New Role Now What?

15 | How to dial down your fear of making a mistake at work

• Erin Foley • Season 1

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Mistakes are a crucial part of career growth, a necessary stepping stone to mastering your new role.  Yet so many of us are terrified of making a mistake at work.  This fear can be the culprit behind overthinking, procrastination, and even most common,  burnout.

In today's episode, Erin helps you to reframe your perspective and expectation around mistakes.  She offers clear strategies to help dial down your fear around mistakes so you can learn and perform effectively. 

We're also eager to hear from you, so don't hesitate to reach out with your queries or topics you'd like us to cover.  Email us at NewRoleNowWhat@gmail.com

Other related links:
Podcast website with transcripts  ErinMFoley.buzzsprout.com
Find information on working with Erin at ErinMFoley.com

Over the past 9 years, I’ve helped hundreds of professionals move out of overwhelm and self-doubt and into confidence.  I’ve designed this upgraded 12-week 1:1 coaching program for people who are ready to get out of their overthinking and second guessing and back into enjoying their work. If you’re dealing with fear of failure, overthinking, or uncertainty about whether your role is the right fit visit ErinMFoley.com to enroll.  

Speaker 1:

Fear of making a mistake. You are not alone in having this fear. Let's dive into today's episode, where I'm gonna help you dial this way down. Hey everybody, thank you so much for tuning in. I am back to bring you a new episode. No, I have not ghosted you, I am still here. I am still going to be making episodes. I know it has been a minute.

Speaker 1:

I've been really busy working with all of my clients, but I have not forgotten about you all and I'm excited to be bringing you a new episode today. So today we're going to be talking about a very hot topic. We're going to be talking about mistakes and generally this shows up for my clients in two ways. One is the fear of making a mistake and how that impacts the roles that you take, the level of anxiety you have in the new role, how you show up for your job, what you avoid doing, how much you overthink. And the other piece of mistakes is what to do after you've made a mistake. So today's episode I'm going to really focus on your fear of making mistakes and help you dial that down. And the next episode I'm going to dive into what to do if you've made a mistake and how you can bounce back and recover from that.

Speaker 1:

So one of the reasons why this is such a significant topic for so many of my clients is because for some of you, who are highly ambitious and you have a history of being pretty successful, you don't have a lot of exposure to making mistakes. So you literally don't have a lot of resilience around this because you've managed to stay kind of in your box and in your zone. You've been good at a lot of the things that you've done. Or maybe you've made some mistakes like way in the past, but in your previous role you really mastered it. So you didn't have a lot of opportunities where you felt like you were going to mess up, because you felt pretty confident and comfortable. It was easy for you to sort of move through your work day without missing things. You know your job and your role wasn't changing or challenging you significantly. So what happens is then suddenly you're leveling up and you may be in a new company, maybe just a new department, but the risk of making a mistake certainly increases because you are now in the position of challenging yourself, challenging your skills, challenging your knowledge.

Speaker 1:

So it is tricky in that to get through the fear of making a mistake. We really kind of want you exposed to making mistakes right. The more exposure you have to it, the less you become so fearful of what's going to happen and the more you get to practice being resilient. So if you have this really really strong fear of making mistakes, I want you to know that if you are in a role that's feeling challenging for you, where this is showing up, this is the perfect place for you to do this emotional work and to create this resilience that the more you are being stretched, the more you're going to be able to work through this fear and also work through what to do when mistakes happen. So let's just talk about a quick review on why it's really important to dial down the fear of making a mistake. It's not because I want you to like move through your role or through your career being careless. Obviously, it's really normal to want to mitigate mistakes as much as possible, but it's problematic because it can really affect the fear of like.

Speaker 1:

Trying to avoid mistakes can really affect how you're showing up in your role and it can limit you substantially. So one of the things that I often see is that people who have a really strong fear of making a mistake will avoid really diving into anything. So it will create a procrastination pattern that's extremely strong, because you're constantly afraid that you don't know enough or that you can't perfect it enough, that you need to sort of wait until you have more information or you feel more confident or you can dive into it more substantially. Before you'll dive into things Because you really really want to make sure that you're doing it perfectly. And so you end up working only under extreme pressure of a deadline. And it's fine. It works for some people. Some people just sort of work on deadlines all the time. But I find for many of my clients, myself included, that Procrastination pressure can really burn you out. It's just it can become untenable as you grow in your career, as the pressures become stronger and you really are trying to Figure out how to create a pattern for yourself where you're able to dive in and chip away at work so that you're not feeling that intense pressure at the end. But if you have an intense fear of making a mistake and having to do it perfectly, you'll often find yourself avoiding diving into the work the over.

Speaker 1:

The other thing that can happen if you have an extreme fear of making a mistake is that you overthink, you overcheck, you over prepare everything. So it means that you're working at a hundred and fifty percent all the time, and this also creates creates a lot of exhaustion and a lot of burnout. You know, working at a hundred fifty percent is not only not possible to maintain, but what I also find that's interesting is that for many of my clients, putting in the hundred and fifty percent does not create a hundred and fifty percent impact. So you might be working on something and you are going over it and over it and over it and over preparing it and checking it, and the difference between what you completed two hours ago and what you've completed now is not significant. So you've spent an additional two hours on something because you're so terrified that you're going to miss something or make a mistake, and it hasn't actually created a outcome or a product that is significantly better. So you're putting in a ton more effort and time and that effort and time is not, on the other end, creating an impact. That is that significant.

Speaker 1:

The third reason why I think it's really important to address the fear of making mistakes is that it can make you just like your work. It can really make you feel a lot of anxiety and a lot of resistance to your role, your job, that when you clean that piece up, people will find that they actually enjoy the work and they're able to dive in more and they're able to Contribute more, and it's much more fulfilling because they're not in that constant state of anxiety. So what I want to offer you today is an easy way to start to address this fear of making a mistake. Certainly for some of you, this fear will be buried in some stuff from your past. When I'm doing one-on-one coaching, I'm really looking at if this fear of making a mistake comes from a trauma from your past, or just a pattern that was developed or Something that happened to you when you were in school or with your parents, or if it's cultural. There's a lot of different things that can affect this and certainly it can be really helpful To tease those out and look at how those are showing up for you now. But I also think sometimes really simple reframes can help the brain significantly to ease this fear and to have a more neutral, open and rational approach to Mistakes. That can really help you feel more free.

Speaker 1:

So the first thing I want to give you as an important reframe when it comes to the fear of making mistakes is that avoiding mistakes avoids progress. Avoiding mistakes avoids Progress. It's kind of like the lean into failure bumper sticker that's everywhere. And I want to be clear because I hate slogans that we have in the self-help world, because I think they often oversimplify things and sometimes they sound really good in theory, but the brain is like, yeah, no thanks. Like yeah, that sounds great, but I'm obviously not going to walk around my life just trying to fail at everything left and right. We don't want you walking around your job just failing everywhere you go, because there are real consequences to that and certainly, depending on your role, the impact of a mistake is different in different roles. We don't want our doctor to be making careless mistakes left and right, so I'm not going to say that you just need to be trying to fail all the time.

Speaker 1:

Failure is good, sometimes it is, sometimes it's impactful, but I think it is really important to get clear and specific that if you are truly trying to avoid mistakes at all costs, you will end up avoiding progress. You don't gain progress by performing perfectly. You actually gain it by your willingness to dive into the new challenge, which means that you are opting into having a learning curve, which means there's going to be some mistakes that are made. So I don't want you failing left and right, but I want you to really get clear on the environments and the times that it makes sense for you to be making mistakes in ways that you can lean into that. So I think it's really important to look at your role and to look at what it is that you need to grow in terms of your knowledge base, your skill base, maybe their systems. You're learning, maybe you're trying to move to the next level and you're looking at all the things that you want to develop in yourself to get there. And I want you to list out all of the likely mistakes that happen when someone is progressing to that level, whether it's mastering this role or moving into the next role.

Speaker 1:

What are the likely mistakes in this role? Because I think we can really be confused about our expectations when we go into something. If we're looking at it from the outside, we likely are able to see. If we just plug Sally into that role and we're not Sally and we're watching Sally it makes sense to us that she's going to have to adjust, learn, she's going to have things that she misses, things she doesn't know and mistakes that she makes. And if you're looking at the role from the outside, you can probably see where those likely will be. Is there a lot of systems involved? Are there logistics that she may miss? Are there things that she might get confused about in a meeting and she might say the wrong thing?

Speaker 1:

Just look at all the places where, if she were really throwing herself into that role, into learning, into contributing, into asking questions, what are all the mistakes that would likely occur at some point? And then I want you to ask yourself are you willing to opt into those mistakes in order to learn and master this role? Because avoiding mistakes will avoid your progress. So if you want to master the role, you are opting in two mistakes at some level, and there are lots of low impact mistakes that come with many of our new roles and in fact, there's a level of mistakes that's often expected when we take on a new job, that our supervisors and teams kind of understand. A lot of times there's systems even to catch those or there's double checking, and I will find that my clients, even who have maybe management or someone who has been in the role longer, who is kind of a backup check when they're finding the mistakes or finding the errors. My clients are really taking that to heart and feeling terrible and making it mean a bunch of things, despite the fact that the very reason why the system is created to catch your mistake is because there's an understanding that there's going to be some mistakes.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes the environment you're in is less forgiving of mistakes than others, but often the environment is more forgiving of mistakes than you are of mistakes. So I'm going to say that again Most of the time the environment you're in is more forgiving of the mistakes than you are, particularly for my clients, for the type of people that are attracted to the work that I do tuning into this podcast. So many of you have such high expectations of yourself and such perfectionistic tendencies that you tend to hold yourself to an incredibly high standard and your mistakes are just like not an option for me. I'm not comfortable with them. You make it mean a bunch of things about yourself and so, while the environment might be saying it's fine we understand this happens, we understand why you missed that you're really making it mean that you're not competent in some way, but opting in at the beginning by really reminding your brain of all of the ways in which mistakes are going to probably show up in this job can be so helpful.

Speaker 1:

I did this in business building. I do this with anyone who I'm talking to who is building a business. I always talk to them about really making a list of all the things that aren't going to work and opting into that, because when you're building a business, there's a million things that don't work. When you're learning sales and you're learning marketing and you're creating content and all the things and you have to opt into that and know that you're going to make mistakes, things are not going to work, you're going to feel like things are failing and it can help the brain a lot to just see them written out and hear yourself saying, yeah, I opt into that, I want the progress. So I'm willing to be resilient with the mistake because I want the progress in learning this.

Speaker 1:

The second reframe that I want to offer you that has really helped me throughout my life and I have the privilege of seeing from the inside because I work with so many incredibly successful, talented, smart, ambitious people is that competent, successful people make mistakes. Competent, successful people make mistakes. One of the things that I see that creates a lot of mistake tension in my clients is that they have an assumption that competent people don't mess up, don't make mistakes and don't have failures. In theory, you may know like, oh yeah, successful people fail. You know like successful people tell the stories of their failures. But really in your day to day life, you're sort of moving through the world with this assumption that you can't have mistakes and competency together. And it's not true. And it's so important that you be like that you open your eyes to this and you really look around the room and allow your brain to see. Look at the people in the room who you see as so unbelievably competent. They not only have made mistakes, they still make mistakes. They've not only made them in the past, they're still making mistakes today.

Speaker 1:

Competent, successful people make mistakes. And so you have to really disconnect this idea that making a mistake means you're not competent. Right, competency is really about the overall outcomes you produce over a period of time. It's about consistency. It's not about never making a mistake. I'm also not saying that if someone is showing up in their job and they are making high impact mistakes over and over and over and over and over again. Perhaps they're not competent in that specific job, perhaps there's a skill they don't have, perhaps it's not a fit Right?

Speaker 1:

I understand that this is a nuanced topic, but what is also true is that people who are very competent, have mastered their role, are extremely successful. Their competency is not about the fact that they never make a mistake, never misspeak, never don't have an answer. It's that when you look at them, you're able to see that overall, they produce positive outcomes consistently, and that's what makes you trust them, right? So if you look at someone who's in the room that you see as really competent and you imagine that they make a mistake, you can't really see that. Imagine that they make a mistake and ask yourself what you would make that mean. And most of the time, my clients will be like it's fine, like I get it, because I know they're competent, I trust them, I trust their output.

Speaker 1:

If you are avoiding mistakes 100% of the time, you aren't going to grow your knowledge or your skills, and so the reason I know that competent people and successful people make mistakes is because, in order to become competent and successful, they have to be willing to have some misses. They have to be willing to not know. They have to be willing to mess something up, because if you aren't willing to do that, you're not challenging yourself truly. Not just like in the inspiring way of challenge yourself, but in the practical way of you know, if I want to learn how to create a webinar, I have to be willing to have things mess up. To have things not work, I have to be willing to sit down and do it wrong. There's just no way for me to avoid making mistakes at all costs and also grow that skill. So competent, successful people make mistakes and the final reframe that I want to offer you is that confident people can handle making mistakes. Confident people can handle making mistakes.

Speaker 1:

So many of my clients will say I just want to feel confident. I want to confident. I just smashed the words competent and confident together, which they do want to feel. I guess confident is how they want to feel, but many of them talk about wanting to show up with confidence that they are. If I could just fill in the blank, I would feel confident, and oftentimes we think like if I performed perfectly, if I never made mistakes, if my work was always given positive feedback, I would then feel confident and calm. I wouldn't have anxiety, I'd skip into work. And it's just not true. To feel confident, you actually have to believe you can handle making mistakes.

Speaker 1:

So when I'm in a coaching session this is such a good example of this and I am working someone through something early on I really felt connected to my ability as a coach. I felt confident in my ability as a coach and I also felt confident in going in a direction that wasn't working and backing up and moving to a different one. So if I made a mistake and I thought, oh, I'm sort of going down a road that I thought was going to get us to loosen something and I've made a mistake, this isn't the right road, this isn't the right questions, this isn't the right exercise, I have no problem saying this doesn't feel right. I kind of feel like I've moved you in one direction and it's not working. I want to back up and move you in a different one. I get it.

Speaker 1:

It's not like a blatant mistake, the way you might think about it, but what I'm trying to say is like I'm not afraid to be wrong when I'm coaching. I'm not afraid of making a mistake where someone is like I don't like this or I don't want you to be doing this or I don't want to do this exercise and I'm like, ok, and I back up and do something different. I'm not afraid to say, oh, I'm sorry, I made a mistake with that, because I really do believe in this particular skill. I can handle it. I can handle making a mistake, I can handle getting feedback that someone doesn't like something, and knowing that I can handle that makes me feel so much more confident in pushing that skill and showing up and doing the work and growing it and progressing it.

Speaker 1:

So the confidence does not come from not making mistakes. It comes from knowing you can handle making mistakes. So I want you to really shift into realistic expectations that making mistakes is going to be necessary. You're going to have to opt into them in order to master this role. And, rather than making your goal to not make mistakes, make your goal to be confident that you can handle it.

Speaker 1:

And in the next episode I'm really going to talk to you about when you make a mistake. What do you do? How do you show up for yourself? How do you address it? How do you deal with it in a way that it doesn't become something that spins or you are really hard on yourself for.

Speaker 1:

But I want you to start with today's episode of really just pushing your mindset around mistakes in general and I really want you to play around with these reframes that avoiding mistakes avoids progress, that competent, successful people make mistakes and that to be confident, you have to believe you can handle making mistakes, because confident people can handle making mistakes.

Speaker 1:

So your work is in writing down all of the mistakes that you're opting into, all of the mistakes that will be likely as a part of the journey of learning this role and mastering this role and really, ahead of time, reminding your brain that you are making a decision to opt into these, to showing up for yourself even though you know mistakes are going to happen, and for you not making them mean that you're not competent, and for you to remember that to gain the confidence that you're wanting, you have to be willing to make those mistakes. So I will be back with the next episode on what to do when a mistake happens. Thank you, guys, so much for tuning in. Please feel free to rate and give comments on this podcast, especially, if you like it, you can do that on Spotify and Apple. It really helps to get reviews and ratings and I'll be back with more great info for you all, and I hope that you guys have an amazing week.