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“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
We’ve all said this to ourselves at some point. Sometimes things don’t work out the way we want and we don’t know why. Perhaps a job or a relationship ends out of the blue. Or a piece of work isn’t as well-received as you hoped it would be. Or you just can’t get your in-laws to like you even though you’ve been on your most charming behaviour.
In life, the criteria for success are rarely made clear. And even when you start to figure them out, it feels like they change. And so, at the end of your wits, you throw your hands up and say “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong”.
Your frustration is completely natural of course, but the question is, what do you do next? In my experience, one of three things happens:
1. You carry on doing the same thing.
The most common reaction to not knowing where we’re going wrong is to keep doing the same thing, even though the one thing we know for sure about it is that it’s wrong. A wonderful example of this tendency in action is the Wason Rule Discovery Test, also known as the 2–4–6 test.
