Back when you were a baby and you took your first steps, did someone teach you how to get up on your feet? Did someone teach you to use the edge of the coffee table to pull yourself up onto your feet. Did someone teach you to piton foot in front of another. No! The human brain is like a filing cabinet. It takes in information from the world around you and stores it for future reference. When you were a baby, you will have taken in how the people are walking from those around you and your evolving brain (without thinking or knowing) has sifted through the filing cabinet to find that piece of information about walking.

However, it’s not plain sailing! You’re not perfect at it straight away. You need to develop the skill of walking to get to a point where you can do it unaided and without thinking about it. That’s where trial and error comes in. Your baby mind will try to get up onto your feet unaided and struggle. You’ll flop back down onto your nappy. “Right, that didn’t work. Let’s try something else”. You’ll see that edge of a coffee table or a sofa and you’ll give that a try. You’ll end up getting onto your feet and be able to stand for a while but you’ll try walking away from it and end up falling back onto your nappy! “Ok, that doesn’t work, let’s try just keeping a hold of the sofa” and you’ll soon realise that you can get around holding onto the furniture until you can find your balance and stay on your feet. 

How amazing is that. A newly formed brain that’s only a few months old can use intuition, skill and experience to teach themselves ow to walk! Now just think about what you could be capable of! The possibilities are endless!

It’s inevitable that in learning to drive there are going to be ‘mistakes’. You’re learning a new skill and as with the baby learning to walk, you’ll experiment with different ways of doing things. Some of those things you’ll try will probably fail but in the end you’ll develop a way of doing something that works for you. So let’s change that word ‘mistake’ to something else. Let call it ‘LEARNING’. 

Think of that ‘mistake’ as a learning curve. You’ve just experience, that what you have just done, hasn’t worked. Now, you’ll then think about why it didn’t work and most crucially, what will you do different this next time (there’s no point in doing the same thing again!). The next time you try it, it might not work either, but that’s ok! It doesn’t mean you don’t know what you’re doing. You just don’t know the best way to do it yet. Let’s try again. You’ve tried two different ways of doing something and again, you’ll explore another way of doing it. This time, it works! “Finally!”, you’ll think to yourself! But that’s ok. You’ve just used you’re own understanding, initiative, trial and error-whatever you want to call it-to come up with your own way on doing it.