. The Personal Mistake Log is easy to use, and it’s a great way to create written self-accountability to ensure you actually learn from your failures.

After each mistake, use a journal or the Excel template linked at the bottom of this post to fill out the following information: