Admit your mistakes. Admit your mistakes quickly. Admit your mistakes to others as soon as possible, so that you are willing to admit your mistakes to yourself and acknowledge what the mistake is all about. Remember, we are the great deceivers. We routinely deceive ourselves. We limit our perceptions and we change the facts to fit our perceptions. It is just something that our minds do. It is the mind’s easier and softer way. It is in our collective nature to take shortcuts and the fast mental process. It is the keystone of our survival instinct, which helped us to survive and evolve. With the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, and the information revolution, the change to our daily reality has far outpaced our evolutionary profile. We are living in the 21st century with prehistoric minds. So what does admitting our mistakes have to do with this human condition? Guess what … the odds are stacked against us. The fact is that we are more likely to make a mistake and be wrong, than the opposite.

Get in the habit of looking for errors in your thinking, and mistakes in your conclusions. Check your reactions; test your gut, and try not to act on your intuition unless it is within a narrowly defined field of your own expertise. Pause when you can and look critically at your thinking, especially when you have jumped to a conclusion or engaged in an unsubstantiated assumption. That’s the basis of that fun (and true) saying: When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME.

We have not evolved mentally and emotionally enough to keep pace with the environmental changes in which we live. We live in our own minds and the world we experience is of our own making, so we have to develop tricks, techniques, and tools to create a new-world survival strategy.

Admit that you are wrong! This is one of the hottest secrets there is, and a survival strategy of the highest order. This secret will allow you to improve your batting average, acquire new skills, and will become the weapon of choice for the true warrior. Try it out for size; practice the following words: “I am wrong. I made a mistake.” How does it feel? How does it sound? Can you see yourself doing this? If you become known as someone who is willing to admit their mistakes, will you be more approachable or less approachable? If you admit your mistakes, are you likely to be more successful or less successful? How do you want to be known? Do you want to succeed? Then grab these tools and make them your own!

You are warriors. You know that you can deceive yourself easily and frequently, but you embrace the techniques that permit you to pierce the veil of self-delusion. With this clarity of true vision, you will change the world. So it is written.