Rolling with Mistakes and Improvising:: February 2008
By Andrew Burnham - February 22, 2008
Turn Mistakes into Opportunities
The second great benefit of accepting your mistake is that you avoid a potential automatic reaction (fight of flee) and can now respond to the situation yourself. You are not stressed, out of joint or worrying about anything. You free to tap into creative ideas or ways you can turn this situation into an opportunity for humour, to make a further point, to let go a bit and relax. You have choice. These ideas and courses of action will appear with little or no effort on your part if you are if you are in the moment.
Are the Laughs on You?
If you do not acknowledge the mistake and react immediately, try in vain to cover up, or otherwise get your ego involved the laughs maybe on you and be of a nervous quality. By acknowledging and moving on, the laughs are about the situation. The laughs are on the mistake itself and have a hearty joyful quality. When you take control, which you can only do by being in the moment, your own mind and thoughts can’t carry you wherever they want much like a horse does with a slumbering rider.
Don’t Take Yourself too Seriously
The ability to see the potential for humour is dependent on you not getting wrapped up in yourself, of you not being too much ‘in your head’. But what humour? If you knew the mistakes or problems that might occur up in front of others you could plan for it. The problems we expect to have often don’t materialize. It’s more often the unexpected that presents itself. So let the humour present itself by being in the moment, create the space for it to happen.
In the Moment Humour
Humour has a powerful quality when it emerges naturally. Most laughter is a result of an improvised process instead of something that was planned. That’s your only choice if you cannot predict your mistakes. Because you cannot know the future with certainty and your pre-judgments about people and the future often need modification, then it makes sense to spend more time in the now. Then you can adept to every mistake and situation as it comes along with more creativity, less effort and less trouble.
