10 Reasons why we make same mistakes again and again

Why don't we (or can't we) learn from our mistakes?

Not all of us are shiny 'high-IQ -wielding- thinking-machines' that never, or rarely if ever, go wrong. Most of us are deeply emotional beings who believe in their hearts so strongly that very often our brain begins to function like a heart too completely forgetting that it was actually the brain!

Some of the common 'same mistake-again' scenarios are:

1. Always falling for wrong/abusive partners
2. Wrong career choices
3. Wrong financial/ emotional investments etc.

But the question is: Why do we make the same mistakes again and again?

Some of us definitely do till we get it so much into a pattern that we get stubbornly trapped in the ruts, unable to break free, and unable to fathom why is it so.

Here are 10 reasons why is it so:

1. We don't refuse to learn from our mistakes; we just don't see our mistakes sometimes. There's a difference.
2. Sometimes we may even regard and take pride in our decision as a smart choice/ the right move/ the best decision ever etc. which everybody in the world can tell is a mistake.
3. We may be full of false positives: a widely occurring modern phenomenon in which the person obstinately continues to think everything will be all right even when it cannot be. It's like believing a person on death bed to recover and live for another 80 years or trying to heal a broken bone with a bandaid. There's a difference between being positive and accepting the reality.
4. We cannot accept the reality and truth and also largely cannot tell what is the reality and truth. Our deep sentimentality and emotional soft corners will easily make us believe 100 white lies but will trouble us believing one stark truth. Sometimes we seem to exist in fool's Paradise. For example: we may continue to believe someone loves us even when all evidence and past experiences point to the contrary.
5. We exhibit fools's confidence that we are right when we are not but at the same time we will doubt a wise person's ability if he tells us we might be making a mistake.
6. Our inability to accept good advice and act on it due to our own lack of perception and ego spells troubles for us. We sometimes cannot differentiate between good or bad advice, and even when we do accept it we fail to act upon it.
7. Our inability to see the pattern in our past experiences with people, circumstances, occurrences, emotions etc makes us like a blind person groping about their way in unknown surroundings. Hence we end up making same mistakes again and again, stumbling on the same kind of boulder. This inability is one sure sign of our head being dominated by our heart.
8. We have inability to predict possible outcomes which together with our inability to noticing patterns makes it just the habitual stumbling on the same rock.
9. We think from our hearts and let our emotions total-eclipse reason and logic. Anybody making decisions with this frame of mind is bound to make mistakes. We allow ourselves to get carried away by emotions alone and do not know how to retrieve our head from the caves of our heart and to command it to get involved in decision making process.
10. Our learning ability may be somewhat limited. We fail to see how we could learn from our past mistakes so the same kind of mistake could be avoided in future. Hence we end up making similar mistakes all through our life.

But not all is lost. All is never lost. Making the same mistakes isn't written in stone. In most cases it is just an acquired habit which is very much possible to shed off with some mindful thinking and certain other steps that I shall elaborate in another post.

I hope you liked reading this article. Thank you for reading.