Don’t Sweat Your Mistakes
Making mistakes is a part of life, learn from it and move on.
Yesterday I made a mistake of sending an invite to clients under To and not BCC. Oops! I was embarrassed to say the least because it feels like such a rookie mistake and common sense says that if you are emailing to outside the company, with multiple contacts, to use blind carbon copy.
My work is very cool about these sort of things and brushed it off as a beginners mistake. I will not repeat it next time. I spent a long time looking up different pieces of advice or horror stories on similar mistakes. Some made me feel better, others made me scared of my job security. Don’t do what I did. Nothing good comes from focusing on a past slip-up.
As people, we all tend to be our own worst critic when it comes to mistakes. Other people may not see it as a big deal but it can be a huge emotional blow to the ego to the person who made the error. What can you do to ensure success and no repeats?
Don’t sweat it and learn.
I like to think back to “The Lion King” when Rafiki talks to Simba about the past and what to do about it. The baboon gave Simba a nice hard hit on the head with his staff. Furious he questions why he did it, to which Rafiki replies “It doesn’t matter! It’s in the past.” Not too long after he says “You either run from it, or learn from it.” Then tries to smack Simba a second time and this time he dodges. You know why? Because he learned from past experience!
Don’t cry over spilled milk
Just like in “Big Daddy”, just take some newspaper and cover that shit up. Just kidding, mop it up with floor cleaner or the milk will get sticky.
If you’re still feeling down about a recent snafu you made and none of my funny anecdotes or media references are cheering you up, I would suggest looking deeper at why you want to keep punishing yourself. If it’s truly a large mistake, own it and apologize. There’s nothing else to do about it, we can’t change what we did in the past but we can change our actions for the future.
- Take a deep breath
- Exhale
- Everything will be alright
To er is human.
