Some people say they never make the same mistake twice. I’m more like the other people who make the same mistake over and over and over. But as the saying goes, the second time is not a mistake, it’s a choice.
Take my specs (someone did). I have reading glasses, computer glasses, TV glasses, driving glasses – and vari-focals for all of the above! This week I lost not one but two pairs of computer glasses. That’s the 3rd pair I’ve lost this year, totalling about £350,
I can’t work without my glasses, they are essential to me as a trainer and writer and I hate throwing good money after bad. So finally I decided to act. I went to town, to the pound shop and bought 2 pairs of reserve specs and a ‘necklace’ to keep them round my neck (total cost £3). Because I was cross with myself just enough to step back and figure out what happens…. I’m constantly putting my computer specs on and off, so I shove them on my head out of the way. That over-handling not only gets them mucky but and loosens the arms and they fall off – often when climbing into my van.
I wrote a blog last year on LinkedIn about keeping it simple, about how we over complicate things and how that stops us acting. In the case of my glasses, I was stuck thinking I would be spending the rest of my life losing my specs and it was going to cost me a fortune. I was fed up, frustrated, but not able to see (ha ha) the very simple solution.
Lots of things stop us making changes, fear that it will be too costly (without checking), fear of change and general I’m too busyness.
But it’s all just avoidance, hoping something else will change, maybe my specs will just stop falling off my head, maybe we will just stop sabotaging our sales, maybe the perfect marketing plan will appear with your butties. Maybe that member of staff will come to work one day a changed person.
We may get cross with ourselves, we may get frustrated, we may blame others, but at the end of the day we won’t make that change until we are ready, until it becomes important enough to us to matter.
I have people who dance around the idea of working with me, they email me and call me and 6 months later call me again. They might even get an invoice and back out again at that point. Some people see those people as time wasters, but I’m clear they are simply not ready to make new choices and when they are, they will come back.
Because the truth is we keep making the same mistakes until we are ready to stop.
But do you know what, invariably the response is,
why didn’t I do this ages ago?
Which is exactly what I wrote on Facebook about my specs! Because when we take the step to act we see how simple it was all along, how it wasn’t as scary or as massive as we thought it would be.
There’s actually a really spooky ending to this story…. I bought my specs necklace on Saturday and on Sunday morning my lost computer specs were on the floor next to my bed. And I know they were not there the night before!
In our house we have a ghost who helps me along in ways that I don’t always immediately recognise to helpful! If you don’t have a helpful ghost and would like to chat about the mistakes/choices you keep making, drop me an email at jane@janebinnion.com and let’s see what we can do.
Over to you… what simple change did you bring about that stopped you making the same mistake again? Leave me a comment below or a reply on social media.