Laugh at yourself

If you are embarrassed by your language mistakes, you’ll need to de-fang that issue—for an issue it certainly is. If you have a problem about the reality, which is that you learn from your mistakes—and that in fact it is the only way that you can learn—then you need to get real.

Make a point of collecting embarrassing incidents.  The funnier, the better. Have them ready to tell to friends and at parties. Be the loudest to laugh. That way, you reduce the hold that the Terrible Mistake has over you.

Why deprive yourself and others of a rich source of humour? Tell jokes about your very best blunders, goofs, slip-ups and howlers.

People with status and respectability are the ones that will benefit the most with this bitterest of medicines. They need their pomposity deflated.