Michael Lynton

There is the events that happened before the mistake that lead you to a place that makes the mistake.

Those are sort of things like the schema.

There's the mistake itself.

And then there's the things that you sort of carry with you after the mistake, principally a sense of shame.

and that burden lived with me for a very long time i was you know i would walk into rooms and think everybody was looking at me years after the whole event occurred which is a whole other thing called the spotlight effect where you think you have this thing sort of emblazoned on your forehead when in truth nobody even remembers the incident

But that third act, that shame, that not dealing with the mistake, trying to understand how you feel about it, how you did it, that in and of itself is a mistake.

And by talking this through with Josh Steiner, my writing partner in this, and we also recruited a very...

very able, a wonderful woman from Johns Hopkins, Alison Papadakis, who's a professor of psychology there.

It was extremely helpful to work through all of that stuff and get out of that place where I felt shame about what I'd done.

What do you feel now about what you have done?

I don't feel shame.

I don't feel regret.

I feel like I have some resolution around it.

Part of it, to be honest, which is a whole other part of the technique, which is sort of like flooding.

There's this thing in psychology where when you fear something, spiders or flying, they flood you with whatever it is.

So in the case of spiders, they put a lot of spiders around you, or if you're afraid of flying, they make you fly a lot.

By talking about this mistake over and over and over again, it sort of succeeded in doing that same thing for me.

The biggest message is quite honestly, and I know it's a little bit of an overused word, but it's permission to actually and the courage to look at one's mistakes and a little bit of a guide as to how one should look at them.

And hopefully people who read the book or listen to this podcast will gain some purchase on how to do that.

That's really the point of the whole thing, frankly.