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Allow The Negatives: How To Truly Learn From Your Mistakes

Lukas Schwekendiek
3 min readSep 18, 2022

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Photo by Emma Frances Logan on Unsplash

As children we used to make mistakes a lot.

We ran as fast as our legs could carry us, falling face first onto the ground plenty of times, climbed the highest trees only to fall or tried to sled as fast as possible only to eat a face full of snow.

We did everything we could without any care for us.

At that point we did not have enough experiences to learn how to be safe; we did not make enough mistakes.

Think about it this way: If you never fell as a kid, or never saw anyone else fall or be embarrassed while running at their top speed, then what would hold you back from doing it now?

Without making a mistake you would have never learned a lesson and would have just kept doing what you were doing.

This is the case for most people that continue making mistakes and never learn from them:

The reward for making the ‘mistake’ outweighs the consequences.

Making mistakes and learning from them is a simple process of conditioning.

We learn to avoid a negative (the mistake), resulting in a positive outcome.

Not learning anything, or not doing anything differently, simply results in us keeping that negative around.

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Lukas Schwekendiek
Lukas Schwekendiek

Written by Lukas Schwekendiek

Life Coach, Speaker, Writer. Published on TIME, Inc & Huffington Post. Coaching available again! Email: Lukas.schwekendiek@gmail.com with the word "Coaching"

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