Mistakes Can Become Miracles
SUMMARY
We've all heard that one man's trash is another man's treasure. Well, in this week's episode, I want to show you that you can take your mistakes and you can turn them into miracles as a coach.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year and Master Coach Trainer, and today I want to continue our conversation around becoming a coach by speaking about looking at your mistakes and what you can do to capture them and then put them in a frame where they can be taught to others so that we help them along the way and get those miracles as we coach them.
The first element of this process is to reconcile.
The second thing to do, now that we've got those down, is to recognise what learnings, what feedback came from those mistakes.
And the third thing that we want to do is learn to reframe.
Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around becoming a coach by taking a look at why the time has never been better than right now for you to take that step and become a coach. I'll see you then.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
We've all heard that one man's trash is another man's treasure. Well, in this week's episode, I want to show you that you can take your mistakes and you can turn them into miracles as a coach.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year and Master Coach Trainer, and today I want to continue our conversation around all things becoming a coach by speaking about looking at your mistakes in a different way so that you can then encourage others with the lessons that you've learned and they become miracles for them.
I know that I've made many mistakes in my life and I continue to make mistakes, and I'll tell you why: If you pinch me, it hurts. I'm a human being just like you. So, as we've already talked about, being perfect is never going to be the goal. It's not about just because you're becoming a coach that all of a sudden you need to have everything altogether, because that's never going to happen. Life is a continual journey of experience where sometimes things go the way we want them to go and other times they don’t.
It's the way that we look at those times when they don't go right that either help us or hinder us. There's a principle that I learned in coaching years ago that it says, "There's no such thing as failure. There's only feedback." And that's a perfect way of looking at the mistakes that we've been through so that we can then mine the gold out of those mistakes to help others and therefore help them to get the miracle that they need right now. We talked last week about sharing your story, your journey, your life experiences. And what we're going to do today is we're going to look at three things that we can then do to capture those mistakes, and then put them in a frame where they can be taught to others so that we help them along the way and get those miracles as we coach them.
The first element of this process is to reconcile. Now, I know, just like me, you've probably got many mistakes that keep popping up, that you keep remembering without any problem. And in fact, you've probably got some people in your life that if you tend to forget the mistakes, they'll remind you. The challenge with that is what happens when we relive that mistake. What happens in our internal dialogue when we go through or when we remember that mistake? Does it erode our identity by making us feel worse about ourselves? And that's what I find is the biggest challenge. So when we reconcile these mistakes, what we need to do is shift from the emotional brain, which talks about," Oh, why did that go on? Why did that happen? Why did I do that?", which goes into that internal downward spiraling dialogue, to what actually happened and using our logical brain, the neocortex, the prefrontal cortex, and looking at it as an audit process where we're just looking for information. We're not going through the whole story.
So when we reconcile using the logical part of our brain, we'll be able to write down things that we did that got the reward, got the success that we wanted, got the result we wanted, and things that we've done that didn't quite hit the mark that actually held us back from getting the result that we wanted. However, because we're staying in the logical brain and we're asking ourselves "what" questions and we're writing those down, it's not going to get hijacked into this "woe is me" feeling that we allow ourselves to fall into when we get into the emotion of it. So to do this, we need to get our mini-me under control. We need to make sure that it's the big version of us stepping up to do this reconciliation. So for example, you might have, like me, had some challenges in particular relationships in your life. So, you might then look at that particular thing, that experience, that moment in time that happened and jot down the things that went right and the things that didn't go so right and actually caused the relationship to break down. We then have two sides of the equation. We've got the positive side and the negative side, but we've done it in a way that's just got the data. So, that's the first step is to reconcile from our logical brain.
The second thing to do, now that we've got those down, is to recognise what learnings, what feedback came from those mistakes. And when we grabbed those things, what we're going be able to do then is we're going to be able to look at situations where, in the people that we're coaching, we could then offer from our experience with their permission some of the things that we've gone through over my many years of coaching. I've had numerous opportunities to speak into the lives of men who, like me, were going through some challenges in their relationship or going through some challenges in their life and people skills to be able to get their permission and say, "Would you like me to give you a little bit of an understanding of how I navigated that or how that transpired in my life? Because right now I can see that if you were to continue down that path, you're going to have the result that is not the one you want." By going through that experience, those mistakes that I've made, I've got this pot of gold over here that I can give out to my clients to help them to get a different result than I did. So, the second thing we want to do is recognise within those stories, those mistakes, what could be helpful for other people as well.
And the third thing that we want to do is learn to reframe. You might have seen an old painting or an old picture on a wall in an old building and it's got this beautiful picture in the middle, but the frame that's around it is all tattered and broken and it detracts from the look of the image. That's what happens as well when we put our mistakes in a frame and the frame is all tattered, and it's not conducive to us moving forward by making that mistake. So by taking the frame that we had, the one that said, "Oh, I make this mistake all the time. I make too many mistakes", et cetera, that then lowers our self-worth because it erodes our identity. We can put a new frame around it, and this is where we turn a mistake into a miracle. In fact, as I'm thinking through this right now, there are many things that I thought were mistakes that actually were miracles for my own life because they took me down a new path, which was the path that I really needed to go on.
How do we do this reframing? So, what we do, the first thing is we take the old way of looking at it, the old meaning that we put on that mistake, and we flip it so that it's then looked at in a positive light. So, I went through the mistake. "This is what happened to me" is where we might normally be, no, we're going to go, "This is what I learned from it. This is where it took me because of that learning. This is the result that I now have because I went through that mistake." So, what we've done now is we've taken that mistake and we've put a new frame around it. We've got rid of the old tattered and torn and broken one. The one that was just helping us to feel bad about ourselves and continue on our pity party. And we now have this brilliant frame that is all nice and shiny and new around that mistake. We can now present, not just to others, but to ourselves as a miracle. So, the third area that I want you to work on here is to reframe those mistakes.
What is it that you keep beating yourself up about? What is it that you can continue to have in that internal dialogue? That reminder? What is it that you've put a meaning on, as in a mistake that you made somewhere in your life, which is holding you back from moving forward in your own life and from sharing what it is that you've gone through as a coach?
Yes, one man's trash is another man's treasure and your mistakes can be someone else's miracle.
Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around becoming a coach by taking a look at why the time has never been better than right now for you to take that step and become a coach. I'll see you then.
