Mistakes are proof you’re trying!

Most of us don’t like mistakes. I sure don’t. However, mistakes can be your friends. They can help you if you learn from them.

I realized early in my journey of learning to speak in English, that it is ok to make mistakes.

People with a fixed mindset think that the brain is fixed in place. It will not change no matter how hard you try. So, why even bother. Unfortunately, this is the type of thinking that hinders many from improving their communication skills in English. They have always thought that they can never fix their broken English. Furthermore, since their childhood, they have been told that making mistakes is not acceptable.

For some reason, today, in many cultures, if one is unable to speak English, he is considered less educated, although it has to do with opportunity, not with intellect. In Finland, as long as I can remember, politicians, for example, have been scoffed at for speaking less than perfect English. And too often, that kind of treatment only results in people rather pretending that they can’t speak English.

Now, I want to take this time to encourage you who are struggling to improve your skills in English. Maybe your background is like mine. Maybe you grew up thinking that you’ll lose face or people will laugh at you if you can’t pronounce English properly or execute a perfect grammatical construction in your speech or presentation.

But I am here to tell you that you can get over that. You no longer have to endure that old way of thinking.

Honestly, if you wait to speak perfectly, you will never speak. No one expects you to speak perfectly, with flawless pronunciation and sentence structure. People are more interested in what you are saying, not in how you say it. You need to change the way you think about it. You need to change your mindset.

All of us fall into one of these two groups: we either have a “fixed mindset” or a “growth mindset.” By the way, it was Carol Dweck, an American psychologist, who coined these two terms.

You’ve probably heard said before that as we get older, we cannot learn anything new. Sort of like, ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’. Yet, others think that it is never too late to learn something new. What’s the difference between these people? It’s their mindset.

A growth mindset believes that you can fix your broken English. It also believes that mistakes are ok and that we can learn from them.

Really, you should not be afraid of mistakes.

Maybe you could look at your own learning as a journey. It is a process of trial and error, of failure, adjustment, and correction. With a growth mindset, you can enjoy the process and come out victorious on the other side.

It is the growth mindset that makes learning fun, at any age. So, you should never stop learning. And when you reach your present goals, make new ones.