10 MINUTE READ

From Luke’s Journal Sept 2025 | Vol. 30 No. 2 | Success-Failure

Making mistakes is part of life, of being part of a “fallen” world that we all live in. For those who are perfectionists, we can see mistakes as a sense of failure. This certainly was my approach to the first part of my life and medical career, where I measured success with outcomes such as academic achievement or “winning”.

More recently, I’ve come to learn, particularly in undertaking projects, that failure is an important part of success. Failure provides opportunity for learning and improvement. Failure tests our resilience. Failure is part of life when you are a “life-long learner”.

Growth mindset

A growth mindset becomes important in this context, where mistakes are not seen as failure, but rather opportunity for growth and change.¹ According to Dr Tim Baker¹, a leadership development and change management specialist, features of a growth mindset include:

1. Believe in the possibility of change
   You’re not fixed. Growth starts with the belief that you can change—that you’re not bound by innate traits or past patterns.
2. Take ownership of your growth
   It’s tempting to blame circumstances or others, but real change begins when you take responsibility for your own development.
3. Stay curious
   Curiosity fuels self-awareness. Instead of clinging to what you know, marvel at all that you don’t—it’s the key to lifelong learning.
4. Allow yourself to fail
   Failure is part of growth. As uncomfortable as it is, challenge yourself. Each stumble is a step forward.
5. Step outside your comfort zone
   Your comfort zone shouldn’t be a place to hide from life. True growth happens when you stretch beyond the familiar.
6. Acknowledge your effort
   While results matter, they’re not everything. Don’t overlook the effort and persistence that got you here.
7. Resist the comparison trap
   Obsessively measuring yourself against others breeds envy. Focus on your own journey—it’s the only one that truly matters.
8. Tame your ego
   Ego often masks the fear of failure and not being good enough. Growth means stepping into the unknown, embracing discomfort, and being okay with not having all the answers.

Esteem sensitivity

Another challenge for medical professionals is that many of us are “esteem sensitive”.² By this, I mean that our sense of self-worth is sometimes tied up in what we do. I personally find it very difficult to receive feedback. However, it’s the negative feedback, or perhaps the developmental feedback, that we can really grow from when we receive it. This feedback can be where the “gold” for growth is, if we embrace such feedback. However, too often I have taken such feedback personally and gotten upset with the other person giving that feedback.

Simulation training

Simulation (“sim”) is an interesting education modality, because, as many would have experienced, there’s nothing more nerve-racking than being in that “sim suite”, encountering a clinical problem that’s a little bit challenging. There may be actors, mannequins and scenarios that may throw you a few curve balls. To top it off, a room full of your colleagues may be watching you on video or through a window in the next room. The debriefing process is critical in simulation training, but it needs to be done in a safe way. Individuals are often asked to identify areas of improvement and describe how they felt. It is important that observers give lots of positive encouragement at the same time.

One of the things about “sim” is that it gets you out of your comfort zone and pushes your anxiety up. And if something goes wrong, there’s a little bit of embarrassment, but if you can bounce back from that moment, you can learn from it.³ For example, during “sim”, the mannequin may have died, or the conversation you had with the “sim patient” may not have been as “spot on” as it could have been. It is all in the realms of practice. Nevertheless, it can feel very real and pressured.

Near misses and adverse events

Likewise, in clinical practice, we can learn from a “near miss”. For example, we can go back and look at the systemic factors, the human factors, the patient factors, the disease factors, and the inter-team factors that contribute to the outcome.

It’s a much more difficult situation when a patient has a bad outcome because of a mistake that a colleague, or even more so yourself, has made. And this is a really tough situation. Emergency physicians found the impact of a negative outcome could be quite intrusive and invasive e.g. disturbing sleep for a number of weeks.⁴ The good news is that these strong emotions usually settle over time (after a number of weeks or months).

“Participants spoke of the pervasive responsibility and fear of making a mistake at work that disturbed their personal lives. Some participants expressed overt regret following a scenario, which they perceived as their own mistake.^”4

“Dr R said:

I shouldn’t have sent that patient home or I should have got them to come and see them coz I think regardless of whether you have written down on a bit of paper and discussed with so and so, it is still your patient, and you have to take responsibility”.⁴

Sometimes, even when it wasn’t actually a mistake made by the clinician, emergency physicians tended to still worry that they may have made a mistake or repeatedly think over what they could have done better, or how a colleague would have handled the situation differently.

Personal reflections

I remember having an experience like this in my third year as a doctor.

A patient died.

I felt very responsible. In hindsight, I was a junior doctor being supervised by other more senior doctors at the time and they shared the responsibility with me. I remember wondering when the intrusive and persistent thoughts, which extended into the nighttime, would settle down. Fortunately, they did after a few weeks. An older and wiser colleague did tell me around that time, that in medicine, we will step on “land mines” on occasion. He was not discussing this specific case, but I found his pastoral support of me as a trainee doctor very comforting. It is helpful to have friends and professionals (e.g. supervisors, coaches or mentors) whom we can share openly and honestly about such challenges. Peer support can also be helpful in this context.

I work in paediatric palliative care. Sometimes people will say to me, “Aren’t all of your patients going to die anyway?”. To me, failure is if a patient dies in pain, or if they shared with me their advance care planning wishes and we did not honour those wishes. Also, if parents and families feedback that the way I communicated with them was not helpful. I find that difficult too. However, I can learn from such situations and improve moving forward. I find my own mistakes make better teaching prompts than sharing my perceived successes, especially when I undertake case-based education of other health professionals.

A parent of a patient whom I looked after 10 years ago recently told me about a doctor who gave her the diagnosis for her son. He did it in a way that focused on the harsh reality of the diagnosis and didn’t foster any hope in this situation. She was angry with this doctor for many years after that time. However, when her son died, he wrote her a letter expressing his sadness and describing what he had learnt in the care of Nicholas. His mother, Simone, appreciated the letter so much. To me, it was like an act of redemption for this doctor, and showed how we can learn from, grow through, or even overcome our mistakes.

Rhys, a young adult survivor of acute myeloid leukaemia, describes his own journey of raising funds for a fundraising event in a way that only a young person can. He describes the challenges of training for the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic. This included challenges in training, obtaining the correct equipment, as well as some of the challenges on the day of the event. Despite setbacks, he continues to rise to the occasion and ultimately finishes the event.⁵

Summary

Mistakes are part of being part of a “fallen world”. However, our world is redeemed, and we can also see redemption in our mistakes. I have given some examples of this. A growth mindset and an attitude of life-long learning can be helpful in this context. An awareness of where we derive our worth from, based on who we are rather than what we do, is also important. “Sim”, near-miss situations and serious errors that can occur in the care of patients can all have large impacts on us in how we sustain ourselves in our medical careers. It is important to have an awareness of how such events may impact us, as well as a support network to guide us through such difficult terrain.

We can sometimes redeem ourselves when we make a mistake with a patient. We can always learn from the mistakes we make. Such learnings can be associated with an emotional heaviness.

Concluding reflections

God wants you to know that humans learn only through trial and error, and that includes you. You have to live life, not think about it. Step into the midst of things, try, fail, learn, and stand up again.

The question is not whether you will make mistakes.

You will.

The question is whether you want to learn and grow or shrink back and be stuck. Take that step you’ve been avoiding. You can succeed, or you can get feedback that it didn’t work, but in either case, you are sure to feel alive.⁶

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