Why You Keep Repeating the Same Mistake

By Focusing on the Bad, You Keep Reliving It

Sometimes we keep repeating the same mistake over and over again because we have not learned the lesson yet.

I am the poster child of tripping over the same rock, again and again, but I have stopped beating myself up over it.

It is one thing to try and do better, but it is another thing to keep festering on the mistake.

Some might see this as letting yourself off the hook too easily, but I have realized that this is not the case.

What do you keep tripping over? What is one major change that you would really like to do, but you keep failing at it?

The answer has to do with neural pathways that get created as we do things. When we do something right, a pathway is created. Unfortunately, a pathway is also created when we do something wrong. We basically build habits this way, both good and bad. So the reason we keep making the same mistakes is that we slip by default back into existing neural pathways.

What we need to do is identify our triggers, the ones which make it so easy to…