Ah, if life were nothing but victories! Everyone makes mistakes by the boat load, you in particular. Confident people somehow learn along the way that mistakes need not drag them down.

They don’t dwell on them. They regard them as lessons, life lessons, that give them insights that they perhaps did not have before.

Life repeats itself until you learn the lesson, and then you move on. If you were to never make any mistakes or make only tiny, itsy, bitsy ones, that would be a sign that you probably weren’t attempting enough in life.

After all, if you play it safe, hardly taking your foot off first base, you’ll never get picked off, but you won’t score many runs either.

Cut yourself some slack. Give yourself some leeway to make mistakes on occasion and be far less than perfect, especially when it comes to being assertive.

Conjure up the image of someone you know who is self-confident. Does he or she go to pieces when they err? Does this individual get mired in what didn’t go right, or do they learn from it and apparently move on?

Michael Daras