Mental Health: How To Stop Making the Same Mistakes

Dr. Alduan Tartt, faith-based licensed psychologist, discusses how to stop making the same mistakes over and over again. Why? Making the same mistakes negatively affects your mental health because you fail repeatedly which hurts self-esteem.

In this video, I use Dr. Daniel Pink's book, The Power of Regret, to provide seven tips for changing your life:

1) Act Like your Successor- Ask yourself what your replacement would do in the same situation. This is called emotional distancing and helps one gain perspective. When we think like someone, else it gives us options. Example: Would another husband ignore his wife's suggestion to go on a marriage retreat (A Weekend For Love) when the marriage needs it or only you?

2) Create a Regret Circle- Form a support group with friends and/or family discussing your biggest failures. Why? It promotes self-disclosure which allows one to vent, see regrets first hand versus bury them, and then take action on them. The worst thing we can do is to live in a state of denial or suppress our failures so that we repeat them.

3) Create a Failure Journal- List your failures in one column and the lessons learned in the other. This allows one to learn versus feel lost about why life is not working out. Once you see your lessons laid out for you, change happens.

4) New Year Resolutions- Make real time, new year resolutions based on last year's regrets. Don't just make random resolutions, make them meaningful, purposeful and deeply emotional so that you can change intentionally and in alignment with your destiny.

5) Addition By Subtraction- Mentally erase all of the good times in your life for a second and imagine how life would feel. Pretty crummy, right? This is a gratitude exercise because it gives you appreciation for the things you went after and dreams realized. This will motivate you to go for more good moments, make better decisions, and be more intentional about creating happiness versus being overly cautious.

6) Take the World Regret Survey- Reading about other's regrets makes us change to avoid their mistakes. I read about a man who worked 60+ hours for twenty years to have wealth only to regret losing his wife (cost him wealth), his family (cost him wealth) and his health (cost him wealth due to medical bills) and decided a balanced life was my next focus.

Take the World Regret Survey here.

7) Adopt An Adventurous Mindset- Instead of always playing it safe and regretting not taking a chance on yourself, adopt a mindset of adventure where your faith guides you to pursue all of your dreams. God wants you to be adventurous and to follow your destiny. Imagine how happy you will be truly living versus worrying or allowing fear to steal your joy.

God Bless!