Learning from Your Mistakes: A Survival Trait, 2

Continued from "Learning from Your Mistakes"

In "A Late Night Encounter", I related an incident wherein my barber had to snap out of a sleep-deprived fog and react to a potentially violent, perhaps lethal situation. His performance was exemplary, except for one thing.

He employed his left hand to cover his wallet rather than for personal protection.

He recognized this after the fact and mentioned it to me in the phone call. At some point, the part of his mind that puts the jigsaw puzzle together saw that piece and said, "What's wrong with this picture?"

At that moment, he says to himself, "Good grief! Someone behind me could have driven a knife into a kidney while I was covering my wallet." For someone like my barber, however, this is not simply a could-a, would-a, should-a moment that ends in frustration and self-blame.

As I said in that post, "Every encounter we survive provides experience for the next." Recognizing your error is simply the first step.

Let's look at the second step in another post.