As a parent, I am quite familiar with challenges related to spills, broken or damaged items, and so on. Kids, much like the rest of us, make mistakes all the time. If you look closely enough (and I really don’t recommend that you do), you will notice that people make mistakes all the time. People drive too quickly, change lanes erratically, erroneously overcharge you in restaurants, say things that are hurtful or just not particularly tactful, forget to do things, talk too much, talk to little, do too much or too little, turn the heat up too high, spend too much money, forget to look both ways when crossing the street, fail to return your calls, make grammatical errors while writing blogs, and the list goes on and on. While the mistakes that other people make can be quite frustrating and annoying and sometimes lead to distress and inconvenience, they also present opportunities for us to learn and practice effective coping skills.
How can we cope well when other people make mistakes? Often, one important first step is to accept that the other person did whatever she or he did. To take this one step further, it can also be helpful to practice accepting your own thoughts and feelings about the other person’s actions. Accepting is not the same as forgiving, but forgiving can also be a helpful step in this process. Indeed, a recent study found that lower levels of forgiveness among young adults predicted worse mental and physical health outcomes. Also, stress was less strongly related to mental health among people who were higher in forgiveness (Toussaint et al., 2016). Another useful step is to practice engendering some compassion for the person who might have made a mistake. One way to do this is to jump into the other person’s shoes, and try to see the world through his or her perspective. As Dr. Marsha Linehan stated in her video on the DBT skill of opposite action, things that don’t make sense from our perspective might make perfect sense from another person’s perspective. Moreover, recognizing that everyone makes mistakes and that nobody is perfect can help boost our compassion for people who make mistakes that drive us crazy. Finally, how we think about other people’s mistakes can make a big difference in our reactions. If I were to think that someone else made a mistake on purpose to make my life difficult, I would probably be quite irritated with that person. I would probably have a hard time letting go of it, and forgiveness would not be the first thing on my mind. Instead, I find it helpful to avoid assuming that others are doing things on purpose to make my life difficult. I find it a lot more effective to assume that we are all doing the best we can at any given moment. – Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.