New Role Now What?

16 | What to do when you make a mistake at work

• Erin Foley • Season 1

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In today's episode, Erin delves into the nuanced process of managing work mistakes with resilience and self-assurance.  She addresses the complex emotions that you might be navigating after you make a mistake.    This episode offers helpful insights on how to gain self-awareness, take responsibility, and overcome the fear of failure and mistakes in a professional settings.  

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Speaker 1:

Making a mistake is a very normal part of adjusting and learning a new role. So, in today's episode, if you are finding yourself terrified of mistakes and reacting emotionally internally when you've made a mistake, this is the episode for you. Tune in and I'm going to teach you what to do when you've made a mistake at work. Hello, hello, welcome back friends, happy 2024. Listen, I know it's been a minute. I know it has taken me longer than some of you may have wanted for me to come in here and dive back into this episode. For those of you who have reached out, told me how much you're loving the podcast, talked to me about how much you liked the last episode on fear of making a mistake. I see you. I really appreciate you giving me feedback. I've been working away with all of my clients, but now I am back to give you this episode on what to do if you've made a mistake. So, for today's episode, if you have not heard the last episode on fear of making a mistake, I want to encourage you to go back and listen to that. What it does is it helps lay the foundation of how I want you to think about mistakes. You want to think about it as like creating your own philosophy around mistakes and really internalizing that and reinforcing that with yourself. Creating that philosophy is very important in terms of it setting you up for how you're going to feel and how you're possibly going to react when a mistake happens. So in this episode I'm going to take that foundation and I'm going to talk you through sort of how to operationalize that or how to put that into practice when you've actually made a mistake at work, particularly for those of you who find that making a mistake at work really spirals you out. You think about it for days, you feel a ton of anxiety and because of that, you may find yourself really over squeezing your work because you're always afraid of making that mistake and you're always afraid of the fallout from that mistake. So I'm going to talk about two steps to my process when it comes to what to do when you've made a mistake. The first is going to be addressing the mistake internally with yourself, and the second is going to be addressing the mistake externally with your supervisor or co-worker, client, colleague, whoever it is that that mistake may have affected. And let me just say this the first part of this podcast episode where I'm going to talk about addressing this mistake internally with yourself is, in my opinion, the most important part of what you do when you make a mistake. This is the key to really reinforcing your philosophy on making mistakes. This is the key to how you're going to feel moving forward each time you make a mistake is based on how you address mistakes internally with yourself. This is where I believe the crux of the shifts can happen with you.

Speaker 1:

I'm certainly going to talk about what to do with your supervisor, if you're talking about the mistake and owning it, but the truth is, many of you who are listening to this already know exactly how to own your mistake to your supervisor, to the client. You already know what kind of language to use. You already know how to do it. I'm going to talk about it anyway and I'm going to give you some possibly additional tips that perhaps you don't know. But what many of you are not doing is step one. You're not addressing the mistake internally with yourself in a way that is productive and effective at not creating shame, anxiety and self-judgment around the mistake.

Speaker 1:

So let's dive in. Let's say you have made a mistake at work. We could look at lots of different examples. It could be a small mistake. Maybe you misquoted something with a client and you quickly corrected for that, followed up with the client, told them so sorry, I sent you the wrong information. Here's the correct information. So it might have been an easy mistake. It might have been something that you were able to course correct quickly. It could be that you made a more significant mistake. Maybe you closed out a deal with someone and you forgot to take into account the currency change and maybe it costs thousands of dollars for the company because of that mistake. So that mistake would be a little more high impact, something that you can't course correct quickly or easily and something that you will need to reach out and have a conversation with your supervisor about. What's interesting is that both of these mistakes one we could argue is pretty low impact and one is a little bit more high impact I have seen people have very intense reactions to both of these type of mistakes and those intense reactions are often because of what is happening internally when they've made that mistake. So you know, person one whose mistake was pretty small and was course corrected easily still may find themselves really feeling like I shouldn't have done this, really feeling like there's no room for this kind of mistake, really feeling deep embarrassment and shame around the mistake, despite the fact that it's a pretty low impact mistake and it can be corrected quickly.

Speaker 1:

So the key for step one, when you realize you've made a mistake, is owning it to yourself, without defending, diminishing or blaming. And this is the really difficult part. Your brain internally is going to want to jump into a defensive mode. It's going to want to look at your external circumstance as the reason for the mistake and you're going to hear things like they set me up to fail. I should be trained better than this. How am I supposed to do all this? I'm doing too many things. That's why this mistake happened. The workload is unreasonable. I was given too much freedom too fast. Someone should be watching over what I'm doing. It's not fair the way that they are, you know, putting all of this on me independently so quickly. So your brain's going to jump into immediate protection mode where it wants to kind of diminish and defend yourself.

Speaker 1:

It wants to blame external circumstances, and this is where things get very tricky. I am not saying that external circumstances did not contribute to the mistake. It very well may be that multiple factors in your external circumstance is what led to this error. But it becomes really difficult to parse that out when we're in an emotional space of focusing externally. And what happens when you start to indulge that external blame is that you're shaming yourself for making a mistake and you're shaming yourself in a way that's tricky for you to catch. And what I mean by that is if I am reinforcing this idea that it has to be externally caused, because if I were to own it as internally something that I did, it would be bad. So when you're indulging blame, defending and diminishing and what I mean by indulging that is you're making those arguments to yourself. We've all done this, like I've done this a million times, my head starts to build the argument. Then I go home and I build the argument to my husband. Then my best friend calls and I tell my best friend about how this mistake happened and how it's BS and all of the things that the company has done to set me up for this and all of the circumstances that led to this. I'm building a case and I'm building it over and over and over again.

Speaker 1:

And what happens when we're in that space is you are unconsciously sending yourself a message that there's something very wrong with having made a mistake, that it's unsafe to make mistakes and that it's unsafe to own mistakes, that it has to be something outside of you, because if it's something inside of you and you just missed something or you forgot something or whatever the reason may be that the mistake happened, your brain is basically telling you that that's unacceptable and that we need to focus externally. And so it hurts your relationship to mistakes. And my goal as a coach who's trying to up-level people professionally and get you feeling very resilient in the workspace, is that your relationship with mistakes is a good one. It's a resilient one. You're not afraid of them, you know how to bounce back from them, you know how to take accountability, you know how to move on without getting lost or spinning in that mistake. And if your brain creates this unconscious shame spiral where it's almost pushing the mistake away from you and pushing it externally and focusing on all these other people and all these reasons why that mistake happened, it makes it very difficult for you to build a healthy relationship with mistakes. So what happens when you're in that headspace and you are really fired up and you are finding yourself making all of those arguments and finding the people around you indulging in those with you, which is fine and totally normal and what we want from our family and friends to validate us and be on our team.

Speaker 1:

But in this circumstance, what becomes problematic is that the message you're sending to yourself is me making a mistake is bad, I should never make a mistake. And what is really behind it most of the time is that you're trying to avoid a correlation that you're making that me making a mistake means I'm not competent or capable. And if that correlation is something that you buy into on any level that if I make a mistake it means I'm not competent or capable, that I can't learn this job, that I can't succeed in this, then you will push the mistake away, because to accept it would mean that you are telling yourself you're not competent or capable. And the truth is the relationship we want you to have with mistakes is they're not a problem for me. I'm not above them. I make mistakes, I am competent and I make mistakes.

Speaker 1:

Making mistakes is not something I can't come back from. You will react very differently to a mistake, depending on your relationship to mistakes and what you make it mean about yourself. So, if I allowed it, if I started from the assumption that it is okay to make a mistake without justifying the external circumstances that contributed to that mistake at the start. Then I can come from the space that I'm competent and capable and I can work on trusting myself to not spiral out when I've made a mistake on myself. And I know that a lot of you your brain, is saying but I'm in a workspace and my supervisor might be hard on me and people around me might call me out, and I understand all of that. Some of you are in a workspace that's a little bit less forgiving of mistakes. A lot of you, however, that I work with are in workspaces where your supervisors and the people around you are far more forgiving of a mistake than you are of yourself. When you've made a mistake, oftentimes the way they react and the feedback they give you is quite minimal and you will spiral anyway, or your brain will tell you they might have said that, but now they're actually thinking bad things about me, or they don't trust me or they don't think I'm competent.

Speaker 1:

So so much of the load is often based on your own relationship to the mistake and the way in which you are moving through the process of. It's almost like a pendulum and you tend to swing from all these. External circumstances created this mistake and it's not my fault. Another end of the pendulum that you swing to is oh my gosh, I'm not competent, I'm not capable, I should quit this job. You know I shouldn't be making these mistakes, and so you're flipping between one extreme to the other because of the discomfort of your relationship with mistakes, and where we want you is really cleanly in the middle.

Speaker 1:

So the first step is to really work to not overindulge that external focus and to get to the point where you can just name the mistake to yourself in a clear and neutralized manner. Take out the drama, take out the. I was super busy. I was doing all of these things. They threw 10 things at me. I was trying to work quickly. There was a deadline. Take out all of that and just name the mistake. I misquoted the number. I made a mistake. I misquoted the number. I made a mistake. I did not account for the currency change Period.

Speaker 1:

I want you to get into your own clarity, into a single sentence about the mistake that you made, and I want you to take all of the emotional language around it out and just sit with the sentence, the neutralized sentence and I want you to focus on how you would feel about this mistake if you believed you can handle coming back from mistakes. It is not a reflection on your competency, your capabilities or your future success, and I want you to really think about how you would feel about the mistake and about yourself if you were coming from that perspective. The place we want to get your brain to is where you don't feel like you need to protect yourself from a mistake emotionally. That you don't feel like it's dangerous. It doesn't mean you're going to love it. It doesn't mean that we're looking to make mistakes. It just means that you can get clean much faster.

Speaker 1:

Defensiveness assumes you have to defend something. If you believe mistakes will happen, they're going to happen. Even when you're competent, you're going to feel much less defensive internally. So, regardless of how you own it externally, what matters the most is what you make it mean internally. So internally, we're not going to feed that shame spiral. We're not going to send the message to ourselves that this mistake is something that we need to grossly defend, that we need to run from that. We need to blame everyone for because mistakes are fine and they happen, regardless of how people externally react to that mistake. Even if your supervisor does react in a way that is intense, you don't have to react in a way that is intense. You get to decide what your relationship is with mistakes and you get to have your own back. And the trick is, oftentimes people confuse that and they make having their own back mean not literally taking on the mistake, because that feels heavy, and instead I want you to have your own back by taking the mistake, owning the mistake and not making it mean anything about yourself, showing yourself you can carry that mistake and own it and move forward right that you don't have your own back by pushing the mistake off of you and onto someone else. Okay, step two is owning it externally to your boss, your client, your colleague, whoever this might have affected.

Speaker 1:

One of the questions that I sometimes get is should I own it? Should I tell them, should I fess up? This is a nuanced question and it really is dependent on your workplace culture how often people have their hands on what you're doing, how much they want to be in the loop on whether it was a high impact or a low impact mistake. Is it something that's going to come back to your supervisor If you're feeling like you're hiding it, if you're feeling like you're not sure whether or not you should tell your supervisor or not, then I always err on the side of telling them right. I don't want you again shaming yourself unconsciously by hiding an error or a mistake. If it's a low impact mistake and you can clearly correct it, it doesn't have a high impact on a lot of people. It's likely not something that your supervisor needs to be bothered with or has anything that they're going to need to do because of it, then you move on from it.

Speaker 1:

But what becomes important in that circumstance is that you use that as an opportunity to work through your own relationship with mistakes. Notice how much do you feel the need to defend it, talk about it, blame, get mad about it, tell your family and friends about it. If you notice you're in that headspace, you probably are still having a relationship with mistakes where you feel very fearful and you're holding a standard for yourself where you're just not allowing it. So many people will tell me mistakes are human, mistakes are normal. But they do not practice that on themselves, right, it's like a philosophy they have. They'll say it to their best friend. They'll tell you that's how they feel about mistakes, but when push comes to shove and they make a mistake, they will actually feel a ton of shame and a ton of resistance to sort of being wrong or having made that mistake, and so you want to call yourself on your own BS.

Speaker 1:

You want to notice if you believe mistakes are okay for other people, then you have to also believe they're okay for you. If you believe mistakes are okay for other people but not for you, then you're holding yourself above other people, and I think it's always important to remember you don't have to be better than everyone else to be successful. You don't have to be held to a standard that is different than everyone else around you. You, too, are allowed to make mistakes, just like your coworkers and your colleagues and your supervisors and everyone else in your professional industry who also makes mistakes. So if you are in the position where you are realizing you need to own it externally to a supervisor and you are going to share with them what happened, the first, most important thing is to get to that headspace that I talked about, where you've neutralized it and you really have owned it in a very clean way, without all of the drama, and so the first thing you want to do when you're taking accountability is you want to own it in a very simple way that doesn't diminish blame or defend Right. I misquoted the client. I sent an email back and let them know and course corrected, without a lot of drama, without a lot of explaining away.

Speaker 1:

And the reason why that is so important because we have this tendency to want to explain why it happened in terms of I was really busy or all these things were coming at me, or maybe we're trying to like significantly diminish it and be like it really wasn't that big of a deal. What happens on the other end is the supervisor, who's listening, feels unsafe and untrusting, like if someone doesn't own a mistake very clearly and they don't articulate what they did and make it clear to us that they can see that we feel unsafe because we start to feel like this person isn't seeing this clearly. And that's when you'll get into a situation where your supervisor, your colleague, might start pushing on trying to explain to you why it was an error and why it's problematic. If they're pushing a lot on why it was an error and why it's problematic, it's probably because you've been talking around it in some way or you've been putting a but on your sentence, meaning you've been clear that you made this mistake, but you keep trying to put a but to diminish the responsibility of it, and it makes people feel untrusting. So a lot of us think, oh, people aren't going to trust me if I own this mistake and tell them that I did it.

Speaker 1:

But most of the time the opposite is true. When you don't clearly own it or take accountability for it and show that you're very clear on what happened and very clear on what you're going to do moving forward, people feel very uneasy and they want to try to get you to that headspace. So they start pushing on you more and more and overly explaining what you did and why it was wrong. So you want to kind of cut them off before they have to even get to that, not literally cut them off, but you want to come in clear and owning it Right. You want to come in first saying I made the mistake, I'm really sorry, I misquoted the client, I sent a follow up and corrected it, and then you want to just offer what you're going to do, moving forward, to correct for that. I noticed that I was sending two follow ups at the same time. I'm going to start just sending one so that I can make sure I'm looking through all the details.

Speaker 1:

So the first thing that you're doing is really just being neutral and really clear, apologizing for the error, owning it, being clear about what you're going to do, moving forward to make sure it doesn't happen again. And you want to give that space, and what I mean by that is stop there, allow the person you're speaking to to respond, allow them to have whatever feelings they need to have about it. Allow them to say whatever it is they want to say. Give that space, sit with that before you offer any feedback on things that you feel like you need to help you moving forward. So it isn't that I don't want you to be clear. If you feel like there's something that you're asking for to help you moving forward, if it's, could someone double-check this? Or is there a training on X, y and Z that I could dive into so I could learn more about? I understand that many of you might be feeling like there is something in the circumstance, the environment, the training that I would like to help me avoid making that mistake in the future. But that needs to be the last thing you say, not the first thing you say.

Speaker 1:

When you are offering people ownership, accountability, clarity that you understand the mistake, clarity that you understand how you course corrected it if you are able to, and ownership on what you're doing, moving forward on your part, you are putting yourself in a position where people are going to be so much more open to also supporting you, helping you, moving forward, versus people tend to come in really moving past that first piece very quickly, right, like owning it very quickly, kind of diminishing it and then being like can you do X, y and Z? I really need help with a lot's coming at me, whatever it is, and so they'll do it in a way that makes the person feel like who's listening to you? You're not owning it. They start to feel unsafe, they start to push back and they're just way less likely to be giving you the support that you need. So that's my tips on what to do if you've made a mistake at work.

Speaker 1:

The most important part, as I have said over and over again in this, is what you do internally your ability to sit with yourself owning the mistake, owning it in a very neutral way, without a lot of drama, owning your parts of it, owning what you did that led to it, and owning it without shaming yourself, without needing to blame others, without needing to push all of that externally, but instead just making it okay that you made a mistake and really building a relationship with mistakes that feels resilient to you, that feels like I know how to handle it when I make a mistake and I know how to move forward and I know how to own it.

Speaker 1:

And I'm not gonna make it mean that I'm not competent or I'm not capable or I'm not going to be successful in my job, because if you really believe in your competency and you also know that I'm competent and mistakes happen, your reaction to them will be drastically different. All right, thank you so much for tuning in and for your patience on me diving back in in 2024 with podcast episodes. I'll be back with more great information for you all. If you are interested in working with me one-on-one, you want help getting more resilient, dealing with your fear of making a mistake, your fear of failure, your overwhelm in your new position, feel free to grab a consultation session. Go to Erin M as in mindset fullycom. I will be back with more great information for you. In the meantime, have a great week. Bye.