We all make mistakes but some of us getting stuck in them, beating ourselves up and often repeating them. In this episode, we consider how you can instead approach past mistakes with compassion and curiousity, so that we can learn from them with less judgment. So, whatever your past mistakes, this is the episode for you!
In this episode I talk about a piece of work by Pragya Agarwal, the author of Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias. You can find the article here in The Conversation. I also talk about a film and it DID star Gwyneth Paltrow after all! Details here if you want to check it out!
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 28 of the PhD Life Coach. Now, do you have decisions from your past that you look back and question whether you did the right thing? Should you have started this PhD in the first place? Should you have got going on something sooner? Should you have left that person, not left that person?
Whatever it might be, I want you to have a think about a decision from your past that you maybe consider a mistake, because one of the things I've been seeing a lot recently with my clients is this problem of looking back in time and beating ourselves up about past decisions. Sort of spending a lot of time now ruminating on what we should have done differently and how much better things would be if we just made a different decision.
I just see that causing a lot of problems for my clients. So firstly, it's not a fun experience to spend time thinking about something you've essentially got no control over now at all, and saying lots of horrible things to yourself while you do it. That you “should have known better”. You “should have been braver”, you “should have been less reckless,” whatever it is, you know, it could go both ways. Berating yourself for having done it, berating yourself for having not done it.
So it's not fun in the here and now. It also means that we don't learn from these mistakes because when we make - if they were mistakes, indeed - because when we make these decisions in the past and then we turn them into these massive mistakes, things we regret and we start attaching a whole bunch of meaning to that. We start attaching a whole bunch of emotions to that. Then we don't really want to spend time analysing it, do we? We don't really want to spend time thinking about it. We kind of want to stick our head in the sand, pretend it didn't happen.
Or when we do think about it, thinking about it in a kind of more compulsive like, can't really help it, thinking about it kind of a way. And I had already planned this topic for this podcast, a little while ago, but I read a really interesting article earlier from Pragya Agarwal in The Conversation. So she's an academic at Loughborough, I think it is. She wrote a book called Sway, which is about unravelling unconscious bias. And she was talking about why we don't learn from our mistakes from a psychotic cognitive psychology perspective.
And one of the things that she talks about in that is how it's cognitively much easier to do the same things we always do. It's habitual. We don't have to think as much. We don't have to overcome emotions. We don't have to change our thoughts. Even when it's things that we maybe regret having done in the past, it's much easier to just keep doing them now.
I'm not going to revisit everything in that article, but I really, I strongly recommend you have a look at it. I will link to it in the show notes. There's some really interesting stuff there, referring out to various different psychological, um, studies. It really emphasized this idea that I already had, that we don't learn from our mistakes when we make them this big, painful, horrible thing.
And the third thing, which is something I'm really seeing with my clients at the moment, is that if we beat ourselves up now about past decisions, it makes it incredibly hard to make decisions now. Because if you think about it, current Vikki, for example, is beating up past Vikki for having made a stupid mistake or having done something that turned out not to be the best thing to do.
Now when current Vikki is now trying to make a decision, she's trying to choose whether to do this or do that, whether to do it or not do it, she knows based on current experience that future Vikki is gonna beat her up. Future Vikki is going to be like, “you should have thought this through more” or “you should have just been braver and gone for it”.
Knowing that you don't have your own back when it comes to your decision making makes it so much harder to make decisions now. And that's why I decided to do this episode, to think about how can we change that? How can we make it so that it's okay to learn from decisions we made in the past?
How we can stop ruminating on it, stop beating ourselves up about it, actually just learn from it and move on. And how we can use that to make it easier to make decisions.
So how do we do it? Well, first of all, we remind ourselves of our two favourite qualities that if you've listened to my podcast before, you all know compassion and curiosity.
We are going to address all of this from a place of compassion and curiosity. This is not about beating ourselves up. This is not about attributing blame. This is not about really understanding, you know, why we were so stupid as to make this decision. It's looking back with love on our past self and going, “oh, why did we do that?”
It's okay that we did it, but let's try and understand it. Okay, so we are gonna be channeling compassion and curiosity all the way through this, and as usual, I've got some steps for you to go through.
And the first one is avoiding generalizing. So one of the most common things we see when people think about a mistake they've made in the past is that they generalize that mistake to mean something about them as a person and something about them as a kind of habit, an ongoing way of being.
So instead of being, “oh, I think I rushed into it a bit that time”, it becomes “I always rush into things. I'm someone who just doesn't think things through. I'm stupid. People have always told me that”. You make it mean that you are not brave. I'm just not a brave person.
I was coaching somebody this week who was talking about, “I'm just not a resilient person. That's just not who I am”. We look back at times where we've struggled in the past and generalize it to mean something, and the problem is with that, our brain loves patterns. So as soon as you start to generalize, you start to think, oh, you know, maybe I am just someone who rushes into things, or maybe I am someone who's not resilient.
Maybe I am someone who can't take the brave decisions, then you start to remember all the other times when you've done that too and you start to forget all the times that you were brave and forget all the times that you were resilient. Because that's the other thing, because we spend so much time thinking about our mistakes, or lots of us do anyway, we're also usually spending much less time thinking about our successes.
So our mistakes are much more present in our brain because we rehearse them so much more than our successes. So the first tip really, really be careful not to generalize any one decision that you made that maybe didn't turn out the way you wanted to mean anything about you and to mean anything about your sort of general tendencies. That's the first one.
Number two is to decide that you made the best decision that you could make at the time, regardless of what the decision was. Even if now you look back and you're like, what was I thinking? What were I doing? You need to decide now that that was the best decision that you were capable of making at the time.
And that might sound weird because you might be looking back and objectively it really wasn't. I really should have thought that through more or I really should have known to leave or whatever it was. But that was the decision you made. And so there's a lot of power in just deciding that it was the best decision you could have made.
Because what else do you do? Let's work out what happens. Okay? Let's think. Yeah, that was a stupid decision. I made a stupid decision. Now when we think the thought I made a stupid decision, what emotions do you feel? For me, things start to come up, like shame or embarrassment or disappointment in yourself.
These sorts of emotions that firstly aren't that pleasant. And secondly, we know they don't lead to actions that are, make us more likely to be successful and do different in the first place. In fact, it's often all these emotions that we have around this decision that we made that prevent us from analysing it and learning from it.
If you feel shame when you think about a decision you made in the past, you're probably not going to sort of sit and go, oh, I wonder how I could avoid that in the future. You're going to avoid thinking about it other than in the depths of the night when it just appears in your head uninvited.
By believing it was a terrible mistake and you should have done something different, generates all these emotions that are just not particularly helpful. We can say “it was the best decision I knew how to make”, then we can reach something around acceptance. I'm not asking you to be proud of those mistakes. I'm not asking you to be super happy I made these mistakes.
I'm just asking you to say, you know what? I made the best decisions I could at the time, and I accept that - I have an emotion of acceptance. Now, really importantly, this doesn't mean you can't learn from it in the future, and it doesn't mean that you wouldn't do it differently if you have that opportunity again in the future.
Sometimes people think if we think, oh, that was, you know, that decision was absolutely fine, no problem. Um, that we’ll never change because we're essentially accepting all these flawed decisions. That's not the point here at all. We can simultaneously believe we made the best decision that we were capable of at the time, and that we will do it differently in the future.
And in fact, having these more compassionate and curious thoughts make it much more likely that we can learn from it in the future and I'm going talk about that in a second.
The other thing, and this starts getting a little bit Sliding Doors, I don't know, you guys might not - some of the PhD students might be too young to remember this film, but when I was growing up, there was a film called Sliding Doors.
Was it Gwyneth Paltrow? It might not have been. I'm really bad at knowing who was in films. It was someone blonde. Anyway, she was in a film where it was all about a moment on a tube, on the underground in London. And in one version of the timeline, she just got through the sliding doors as they shut. And that shot her off into one timeline where she met someone and I can't remember exactly what happened. And then in the other timeline, she just didn't make the doors and they shut in front of her and the train went off without her and so her life went in a different direction.
I can't actually remember the outcome of the film because I'm not good at remembering films either, but I remember that concept that just that either you make the train or you don't, can send your life in totally different paths. So the other thing I want to offer is that you don't know what negative consequences there could have been if you'd made a different decision. You know the negative consequences that you experienced because of this decision.
Maybe there could have been completely different negative consequences if you had taken the other decision. And because there's an infinite possibilities because we never know what those might be, we tend not to think about them. We tend not to think of all the things that could have gone wrong if we'd taken different decisions.
We just know the ones that happened because I did this thing, and we tend to remember and believe, “oh, but if I'd done this thing, it would all be great.” Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would've been terrible. Maybe all sorts of awful things could have happened because you took a different decision.
So my recommendation would be to tell yourself that you made the best decision you could at the time, and then all of those other things fall away.
Then what do we do from this place of compassion and curiosity and now acceptance? The next step is asking yourself, can I make this the best decision I've ever made? So we've told ourselves it's the best decision we could have made at the time, but what we often don't do is try and prove it to be the right decision. In fact, sometimes the opposite happens once we start to have concerns about, you know, “Ooh, should I have started my PhD” for example?
Maybe that was the wrong decision. Maybe I wasn't ready. Maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe I shouldn't be here. Maybe I should have taken that other job. Maybe I should have done something different. As soon as we start to have those thoughts and we have doubt, what happens is we start to withdraw from the thing.
So say you're doing your PhD and you're starting to have doubts that it was the right decision for you. What happens without really making a proper decision about whether you are staying or going, just having these doubts, you avoid making the actual decision because you're feeling doubtful and shame and all these horri emotions, but you also start to withdraw a bit from the PhD itself.
That's what tends to happen. So once you start having doubts, you start doing a bit less work. You start engaging less in the community activities in your school or department. You go onto campus less often. You avoid talking to your supervisor. You start to withdraw a little bit. And so what you start to do is by telling yourself this might not have been the right decision, you make it not a good decision because you start to withdraw it and start to not do all the things that you need to do in order to make it a success.
So my third tip for you is really challenge yourself to think, is there a way I could make this the right decision? So even if at the moment it feels like it wasn't a good decision, can I make it a good decision?
Can I try and get out of it as much as I can get. So here's an example for you. I've talked before about planners and, in fact my second ever podcast episode is about why you don't need another planner. I released that in late October.
I stand by everything that's in it, yet in January, I still bought myself a new planner, and you may remember there is also a podcast episode where I talked about how I'm using that planner to record the things I've done and the things that I'm proud of, and how well that system is working. And it was for a while.
Currently not working. My planner is, those of you on YouTube can see, my beautiful planner, so gorgeous. Look, look at all of this. Gorgeous, that's January, uh, into February.
Yeah, this is March. Not so much. So I could very easily tell myself that it was a bad mistake by my planner. Now it wasn't a big mistake. I spent like 20 quid on it or something. I can afford to spend 20 quid on a planner I don't use. But in the past I have beat it, beaten myself up about decisions like, oh, you've wasted money on a planner again.
Oh, you didn't stick to it again, did you? Now I can decide now that it was a great decision that I had a lovely six weeks or so where I was using it and I really enjoyed it and it was worth the money. So it was a great decision from that point of view, but I could also choose to go back to it and say, you know what, I can make it the right decision. Maybe I haven't used it for most of March and April, but it's only April. Imagine if I used it now for another month. I'm not even going to… I nearly said for the rest of the year, who am I kidding? I'm probably not going to do it for the rest of the year, but maybe I could say, you know what?
I'm goin to get some use out of it over the next few weeks. I'm going to make it the right decision to have bought this because I'm going to have some more fun with it this month. I can make it the right decision. So that's the third thing to do, is to really think about, are there ways that you can make this the right decision?
Now, one thing to be cautious of. Sometimes you need to spend a little bit of time, when it's a more important decision than whether you bought planner or not. Whether it's maybe your brain is offering that you shouldn't have started your PhD. Maybe spending a little bit of time analysing whether that's true is important because part of this process of making sure that you make it the right decision doesn't mean keep flogging something that you don't want to do anymore.
So what I have also seen with some of my clients is them putting pressure on themselves now to do something in order to prove a past decision right? I need to get this to happen because otherwise it means that I shouldn't have started. If I don't finish, it means I shouldn't have started, for example.
And I just want to emphasize that I'm not saying that in order to make the decision to start a PhD, for example, right, you have to lean in and finish it. Sometimes leaning in could be deciding that you don't want to finish it, and that you're going to get out of it what you came for in terms of some experience, and then you're going to leave.
That can also be the decision. Sometimes we clinging to decisions we've made. It's called sunken cost fallacy, where we've put in this much time so far, so we've got to finish it. We've put in this much money, so we've got to follow through. Sometimes goal disengagement, so moving away from goals and goal re-engagement into something else can also be super important.
It can really help with motivation.
So overall though, you can think about how you can make that past decision the right decision for you.
The fourth thing is a bit of a process. It's not just a a one-off. But the fourth thing is now that we are in a place, hopefully, where we are feeling compassionate and curious, and we are feeling more accepting that we did the best we could at the time. We love Past Us, we're going to bring love and understanding to our relationship with Past Us.
We can now step into analysing that situation. And the reason this is important is because what people usually do is they say, oh, I'll just choose the other thing next time. So when I was an academic, I was an academic for a really long time. I was teaching for like 20 years. And one of the things I always saw with my students, would wait until the last minute to get their coursework done, handing things in, and then when I talk to them afterwards, they'd be like, oh my God, that was so stressful. I'm so frustrated with myself. What an idiot can't believe I left it to the last minute. Again, I always leave things to the last minute. So remember generalizing all of that stuff, I shouldn't have been so stupid. Um, so judging past self, um, next time I'm doing to start earlier, next time it'll be different.
And what they rarely did was spend time analysing why they did what they did last time. They were just absolutely convinced that past them were stupid, made a bad mistake, feel embarrassed, feel shame about it. But future them is going to make the right decision. It's going to start it early. And they don't want to spend too much time analysing it, because frankly, they feel a bit shame and embarrassment over here and they have absolute fate.
It'll be fine. Next time I'll do it. I'll start earlier. Next time I'll remember it's important. And the fact is you see these students go through these cycles and they do the same thing every time. Because they haven't really addressed what the issue was. They haven't really figured out why they did what they did last time because Past You wasn't an idiot, Past You was trying to do their best.
Whatever decision they made, they thought it was for the best at the time, one way or another. And so, when we sort of relegate Past Us to, well, they were stupid, but I won't be next time, we sort of miss out all the nuanced understanding of the barriers that we were facing at the time.
So when we analyse this from a place of curiosity, from a place of compassion, and from the starting ground, that we probably weren't an idiot in the past.
So why did we do this thing? Suddenly it becomes so much more informative. So what you could ask yourself is, why did you choose this, last time? So if it now feels like it was a mistake, why did you pick it? So for example, why did you leave it to the last minute last time? What happened? Did you underestimate how long it would take?
Did you overschedule yourself so you forgot to leave space or didn't think about leaving space for yourself to do it? Did you find it uncomfortable doing it and so you tried to avoid it for as long as possible? Did you not keep track of your deadline so you didn't know that you had some clashing things and so you didn't plan for it accordingly?
Did you get distracted by friends or social media or games or whatever it is? Why didn't you choose this option ie starting it earlier last time? You were probably about as sensible then as you are now. So why didn't you? Let's ask ourselves that question honestly.
Second question you can ask when you're analysing this is what options did you reasonably have? So again, we say these like I should have started earlier. Okay. When could you have started? And how could you have known that? So when did you have all the information from your tutors? When did you have time to put aside for it? How many options did you actually have? And sometimes you might go, you know what?
I could have started it like two months before this deadline. I really could have done. Other times you’d be like, Yeah, actually we didn't have the final instructions until like three weeks to go, and I had that other piece of work and I was working 30 hours a week. So you know what? I probably couldn't have started it much earlier.
Maybe a little bit, but not much earlier. So you start to analyse what other options you reasonably had. So same thing if you're regretting starting your PhD, for example, at the point you decided to start your PhD, what other options did you have? What were you choosing between? Let's really understand that context in which you made this decision.
And then what I want you to do is put yourself back in the position of Past You and say, why didn't I choose those? So I had the option to start this a month before the deadline. Why didn't I? What happened? So not just why did you choose the option you chose, but why didn't you choose the other options?
So we're really looking at this from every angle. We're trying to understand why ourselves, who we know to be a good person, and we're really building that belief, why didn't we choose the other options? Why didn't we choose to do the other thing you could have done instead of starting your PhD? Why not?
Then we get to look at all of that and we get to decide what do we want to learn from this? And sometimes that all can help us just build compassion. And go, you know what? Actually I'm not surprised I didn't start it sooner because I had a bunch of other stuff on, and looking back, given the situation I was in, I probably muddled through about as well as I could have done.
And so in that situation, you might want to learn, okay, my mistake wasn't leaving it to the last minute. My mistake was not checking my calendar when I also signed up to do that concert and that match and that whatever other commitments you have without checking how that lined up with my academic work.
So actually my mistake wasn't just being lazy and stupid, and leaving it till the last minute. My mistake was not double checking my schedule and thinking that all through. That's the bit I want to learn from it. Next time, I need to be looking further ahead so that I can try and avoid getting in that position.
Or maybe you want to learn from it that actually when you sat down and got on with it, you quite enjoyed it. And that actually you need to figure out a way to remind yourself that when you work on this, you quite like it. And so this notion that you are avoiding something that's uncomfortable isn't actually true and maybe that's the bit you need to learn.
Maybe looking back, the moment at which you got on with it was the moment at which you finally plucked up the courage to ask your supervisor's advice, and then you knew exactly what you were doing and you could get going, and that was the reason that you were late to the deadline, was because it took you ages and ages to feel confident enough to ask for help.
So we get to figure out what were the things last time and therefore what do we want to learn if we find ourselves in this position in the future.
And all the way through this, we're going to be really kind to ourselves because we can make mistakes and still be good people. We can make mistakes and still be humans, still be competent, still be skilled, still be worthy, still deserve to be here, and all of these things. In fact, we all make mistakes.
One of my favourite things to do is to Google like CVs of mistakes and things like that. There are lots of wonderful academics, who have published all the things that have gone wrong for them. CV of failures is the other phrase that you will hear, and we do all make mistakes. And so when we think about them in this way, we get to analyse them as lessons rather than as marker that we are inherently unworthy in some way.
But we haven't finished because we can decide what we want to do in the future, but we all know that behaviour change isn't straightforward. We all know there are various things that we've intended to do that we haven't ended up doing. So the final step that I want you to take is If you want to do something differently next time, how are you going to make that more likely to happen?
How are you going to make it more likely that you will start the piece of work earlier so you don't leave it to the last minute this time? How will you make it more likely that you'll be brave enough to take on a new opportunity next time if you are regretting having not done so before? How are you making it more likely that you won't overcommit next time.
Now, part of it comes through this understanding, but part of it needs much more systematic planning than that. So have a think. How can you make this easier to make the right decision? Do you need a wall calender? Do you need a planner? Maybe you need a planner. Do you need a wall calendar that makes it easier for you to see where you've got competing demands?
Do you need to always take a pause before you agree to something? If you are somebody who has jumped into too many things and that's what you regret is that you took on too much stuff, do you need to build in an automatic pause?
I've worked with a client recently about having a stock phrase of, “thank you for that opportunity. I'm going to take some time to think it through”. Whenever anybody suggests that you collaborate together or that you could teach on their module or whatever, having that sort of stock response, so you never say yes or no immediately, you always take time to think.
How can you build in that there's always somebody who believes in you that you could go to. So if you know you are somebody who tends to find it difficult to put yourself forward for things or that you feel like you're not ready to, and then you regret afterwards that you didn't do it, maybe you put in place that I always talk to this person because they believe in me and I can borrow their belief for a while and encourage myself to do it by surrounding myself with people that cheer me on. So we can start thinking about things like that. How can we make it more likely that we'll do it?
Within all of that, how can we make it easier? How can we make it more fun? So to make the decisions that we now want to make, how can we make that easier and more fun?
And before we leave this, I want you also to look back with gratitude to your past self because, because you made the decision that you made and you experienced the consequences that you experienced, you are now learning this lesson now. And so while it might feel really tough and it might feel like you wish you hadn't had to have this experience, it's because past you took that decision that you are now having the self-development that you are having now.
And so we can even look back with a little bit of gratitude that we are now getting to learn what we do want in the future, partly on the basis of experiencing some of the things that we don't want.
You might be thinking, this sounds like it takes a whole lot of time sitting and working through how I feel about this and what I might want to do differently, and yeah, it does. It does take some time. But what I promise you is it doesn't take anywhere near as much time as years of beating yourself up for making bad decisions.
It doesn't take anywhere near as much time as unravelling the stories that you will create about yourself if you keep telling yourself that you're someone who always makes mistakes, always screws things up, or always leaves things to the last minute, or always chickens out, or always takes on too much.
Okay? So working this stuff too takes a little bit of time but not as long as all of that. Finally, we've spoken about how to learn from your past mistakes.
I'm sorry for those of you who are on YouTube, you might be wondering why my hand is stuck out at right angles here. It's because I have a Labrador chin on my hand and he telling me that it is very nearly dinnertime. So I'm going to wrap this podcast up, but I'm going to wrap it up by saying, we've been thinking today about how to learn from your mistakes, but what I want you to also think about, and I might do a podcast about it in the future, is how you can learn from your successes.
One of the things we know is that people spend an awful lot less time thinking about their successes, why they were so amazing, why they were able to achieve them, and how they can replicate them more in the future. And so I would also really encourage you every time you remember a mistake that you made, even if you're taking this really positive analytical approach that I've talked about today, I want you to also think of a success that you've had and think about how can you replicate that success in the future? How can you build on the things that you are already good at?
It's a strength-based approach. You might remember us talking a bit about it with Professor Jenn Cumming at the end of last year. If you haven't checked out that episode, go find it. It's called a Strength-Based Review of the Year. A really wonderful strategy for learning is to think about what have I already done right in my life and how can I do that more?
So check it out. Have a think. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that was useful. I hope you can go away now and analyse some of your past mistakes and feel much better about them moving forwards. Take care and see you next week.
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