Every day, there’s one goal I track for myself that truly moves me forward. The goal is simple: screw up.

Make a mistake. Do something imperfectly, or just plain wrong.

If I screw up, then I met the mark. A minimum of one mistake a day is my target. Many days, I’ll have a lot more than one, but one is my bare minimum.

I’m not talking catastrophic or career-ending mistakes. For the perfectionist, celebrate the one typo in your email. You made a mistake, and the world didn’t end! Celebrate speaking up in a meeting when you were overly wordy. What can you learn from that? Celebrate that you didn’t speak up when you should have. Again, what can you learn from that? The goal is to flip the script on perfectionism and let some of the pressure go down.

I use a theme journal to track my progress. The mistake itself gives me half-credit in my tracker (check out the fantastic theme journal I use here). To get full credit, I have to debrief my mistake, assess it, and come up with at least 1 insight I’m taking away from the experience.

Why do I do this?

First, it keeps me honest. Rather than trying to hide my failures even from myself to protect my ego, I bring them out, track them, celebrate them, and finally, I seize them as opportunities to learn.

For instance, I lost my cool at my kids again last week. Ok and maybe this week. Rather than brush it under the rug and hope I “do better next time,” this is a perfect moment to track the screw-up. And then take a few moments to reflect. What got me to that point? What else was going on? Why was my fuse so short?

Before I know it, I’ve traced my hot temper to the actual root issue – a lack of transition time between my work day and home. With just a few moments of reflection, I’m deciding I’d like to start taking 90 seconds for deep breathing before I come into the house to calm my nervous system and prepare me to transition smoothly (and more patiently) into interacting with my family.

There is so much good learning to be had from these mistakes, even the little ones. So the next screw-up you face?

Track it. Look it in the eye, and celebrate it. Then sit with it and find the new insight you can carry forward.