The Ability to Admit Mistakes

My special mutant power is the ability to make mistakes.
I make all kinds of mistakes. I make small mistakes, like failing to close my gas cap cover after getting fuel and being "that person" driving down the freeway.  I make medium mistakes, like mis-spelling error on important presentations.  I make big mistakes, like asserting something and then finding out I was 180 degrees wrong.  And I make supersized, Death Star-like mistakes, like completely changing careers for one that does not suit me as well at all.

I make mistakes.  Yet another mistake was assuming the everyone else has the ability to make them, laugh and learn about them, and carry on.

This really surprises me.  Perhaps I have become so immune to mistakes on my psyche that admitting them is no more shocking than stubbing my toe - immediate pain and a bit inconvenient, but little more.  But it seems that for others - a lot of others - making mistakes is the thing of catastrophe.

I have come to judge the level of catastrophe by their ability to admit the mistake.  This is something that is surprisingly hard for a good number of them.  The concept is so foreign to me that I can only theorize at what is going on:  Pride?  Embarrassment?  A fundamental belief that no matter what they are doing and no matter how many things go wrong, they were right?  The fact that they will appear a little lesser in the eyes of others?  All of these, I suppose.

It is not helpful of course, this inability to admit a mistake.  It short circuits the learning process by not learning the actual intended lesson but continuing to maintain the previous paradigm.  It never solves the underlying issue (most likely if one does not admit a mistake, the mistake will be repeated).  And it does not have the intended effect on those around one:  most people recognize a mistake when it has been made.  For you to maintain it was not a mistake when it is quite clear that is was adds not luster to one, only the reputation of being a stubborn fool.

Mistakes happen.  It is what we do with those mistakes that determines our ultimate success or failure.