Making the Same Error Repeatedly
What we're not doing or doing well enough
We might find ourselves in the midst of a situation, short or long, that we didn’t expect or want that wasn’t necessarily a result of the acts of other people.
This painful place could be because of one bad decision. That happens at some point to almost everyone. Yet the outcome and the undesirable, stressful or miserable experience could also be the byproducts from multiple bad choices.
It’s possible we thought we were on the right path. It’s also possible that we repeatedly made problematic decisions or gave into habits on autopilot that, if we would have stopped and analyzed the risks, we would have likely or clearly known we were not being smart.
“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.”
John Dewey, per the writing of Marc (Dewey) Boberg
So you don’t think I’m pointing fingers, I will tell you this has been me too, experiencing blind spots and assuming what I was doing didn’t involve risk, when the reality contradicted that assumption.
I wasn’t sufficiently learning from unwanted experiences because I wasn’t deeply, thoroughly, successfully reflecting on it.
When people move through life like this, professionally or personally or both, this is how they end up in troublesome situations or crises. It’s how, for some of them, they unquestionably assist in blowing up their well-being or making their lives a little worse.
We have emotional, psychological triggers that can develop out of seeking to cope with some type of distress or trauma and we also have triggers for the mere purpose of gaining pleasure for pleasure’s sake.
Sometimes we’re aware of it and other times, not.
This makes it very common for people to not learn from an experience, multiple ones or the same one, over and over.
We don’t understand our mental programming or the “stops” or “go’s” or if you prefer, “red lights” and “green lights" that are needed to show we have learned and improved. “Yellow lights” aren’t being minded either.
There is a proverb that vividly, possibly too much so, also illustrates this point:
“Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.”
Deep down, if we’re mentally healthy, we know that our decisions and actions are not helpful or worse, they are wrong, even egregiously so, yet because we are taking away some real-or-perceived benefit from that behavior, we remain stuck, escalating risks.
Learning how to build and implement reliable “stops” into our lives for what we should say “no” to while building more “go’s” for what we should ethically, morally be doing become the tasks, either as solo expeditions or team efforts with those who can and will assist us.
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