Don't Beat Yourself Up

"Remember you learn a lot more when you make mistakes. Don't beat yourself up."
(from my tweets, 2014)

I tweeted a lot about mistakes back then. I wrote that I had made hundreds of them over six years, that I mostly made mistakes in my first year of business, and that I tried never to make the same one twice.

This tweet had two halves, and the second half is the one most of us struggle with. Learning from mistakes sounds sensible. Not beating yourself up over them is much harder. Many of us quietly believe the opposite: that being hard on ourselves is what keeps us improving.

The research suggests that belief is mostly wrong.

Mistakes really do help us learn

Start with the first half of the tweet. Psychologist Janet Metcalfe of Columbia University reviewed decades of research on learning from errors in 2017. Her conclusion: making errors, as long as they are followed by corrective feedback, often helps learning rather than hurting it. Trying, getting something wrong and then seeing the right answer can make the right answer stick better than being handed it from the start.

One striking finding from her lab is called the hypercorrection effect. In a 2001 study with Brady Butterfield, people were more likely to fix mistakes they had been confident about than ones they had been unsure of. Being surprised by your own error seems to grab your attention and help the lesson stick.

So mistakes are not just tolerable. Handled well, they are part of how we get good at things.

Why beating yourself up backfires

The key phrase is "handled well." Harsh self-criticism tends to make people defensive. If every mistake feels like proof that you're a failure, it becomes painful even to look at what went wrong, and that makes it harder to learn from it.

Psychologist Kristin Neff developed the idea of self-compassion in 2003. She describes it as having three parts:

• Self-kindness: treating yourself with the warmth you'd show a friend, instead of harsh judgment.
• Common humanity: remembering that mistakes and struggles are part of being human, not signs that something is uniquely wrong with you.
• Mindfulness: noticing painful feelings clearly, without ignoring them or getting swept away by them.

Self-compassion is not the same as letting yourself off the hook. It is closer to being a good coach than a cruel critic.

Self-compassion makes us try harder

Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at UC Berkeley tested this directly in 2012. In one study, students took a difficult vocabulary test and did poorly. Some were then encouraged to be understanding and kind toward themselves about the result. Others got a message to boost their self-esteem, and others got nothing.

Then everyone got the chance to study for a second test. The students in the self-compassion group studied longer than the others. In other studies in the same paper, self-compassion also made people more motivated to make amends for a moral mistake and to work on a personal weakness.

Being kind to themselves didn't make people complacent. It made them braver about facing what had gone wrong.

What the philosophers said

Confucius put the point about mistakes in one sentence. In the Analects (15.30), he says that to make a mistake and not correct it, that is what is truly called a mistake. The error itself isn't the real failure. Refusing to learn from it is.

That matches my old habit of trying not to make the same mistake twice. But Confucius did not say you should punish yourself. The focus is on correcting the error and moving on, not on dwelling in shame.

Some honest caveats

Self-compassion research is still young, and many studies rely on questionnaires and short lab tasks. Some researchers argue that parts of Neff's scale may partly measure low self-criticism rather than something new. And learning from errors works best when you actually get feedback. Making the same mistake over and over without finding out why doesn't teach much.

Still, the overall pattern is consistent. People who treat their mistakes with understanding tend to be happier, less anxious and more willing to try again.

How to learn from mistakes without beating yourself up

• Talk to yourself like a friend. Ask what you'd say to a friend who made the same mistake, and say that to yourself.
• Remember you're not alone. Everyone who has done anything difficult has made hundreds of mistakes.
• Get the feedback. Find out exactly what went wrong. A mistake you understand is worth far more than one you just regret.
• Write down the lesson. One sentence is enough. It helps you avoid making the same mistake twice.
• Then let it go. Once you've taken the lesson, there's nothing more to gain from replaying the error.

Today's reflection

Think of a recent mistake you're still beating yourself up about. What is the one lesson in it? And what would it feel like to keep the lesson and let go of the rest?

Sources

• Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143.
• Butterfield, B., & Metcalfe, J. (2001). Errors committed with high confidence are hypercorrected. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27(6), 1491–1494.
• Confucius. Analects, 15.30.
• Metcalfe, J. (2017). Learning from errors. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 465–489.
• Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101.