:Hello, hello, welcome to the podcast this week. This week I’m gonna be talking about making mistakes. And if you have ever made a mistake where you felt awful, where you felt like it was the worst thing in the world and you’d do anything to take it back, or maybe it wasn’t so extreme, and maybe you’ve just made a mistake that you didn’t think was a big deal, but everybody else or somebody else was making you feel really bad about it, or you felt like they were. then this episode is for you. If basically, if you’ve ever made a mistake in your life, this episode is for you. All right, so let’s get started. Thank you for being here. I’m Natalie Fisher. If you don’t know me, I help people land higher paying jobs. I help people negotiate for their value. I help you own your own value. And today, I feel like this is an important topic because making mistakes is part of. you being valuable because humans make mistakes and mistakes make us more valuable because we learn the biggest lessons during our times of, you know, understanding the mistakes that we’ve made. So here’s the problem, as I usually see it, is the way that people treat the mistake or what they think about. And I’m going to share a few examples with you because I’ve made a lot of mistakes that have that I’ve worked through and that I truly believe have made me stronger, not smaller. And I think that the biggest problem is, is a mistake can make you smaller. It can make you fearful. It can make you more anxious. It can make you more paranoid or it can make you bigger, more confident, more self-confident. So, for example, you could make a mistake where you forget to show up to a meeting and it could make you super paranoid about doing that again. And it could make you you know, move through your life very anxiously, afraid that you’re gonna have that happen again, right? Like we have people who have had a car accident or something and they’re afraid to drive, right? Or they are afraid to get into the car again. And maybe the accident wasn’t even their fault, right? It was just an experience that happened. And maybe they contributed in some way and maybe they didn’t, but even it’s like an event that happens that was unwanted. Maybe you contributed to it a little bit. Maybe you didn’t. And it can either make you terrified or afraid to do the thing again. It can keep you small because imagine if because of that you decided you weren’t going to drive again, right? Like you decided you couldn’t trust yourself to be behind the wheel. Then you would miss out on a lot of conveniences and a lot of opportunities in your life. Right. But what it can do also is it can make you evolve in the opposite direction. It can make you bigger. It can make you more confident. It can actually evolve you in a way that you didn’t really realize before. So what we think the problem is is that we shouldn’t be making mistakes. We think, oh, we should be able to prevent these mistakes. We should know better. We should have looked into that. We should have researched. We should have looked. We should have done something better, right? And that is, in my opinion, that’s not a helpful way to look at it because I know that no matter what, I’m gonna keep making mistakes no matter what, right? I’m gonna make probably different mistakes, hopefully. I’m gonna make mistakes in different situations because I’m be putting myself in new different situations and I’m not gonna know what’s coming. So of course I’m gonna wish that I did something differently or better, right? And I’m only gonna have hindsight to tell me that I didn’t, right? Hindsight is 20-20 for a reason. It’s because you can’t know in the moment that it was a mistake until after, right? So let’s give an example of like a mistake at work, which is something that I talk about quite frequently. For example, one of my big mistakes at work was that I announced something to somebody that I shouldn’t have, and they got some information that lost them a client. And so in that situation, obviously I didn’t realize what I was doing at the time. It was happening really quickly. I just kind of answered the phone and I plugged my boss and you know how you have those phones. I was on reception and I would press the button to his office and he would answer and I would say, hey, there’s a lien on one of your properties. And he was in there with clients and I didn’t know. And so he. Was embarrassed because his clients heard about the lien on one of his properties and he he he tried to cover it by saying it was a mistake. Like, that’s a mistake. There’s no lien on my property. And I said, oh, no, there is. Here’s the information. I was going to give him the information. And he’s just like, OK, well, that’s mistake. And he hung up. And I was like, oh, that’s weird. I wonder why he’s being so short with me or why he’s being like that. And then I realized he had clients in his office. He gets up, he walks out and I’m like, oh, OK, that was a problem. He’s not happy with me. I’m really embarrassed and ashamed and feeling scared that I’m going to be fired or something because I wasn’t paying attention. And then I’m like thinking, why did he answer the phone? Why did he pick up the phone? And he said, I was waiting for you to give me some other information that was somebody was supposed to call with. And I had no way of knowing. Like he thought. somebody else was supposed to call with some other information for those clients and he was expecting that instead. And I was like, well, I didn’t know that. So I couldn’t have known. Obviously, I didn’t know clients were in there. Obviously, I didn’t announce that on purpose. So it was kind of a problem. And so the solution there is I would have been replaying it in my head over and over again and saying, oh, I should have known. I should have checked. I should have done this. I should have done that. And that isn’t helpful because, well, we know we can’t. change the past. The past is a circumstance we can’t change it. But that’s what our brain wants to do. It wants to go replay it and do it again and relive it and be like, let’s just do this differently. Can’t we can it just be differently? Can I have a do over? But instead, what we need to do is move to acceptance and moving to acceptance as quickly as possible is the best thing that I have been able to do. So something bad happens, I can move to acceptance almost immediately. And when I do that, I find mistakes. cycle through in my life pretty quickly and they don’t affect me as badly. Okay, so I’ll even give you an example. Yesterday I got, oh no it was two days ago now. It felt like yesterday. Two days ago I was stopped for a parking or not, I got a traffic violation ticket for texting at a stoplight and I was at the stoplight, I obviously didn’t realize that there were police around and he knocked on my window, he saw me on my phone and he’s like, go over here. And so in that moment, it was like I had used, I was using all my tools altogether. I was like, okay, acceptance, I’m busted, let’s do this. I was like, okay, let’s go. Nice enough policeman, luckily, he gave me the ticket and he said, look. He’s like, I can see you’re having a bad day, which I was. I was already upset for something else. But anyway, he said, you can actually go online. You can dispute the ticket and they won’t charge you the whole thing. He’s like, they will usually at least cut it in half for you. And so I was like, OK, thank you very much. That was at least that was it was it could have been worse. But anyway, the point is I moved to acceptance really quickly and. I’m over it. Like it was, I looked into, okay, what are the consequences? These are the consequences. Not great, not ideal, but I’m like, I’m moving on with my life and it’s like, whatever. I don’t even, like it’s, it was a pretty short, like upsetting situation, right? And I don’t know. I actually don’t know how long it would take somebody usually to recover from something like that or how much it would affect somebody. But I can feel like I’m pretty proud of myself for, for honestly being able to move through that pretty quickly. And I know that successful people, it’s not that they don’t get punched in the face in life. It’s not that they don’t get knocked around. It’s not that mistakes don’t happen or bad things don’t happen. It’s their ability to recover from them faster and truly recover, not just pretend like they’re recovered and actually, but actually feel like accepted, accepting the situation, accepting that it sucks and then being able to move forward quickly. I find with a lot of my clients, sometimes they’ll They’ll try to trick themselves into thinking they’ve recovered, but really they haven’t processed the emotion that they needed to process yet. And so they keep pushing it down. And so it actually takes longer for them to recover. So there’s some nuances there. But with this, I was able to recover from that pretty quickly. And I’m pretty proud of myself because when things do happen, because, you know, let’s face it, we are alive. We do get punched in the face. Metaphorically, we get punched in the face. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been feeling like I’ve been punched in the face quite a lot lately. But it hasn’t been as big of a problem for me because I know how to recover quickly. I know how to bounce back quickly. Truly, like I will feel my feelings. I will cry. I will have pain and I will be like, I can do this pain. I can do this fear. And that will help me move through it so much faster and it will lift and it will become something I’m not afraid of anymore. And it’s really been a huge asset to have that skill, to feel your feelings. So anyways, getting back on track. So what we think the solution is, is to not make the mistakes in the first place, is to not have the things happen in the first place. Well, once we get past that and we’re like, yes, these things are gonna happen, there’s nothing that we can really do to prevent all of them, then we can decide the solution is actually how we’re gonna talk to ourselves after the things happen and how we’re gonna move through life knowing that these things are going to happen. So. It’s it’s the mindset of when that happens. If that happens, I’ll figure it out. Right. So when your brain wants to say, oh, what if you do this? What if this happens? What if you mess this up? What if, know, this bad thing happens? You can respond to your brain and say, yes. And if that does happen, I will figure it out. Like I have every other time in my life. And you can say, yeah. And if or when that happens, if it happens, because we can’t tell the future, we can’t predict it, then I will. I am willing to take the steps to figure it out as I always have, okay? So when we’re thinking like we’re trying to prevent things all the time, when we’re like, oh, we should try to not do that, we should make sure that this is in place, like we can do our preventative measures and there’s nothing wrong with that. Like if you’ve made a mistake and there’s an easy thing you can do to prevent it next time, absolutely do that. Great way to think. However, it’s when we get obsessive and we’re trying to obsessively try to put things in place to prevent things that haven’t happened. that sometimes that’s not the best use of our time, right? And then the result that it creates, it’s actually making us feel smaller, take on less, take less risks, do less things. Like for example, if you were going to go do a public speech, right? And you went up on stage and say you tripped, like say you tripped in front of everybody, you could then decide, oh my goodness, that was the worst thing ever. I am never doing that again. Or, And you would probably have to process some embarrassment. You’d probably have to process being publicly humiliated. You’d have to process that. And however you process that, there’s no right or wrong. I tend to cry a lot. I tend to process my feelings by crying a lot. But once you did, then you could start to form a story around it that makes you stronger, not hide like a turtle, right? Because there are people, there’s two types of people. The one type of person, they will make those situations, make them smaller. They will make it mean, I’m not supposed to be up on stage. I’m an idiot. I couldn’t wear the right shoes. I didn’t look for that thing that was gonna trip me. How could I not have been paying attention? I can’t go through that again. That was the worst thing ever. I’m not doing that again. I’m gonna stay small. I obviously wasn’t supposed to do it, right? So that’s an extreme. You could make it mean that. Or you could make it mean. I’m willing to feel any feeling. I can feel any feeling. I can feel being embarrassed. I can feel being humiliated. I can feel those things. And that’s not the end of the world for me because I know how to feel them. I can be good at feeling embarrassed. Like it’s not like I’m not afraid of feeling embarrassed. And then if that becomes your standard, then when you get invited to speak on an even bigger stage, then what might you say? Right. Are you going to say, no, I’m scared. I don’t want to. Or might you say I’m in this time. I’m to wear these shoes. I’m to watch where I’m going and I’m to go kick some butt. Right. You might say, I can’t believe this. I get to go speak on a bigger stage. And now that I’ve fallen, it can’t get any worse. I can’t do that again. Right. Like it’s and if I do it again, I know that I can live through it. I know that it’s not a big deal. I know that I didn’t die. Right. So it’s two different ways of looking at the situation. Right. And there are people I have met people who will make a bad outcome or an unfortunate incident mean that the whole rest of their life goes downhill. Now, I know that’s not you. I know you listening to the podcast, you might you might be pretty familiar with these two ways of thinking already. I don’t know. But I had one person, one person he he really wanted to work with me for years, and he just wouldn’t. He he couldn’t like he he was always he was signing up for calls with me and then not showing up. for like the consultations. Like this was literally 12 years ago. And he wrote he would write me very long emails in depth telling me about his layoff and how bad that had been for him. And just getting into the story about how like all the regret he had and what he should have done here. And for years he was living that. But he wouldn’t he wouldn’t get on a call to talk to me so I couldn’t help him. But I know that. For that reason, I know that there are people who will let their mind run away with that situation and make it mean that everything else in your life is gonna be smaller or less or downhill or get worse, right? Instead of making the things mean, making like the mistakes you make or the unfortunate incidents that happen, making those things mean you can handle anything. You’ve already been through that. You can handle embarrassment. You can handle stress. You can handle pressure. You can handle like… you are built to become stronger with those situations, that we have the tools and the capacity in our bodies and our brains to become stronger and to become better equipped and to become less afraid. We have all of that built in. It’s whether we choose to use it or not. when we choose to take the second path, where we choose to build the resilience and we choose to build ourselves into a stronger, more capable human who’s less afraid of feeling embarrassed. I mean, it’s not fun. We might not want to. We’re not gonna be like, oh yeah, we wanna go feel embarrassment. Although you know what? I got pretty good at feeling fear and if fear wants to come over, I’m okay with it. So maybe we can actually enjoy to feel embarrassed. I don’t know. But I know that I wanna… get really good at it because I know that my daughter is probably gonna have some embarrassing situations in her life and I want her to know that it’s okay, that she can feel embarrassed and she won’t die and that everything will be fine and that she will be stronger for it. So the results we create is we can either become smaller and become less likely to take the risks we need to or, you know, do take the difficult emotional steps to get to where we want to go. or we can make it bigger. We can make our lives bigger through these things that we do. Now, a good way to put it too is post-traumatic stress or post-traumatic growth. So post-traumatic stress means that you are scared, you’re freaking out, you’re afraid of it happening again, versus post-traumatic growth means you are actually glad it happened. So we can tell that it is post-traumatic. growth because you are actually glad that it happened. And you can say that. And I’ve listened to some crazy stories. One, for example, a woman was in an accident and became a quadriplegic and she did a bunch of great things with her life despite being a quadriplegic. And she can actually say, I’m glad that happened. Now, if that’s possible, we can we can do we can do smaller extremes of that. Right. And it’s mind blowing. And honestly, right now, I can’t say I’m glad I got the ticket for texting at a stoplight. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m sure that I will be like I know that I will get to that point where I can say I’m glad it happened right now. I’m not quite there. So you don’t want to force yourself there too soon because it’s disingenuous and you want to be you want to honor your feelings. Right. So I’m like. When I ask myself that question, I kind of have that realization in the moment. I’m like, oh, I guess I’m not fully over it yet. I’m not in the growth phase right now. I’m not glad it happened yet. anyways, the results that we create are gonna be, they’re gonna be dictated by one of the paths that we choose. So we either choose the path of, I’m gonna make this grow me. I’m gonna use this. Like whatever mistake I made, whatever unfortunate incident happened. where I may or may not have been a part of it, whatever, to contribute to it, I’m going to make this grow me, or I’m going to stress out and be anxious about it and be scared that it might happen to me again. Those are gonna create two very, very different behaviors for you and very different decisions in your life. I made a video on how you make decisions last week and talked about the guiding principles. So if one of your guiding principles is gonna be, opt for post-traumatic growth, How will I look at this so that this can grow me? Like what decision would I make if this had truly grown me as a person? Then that’s gonna be a guiding principle that will have you making very different decisions than if you had decided that you were going to made smaller by it. Like if you’re gonna choose the post-traumatic stress route and be scared that it’s ever, that it’s gonna happen again, then you might not want to put yourself in harm’s way again. You might not want. to take that risk, you might not take that opportunity because you’re afraid, right? And I see this with women all the time. A lot of women might have an embarrassing situation at work or they might have something, they might be given some feedback at work that really crushed them that they weren’t expecting, right? And what they do with that feedback, they make it mean, oh, I’m not capable, I can’t do that. I shouldn’t have been given that. I should have never asked for that. Like sometimes, I’ll have a client that will ask for a raise and they’ll get told no. And they make it mean that they shouldn’t have ever asked for it and they didn’t deserve it. And who were they to ask for it? Right. And so that is going to make them make decisions differently. They’re not going to they’re going to say, well, if your brain is telling you that you’re not going to go do it again. Right. And that’s one of the things that I think I really excelled at, which I thank my dad because he was the one who was like, go ask for that. Go ask for that. Like, I don’t want to. He’s like, I don’t care. Go ask for that. And so I did and it showed me what I could actually get. It showed me what was actually possible. And I thought, yeah, imagine if I didn’t ask. So if I get told no, I’m like, OK, I’m going to get curious and I’m to go back. I’m not going to question my worthiness or my value in the situation. Right. And that’s what I really want to get across is that you don’t have to. You don’t have to question your value or your worthiness. That is a message you received growing up that was just incorrect. Right. It’s. It’s not a factual truth that you don’t deserve the raise because somebody said no to you. It’s not true. OK, it’s just a decision that was made for you maybe in your childhood. Somebody told you, you know, oh, well, you better not bother them. You better not ask for stuff. Like, actually, my partner was was kind of raised like that because he was raised by his mom and his mom. His dad died when he was six years old. And so he didn’t have a dad telling him, you know, go ask for stuff. So he’s. quite often more like his mom. Like we’ll be sitting and I’ll be like, hey, think we should, I’m going to go ask if it’s our turn. Cause we’ve been here for a long time. Have you ever been in one of those situations where you’re sitting somewhere for a long, long, long time and maybe you see other people come in and then they get to go up first and you’re like, Hey, we were here first. We have our ticket. Like what’s going on? And I’ll be the person who’s like asking and he’s the person who’s like, no, no, no, just sit and wait, just sit and wait. No, no, no, just sit and wait. And I’m like, you know what? I’m sorry. I love you so much, but I’m not going to listen to you on this. I’m going to go ask. and I can’t tell you how many times asking was the right call. And even if we don’t get in any sooner, even though there was a reason why those people went in, I’m still happy to know. And I’m still happy that I’m the one who did go and ask because it satisfies my own curiosity. And it meant that I did everything I needed to do to get there. So that being said, you can use the situations in your life, you can use them for growth or you can use them to be stressed out about. So that’s the actual problem is not that we made a mistake. It is not that a bad thing happened. The actual problem is how we talk to ourselves and the decisions that we make afterwards. So when you make a mistake, who do you decide you want to be in that moment? Who do you want to decide you want to be moving forward? OK. And then the solution is after you make that very clear decision, then you make all your decisions based on that. If you say, OK, I’m a post dramatic growth person, I’m committing to have growth from my experiences, not stress, then these are the decisions that I would make in that situation. So for example, let’s use the public speaking example. If you go speak on a stage and you fall in front of everybody and then you decide I’m gonna make that a growth moment for me, I’m gonna make that post-traumatic growth, maybe not right away, because I understand I need to give myself some time to process those emotions, but when you know that you’re like, yeah, this is gonna make sense. in the end, I’m gonna know why that happened and I’m be able to come to the point where I say, I’m glad it happened. And you kind of know that you’re like, yeah, that’s just how I operate. That’s just who I am. Then that will be that that’s you telling your brain and giving your brain a much different message than allowing it to collapse under stress and and pressure and be like, I can’t handle that. That’s just not gonna work for me. I guess I wasn’t supposed to do it. Like, that’s just not gonna work. And then if you’re offered another speaking spot, then you would probably say, like, you may even manifest some random thing in your life that means you can’t do it, right? And I don’t know, I think maybe this happened to me. A while ago, I was offered a spot on the news, like I was offered to come on a show on the news and I was excited about it, but then I broke my ankle. And it was broken in two places. This was several years ago and I didn’t tell anybody about it publicly. I don’t think my family knew about it, but I broke my ankle and it was broken two places. I couldn’t walk. I was going to be out of commission for six months. Like, I don’t know, six months, but I couldn’t I couldn’t I wasn’t going to be falling back to normal. And so I couldn’t go. I couldn’t go on the on the show. And I don’t know. I’m like, maybe I was protecting myself somehow from that. And I created that situation. But anyways. It’s probably not helpful to think that. But anyways, you can do that kind of thing. I’ve seen people do that where and I can see a pattern when sometimes it happens repeatedly. Like if you are creating a situation over and over where you just can’t, you know, go do the thing you thought you really wanted to do. But anyway, you can make these decisions, right? You can make these decisions and you can have the control and the power over what you actually want to create. And it’s really not about the one time. It’s about the over and over. So the more times you talk to yourself, like even just in everyday moments in your life. So if you have like an everyday moment where you drop your keys and you say, see, I know I’m so clumsy. Like, how could I like, oh, I’m always dropping things, right? That is you telling your brain something about who you are when you don’t have to. That could just as easily be like, oh, I just drop my keys, whatever like could happen to anybody. Like you might not even have a. thought about it, right? If you didn’t believe you were a clumsy person or you didn’t tell yourself that, but if you tell yourself repeatedly, oh, I’m so clumsy, then you’re gonna start being more clumsy and showing yourself more evidence of it, right? Yeah, like that happens. It is as simple as that. Words are spells. That’s why they call it spelling. Get it? So the alternative solution and the solution that I recommend is you decide ahead of time, I am somebody. who uses my life experiences, whatever they may be, for post-traumatic growth. I am the person who will eventually, not right away, get to the point where I am glad that these things have happened to me because they have been part of my journey and they have been part of what I needed to evolve into the person that I’m meant to be. And when I choose that path, I know that I make better decisions, I make decisions aligned with who I wanna be, I don’t keep myself small. and I take the opportunities that I’m meant to take even when they are scary, even when they challenge me, even when they’re uncomfortable, and especially when they will push me out of my comfort zone, especially when there’s something that freaked me out, right? Because I want to be grown that way, right? And anybody listening to this podcast is probably gonna resonate with that. But again, I always tell that story of the guy I used to work with who was at the grocery store and still works there for however many years that is. I started there working when I was 15, I’m 42, he still works there. If you choose a life of no stress, you can choose that, but it’s just gonna be very different. And you won’t have to learn any of these tools, right? Like Bill doesn’t have to learn what to do when he makes a mistake, because he probably hasn’t made a mistake in years, and he probably doesn’t even have to worry about that happening. Right. It’s like, oh, he dropped some milk. Maybe that he’s probably made all the same mistakes and he probably already knows exactly what to do and what to think when a mistake he’s already made or, you know, an event happens. I’m sure that that kind of life is going to have some patterns. Right. They’re all going to be the same and they’re all going to be very expected. Right. Everything is going to be very much like the day it was yesterday. Like we’re told we have a lot of thoughts in our head. Seventy thousand thoughts a day or sixty thousand thoughts a day or whatever it is. And a lot of them are the same ones you thought yesterday. So that’s why I’m constantly listening to new podcasts, finding new opportunities to learn new things. Yesterday, I went to a TEDx conference. I’m looking for ways to get some different ideas in my head, be pushed, get some different perspectives, because I don’t want to be thinking the same thoughts that I was thinking yesterday, unless they’re really helpful and they’re really good. One thought I’ve been thinking these days that’s really helpful is my body is a well-oiled machine. It functions really well. And I like that thought. So I’m happy to keep that one for as long as it serves me. But you don’t want to be thinking the same thoughts every day that are keeping you in the same place where you are. So if you’re seeing the same results every day, you’re going to see you’re probably thinking the same thoughts every day. Right. So this thought, my body’s a well-oiled machine has actually got me to go sign up for some outdoor classes, which I wasn’t doing before because I was working out in my basement, which was also really good. But I liked. the thought of going out and being pushed farther than I’d been pushing myself in my own basement. Because I realized I’m like, yeah, I’m pushing myself. I’ve bought some heavier weights, but I really want like a bit of more of a push. So that’s really inspired me to do that, which is fun. So the alternative solution is to decide you’re going to become someone who gains post-traumatic growth from your mistakes. And why that works so much better is because you will make decisions. from a place of courage, not from a place of fear. You’ll make decisions from the place that allows you to evolve, not from the place of I’m scared and I wanna avoid anything bad happening. I wanna avoid the chances I make any mistakes because that’s what we would be doing. We would just be making decisions to avoid emotions, avoid emotions we don’t wanna feel. So if you’ll do anything to avoid fear, if you’ll do anything to avoid embarrassment, if you’ll do anything to avoid rejection, disappointment. whatever the feeling is that you want to avoid, the things that you do, your decisions will then be made to avoid those feelings versus if you’re like, I’m not afraid, I’ll feel embarrassed, I’ll feel disappointed, I’ll feel fearful, I’ll feel scarcity, I’ll feel whatever it is I need to feel. I’m not afraid to feel those feelings. Then you will make different decisions and your life will open up because you won’t be scared of feeling those feelings, right? And that creates a bigger, more extraordinary life. It just does. And over time, the more you make courageous decisions, I’m not saying like reckless decisions. I’m not saying you don’t do your due diligence or you don’t do research or you don’t do, you know, what you feel intuitively you need to do, but you make decisions that grow you because you’re not afraid to experience those emotions. All right, that’s what I have for you today. So I’m doing the podcast and the YouTube on the same topic, but I’m just talking about it a little differently because I found it too difficult to try to do both as the same piece of content. So this might be a little in depth, a little more in depth here on the podcast, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit longer and a little bit different. So I might tell a few different stories here on the podcast than I did in the YouTube video. Some of it might be the same if I thought one example was particularly good. If you want to watch on YouTube, I do use some dinosaur props from my daughter’s toys to describe my point on YouTube. So that was kind of fun this week. But you are welcome to tune into both if you’d like. And thank you so much for being here. I love you all for having having the attention span to listen to a 30 minute podcast, because attention these days is a hard thing to get. So I appreciate you being here and listening to me. And thank you so much. I’ll see you next week.

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