We make mistakes all day. That’s a part of the job. That’s why we’re so big on testing. I once had a manager tell me, “I don’t care if you make mistakes. Just don’t make the same one twice!” Sadly, I repeated many, many mistakes. But there is a way to condition yourself to automatically undo a mistake once you’ve noticed it.
Our brains are amazing, and there are some things we can do to maximize how we use them. For instance, in an earlier article I mentioned how our brains can’t picture a negative, so we need to focus on the positive – otherwise, we’ll just get the negative that we imagined. Similarly, our brains can’t tell the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined one. This is why there is a lot of debate about the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
We can use this tendency to our advantage by “erasing” the mistake! Similar to rubbing out a mistaken pencil mark with an eraser, we just go through the following steps after we catch ourselves making a mistake:
- Do the correct thing
- Do it the wrong way again
- Do it the right way again
We make the first mistake without thinking about it. But then we think about the right way, and do that. Then we think about the wrong way – which steps took us in the wrong direction – and by doing the right steps again we effectively replace, in our minds, the original incorrect pattern.
Now this isn’t foolproof. You may make the same mistake again, but if you follow this pattern it’s much less likely, as you will have programmed your mind to start naturally approaching the problem the right way – overwriting the wrong way!
It’s so simple, but so powerful!
What’s a mistake you made today that you could “overwrite” with the right way to do things?