Residue On Admitting Mistakes
Admitting Mistakes on the basis of being taught right from wrong:
Just the other day, I was given a quote as a prompt to write on.
“Admitting Mistakes is a Fundamental skill too few of us learn. In part, this is because we’ve been taught it’s wrong to be wrong” — Stacey Abrams
Immediately, I had thoughts of childhood and effects of parenting styles.
How one reacts and respond to anything is said by psychologist to come from how you were reacted to as a child. Fundamental skills, life skills, values, respect, integrity, means of communication, take your pick. From soup to nuts, our foundations of it all are built in child rearing. Now, we could take it to nature versus nurture and add in environmental influence. But we’ll just stick with the basics and look at the grounding of how most learned about right and wrong. From the point of learning to walk the toddler inquisitively touching all insight and bringing to light what adult eyes overlooked, not in sight, the adult reactions began. No, No — don’t touch that! No, No — that’s hot! STOP! Stop running, you’ll hurt yourself! Discipline with minimal word explanations that came with facial expressions, volume, and tones that engraved lasting internalized impressions. That’s a quick visual, audial summation. And in there, as the lessons continued came the handling of mistakes that developed our most often unspoken views of good, bad or indifference we took into adulthood.
Those who received endless reprimand on everything. Trivial for some, huge blowouts for others. Like bumping the bowl of cereal, spilling the milk on the table, and receiving a reaction as if the end of the world was coming. Yelling parents unable to determine difference of needed responses to a child’s learning style, leaves one distraught and in turn becomes challenged when mistakes happen, even in adulthood. The child that was told to be more careful and clean it up when you’re done, non aggressively will better handle mistakes and be more adapted to admitting them, quickly adjusting.
Now really it could go either way and have opposing effects on an individual regardless of upbringing. The foundation or grounding is built in the early years. However, outside influences does play a role, heavier with some than others. It still comes down to personal choice, will to do or not to do and our developed value systems — made up of combined influences throughout our life’s journey.
On the other side of it is the conversation of determining if wrong is always wrong. Is one’s action or opinion necessarily wrong in all circumstances? How narrow is the line between a mistake that appears wrong but turns out to be a lesson that turns to greatness, verses a detrimental wrong that causes loss of the whole farm? There must be room for wrongs or mistakes that have growth potential. This could really be a discussion all on it’s on, so for now, I’ll leave you with those thoughts.
