Welcome to the November edition of The Inbox Coach. The topic I’ve chosen this month is one that I find hard to deal with and that is making mistakes.
I have a very mixed relationship with making mistakes. Coaching requires you to do a lot of self-reflection and something I have learnt about myself is that I like to do things right. I don’t like to make mistakes. In work and in life, if there is a “right way” to do something, I want to do it.
This isn’t a wholly negative trait to have. I research things and make lots of plans so that I take the right route to a place, show up at the right time, have the right things with me which makes me organised and prepared for lots of situations.
Where it doesn’t serve me is when there is the possibility that I won’t be able to get things right, such as learning something new or dealing with new and unexpected situations. I tend to focus on the mistakes I might make, rather than embracing the process of learning something new.
We all make misteaks
It is unrealistic to think that we will never make a mistake. Learning requires us to do things we have never done before; we have to practice in order to get things right. And even if we are working on something we are very experienced at, it is still possible to miss things, make a bad call or get things wrong. I would love to tell you that I’ve learnt the error of my ways and now see mistakes as opportunities to learn (which they are) and fully embrace them any time they happen, but there is still a part of me that doesn’t like making them. I would still rather get things right, but I have at least found a way to be more accepting of making mistakes.
For me, it is about detaching my self-worth from the act of making a mistake. If I make an error, it doesn’t mean that I am a bad person or rubbish at my job, it is just data that I can use to improve how I do something the next time. By spending less time worrying about the awful feeling of making a mistake and focusing instead on what I can do about it, I am making better use of my time and energy.
No Blame
Whilst learning to be ok with mistakes is tough for me personally, as a leader with the teams I work with and as a coach, I am far more compassionate. I have a saying “no blame in team trading” where I work as a manger, and I encourage all my staff and my coaching clients to be kind to themselves when they make a mistake.
Looking for who to blame when a mistake happens, even if that is only blaming yourself, just adds to the awful feeling of messing something up. Most people want to do a good job, so when something goes wrong it doesn’t feel great, even more so if it was something you did or didn’t do that caused it. The last thing you need in that moment is blame. What is far more helpful is compassion, we are all human and will make mistakes, so being kind when that happens is a much better response. It also leaves you free to analyse what went wrong to see what you can learn from the situation.
Reflection
*If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add this email to your calendar
If you accept that we will all make mistakes at some point, and that dealing with a mistake is about analysing the data of what went wrong, then you are better able to learn and improve your work in the future. If you find yourself making a mistake, ask yourself these questions:
What went well?
What didn’t go so well?
What would I do differently next time?
What have I learnt from this experience?
How did it make me feel?
How would I like to feel?
I love asking the question “what went well?” as the first question when reviewing a mistake because it reminds me that not everything has gone wrong. Hindsight is also a wonderful thing, trust that you did your best with the information you had at the time and use this moment of reflection to better prepare yourself for the future.
Action
Making mistakes at work doesn’t feel good and the greater the importance of the work then the worse you might feel about it. If we know that making mistakes is inevitable then the best thing we can do is to prepare ourselves to deal with them when they happen
Task
The next time you make a mistake at work pay attention to how you feel. Are you overwhelmed with blame, either towards other people or yourself, or are you compassionate? Do you dwell on the mistake, or do you focus on how to fix it and how to learn from it? Think about how you would like to feel and what you would need to feel that way.
If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add the prompts in this email to your calendar.
Inspiration
“It is astounding how much a human being can endure without any outward sign of having been broken up into pieces.” - Florence Farmborough
I wanted to feature an artist this week as the career inspiration, as they seem to be so much more embracing of mistakes, allowing things not going well to open them up to new discoveries and ways of working.
Florence Farmborough came from a well-off middle-class family and at the outbreak of the first world war she was working in Moscow. As the war began, she qualified as a nurse and joined the Red Cross in Russia. Throughout the war she took photographs when she could and today her collection is looked after by the Imperial War Museum.
In later life she worked in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, came back to London during the Second World War, and amongst other things worked in Jamaica as a censor checking correspondence. She eventually returned to England and lived in Sussex for the rest of her life. Her diaries were published in 1974, Nurse at the Russian Front: A Diary 1914-18.
This quote relates to the horrors of war that Florence saw in 1917, but I think it is a good reminder of what other people may be going through. People are often dealing with lots of difficult and troubling things in their personal lives. When we aren't getting along with a colleague, or someone has made a mistake, it's worth asking what might be going on that you can't see. We can all be good at putting on a brave face and a mistake might be a sign of other things going on.
The most helpful thing I have found to deal with mistakes is to face them head on and reflect on what happened rather than forgetting about them and quickly moving on. It’s uncomfortable but ultimately it serves me better than pretending they didn’t happen. If you are looking for a bit more support in how to create a reflection practice you can download my free worksheet here.
I’ll be sharing some of my favourite work mistakes on my LinkedIn and Instagram profiles this month, so do follow me to hear about how they have helped me to grow in my career. I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on mistakes
