Hello! My name is Caz Campbell. I’ve lived in Newbury most of my life, I’m a mum of two daughters who are 5 & 7 and I have three other job “hats”:  I teach baby massage, I’m an emotional coach and I’ve published a book focusing on happiness, kindness and calmness. It’s called “Donkey on a Waffle” and includes topics which I’m going to talk about in this blog. Feel free to join my free Facebook group which also discusses these topics, with fun facts, posts and chats:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/818543508893746

We all make mistakes, but mistakes don’t make us, i.e. they don’t make us who we are.

If you think back to something you have failed at, note the feelings that may come to mind – they’re bound to be mostly negative such as disappointing, embarrassing, guilty and even mortifying. Failure is viewed as a negative experience and we tend to judge ourselves as a person rather than looking at that stand-alone action that failed. Simply disassociating ourselves as a whole with whatever we think we’ve failed at can be the first step to feeling better and not being so harsh on yourself.

This is the case whether you have low expectations of yourself, where you may not push yourself in case you fail, or you have unrealistically high expectations, where you may never reach what you want to achieve and always feel like you’re failing.

Many years ago on a museum trip with my dad, we learned about the inventor, Thomas Edison, who famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”, before he was successful in inventing the light bulb.

This is reflected in the neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) phrase, “There’s no such thing as failure, just feedback”. Failure is such a strong, unhelpful and negative word, a better way to think of any mistakes or unsuccessful attempts are as opportunities to learn. It’s much more helpful to see problems as challenges not threats.

Everyone makes mistakes, even the people you look up to the most. Hundreds of things were invented by mistake; penicillin, fireworks, Velcro, microwaves, Super glue to name a few. We grow from our mistakes and it shows strength when we say sorry. It also takes peace to forgive yourself – and others. When you feel resentment, anger or upset, your body produces stress hormones. In general, nobody purposely hurts another and if we understand that, it is easier to forgive. It is also important that we forgive ourselves and it is a reminder that we are not perfect. Forgiveness is a great antidote to pessimism and relieves the stress.

Making mistakes ok is hard to teach children as many struggle with any tiny “mistake”. So showing them that we all make mistakes – admitting them, talking about them and even involving children in discussing what could be done about it – can really help. It normalizes mistakes and makes it easier to children to then talk about their own mistakes. This usually needs to go hand in hand with not shaming or blaming children when they do make mistakes, however. As when children feel they’re being told off for mistakes, they will see them bad things that they won’t want to admit to in the future!

If you’d like to find out more about me and what I do, my website is: www.happykindcalm.co.uk