Career Mistakes

Top 10 Things To Do To Learn From Career Mistakes

In my forthcoming book, How to Reinvent Your Career, I include a lot of different exercises that you can do to help you progress in the reinvention of your career. In the chapter about mistakes, I include many things that you can do to get past the mistakes you feel you may have made in the past. Too often we dwell on things that we have done. Doing so may hold us back from moving forward. Is anything really a mistake if you have learned something important from it? How can you move forward and benefit from the past? If you are considering reinventing your career or making some changes, here are a few things I would recommend that you do to help you get over past mistakes, get over your fears and move forward.

1. Write down some of the mistakes you think you have made in the past.
2. Write down the things you have learned from making those mistakes.
3. Write down the things that interested you in your youth.
4. Write down the things that interest you now. How are the two lists different?
5. Write down the kinds of changes will you have to make to fit into a new company.
6. Write down the things that you are afraid will happen if you make specific mistakes.
7. Write down the things you can do to be sure you won’t make those mistakes listed in number 6.
8. Write down the ways you can overcome the problems associated with the mistakes in number 6 should they actually occur.
9. Think about how bad would it really be if you made a few mistakes? Did the mistakes you made in the past really end up so badly?
10. Think about what would happen if you don’t take the chance of making some mistakes; is it worth staying where you are now?