Acknowledging Mistakes As A Learning Opportunity

In "The Near Miss That Changed Everything" at Backpacker magazine, the author writes of a rock climbing trip with a friend where that friend made a mistake that nearly cost her (the friend's) life. Rather than laugh it off or ignore it, the two acknowledged what had happened and even discussed it with a guide that had also seen the whole thing. The author writes:

    When I first started adventuring, I was sure that if I ever told anyone about the mistakes I made—forgetting to bring water on long hikes, starting up alpine summits too late, refusing to turn back in bad weather, almost getting hit by rockfall—my adventure partners would think me incompetent and never want to do anything with me ever again. So, for years, I kept all my mistakes secret.

    Apparently, so did everyone around me. It was a vicious cycle: Because I never heard about other people messing up, I was certain that I was the only one capable of failure. That made me even more embarrassed and secretive. It was isolating, and it fed my insecurities.

    But on this morning, perched high above Boulder, trading stories with these two women, I finally understood that no adventurer is 100 percent competent all of the time. I also realized that in keeping my mistakes to myself, I’d failed to fully absorb their lessons. After all, it’s hard to learn from things you don’t let yourself think about.

    In this ad hoc group debrief, we were able to talk through all the factors that had contributed to my friend’s slip: her lotion-greased hands, the hot weather, our reckless speed, and our failure to pause and recalibrate when we entered a no-fall zone. This was a kind of debrief I’d never had. Instead of justifying her fall as a random freak accident—or reassuring herself that it was skill and not dumb luck that had saved her—my friend listed her mistakes one at a time. Then, she learned from them. In sharing that process with us, she likely saved not just her own life going forward, but ours, too.