Well, yes. I guess I don't mean to say that dealing well is more important than preventing mistakes, but more that that's the direction that I need to shift towards. And to an extent thinking about what you should have done differently is part of dealing well, so it's not that I'm looking to exclude that or focus all that much less on it. It's just a more forward-facing than backward-facing attitude.
That's definitely true about changing perspectives in time. Sometimes I can recall doing something or being somewhere in the past, and even though everything looks the same, the feeling associated with it is totally different. Maybe the difference is in the context -- the stuff that lies before and after the place, what you're coming from and going to.
I'm not sure how I feel about the dealing vs. preventing thing. On the one hand what you say is very true. You can't prevent all mistakes, and it's important to be able to pick yourself up and fix things rather than just think about what you should have done differently. But at the same time, I feel like that strategy can become too reactive, and not enough active. Maybe it's just a difference of where I'm coming from -- I tend to be kind of passive in my attitude toward things, so I can more clearly see how taking more initiative could have let me make things go well instead of just dealing with them when they went bad. (Wow, an issue where finding a balance is important! We almost never run into those!)
Commenting by HaloScan
