The Worst Thing You Can Do After Making a Mistake

Have you ever made a mistake that felt so bad that you would do anything to erase it? Oh my goodness, have I had these moments in my life! I'm gonna share the first one that comes to mind with you, which to you might actually not seem like that big of a deal, and it really actually shouldn't have been that big of a deal, but it was. In my past relationship, my ex, he was an IT guy and he was very technical. So when I started my business, I wasn't very techie at all, so he helped me set that stuff up and he held a lot of the passwords and a lot of the information as far as how I got into my website and all this stuff. And yes, I realized that probably wasn't very smart, but at the time I was very naive and I didn't know any better. And I thought, you know, if I'm gonna get this done, I'm gonna need some help and he's offering to help me, so So he was helping me. So there was a situation where I wanted to hire somebody to help me with something, and I had to give them a password. So I went ahead and did this, and I told him about it, and he blew up. He got so, so angry at me, like I had done the worst thing in the possible world. He used very mean, harsh language with me. I don't exactly remember what it was. I might have blocked some of it out, but it was really over the top because yes, I maybe shouldn't have shared that password, but once it had been done, we could take steps to correct it before anything bad happened, right? We could change the password. He was really upset because he had used that password for other things, so he was like, oh, now I gotta change all my passwords and I've probably already been hacked, and you know, this was the worst thing you could have done and you betrayed my trust. And he made it such a big thing. So to paint a little visual for you, it felt like this. Let me take my guys here from the shelf. It felt like this. It felt like I was like, okay, I have to tell you something. I'm really sorry. I don't— I maybe shouldn't have done this. I hope it's not a big deal, but I just wanted to let you know I gave a password to somebody for helping me get into my website and change this. And he freaked out and he was like, Oh my God, you shouldn't have done that. Now everything's a disaster and my whole infrastructure of my whole password system is collapsing and it's your fault. And I curled up into a ball and said, oh my God, I'm so sorry. This is terrible. I'm the worst. I'm so sorry. And I hope you can forgive me. And I groveled. Okay, let's put these guys down. So it was such a big thing thrown out of proportion. So I went and got coaching from one of the groups I was in, and I, I told my mentor, I'm like, look, this is what happened, this is— this was the reaction, and I'm just feeling really, really terrible about this, and I don't really know what to do. And my mentor said, look, you made a mistake, you just apologize and you move on. You say, you know, I'm sorry I shared something that I shouldn't have shared, I won't do it again, it was a lapse in judgment. Done, right? And that's not how it went down in the relationship because he held it against me for a week, literally a week. Like, he didn't want to eat dinner with me, he didn't want to talk to me. It was just a grudge held, like a very strong grudge held for 7 days, no exaggeration. So when that happened and I got all this advice from other people and I talked to other people, everybody was like He is being so disproportionately hard on you that it actually doesn't make any sense. Because first of all, there was actually no harm done. The passwords were changed. There was no real risk of anything happening. It was just he was the kind of person who would look for an excuse to be upset. So when this happened, it was a very good excuse for him to jump on and use to the maximum to make me feel really bad. And at the time, I didn't know that I didn't have to. I didn't understand 'cause I didn't have my own back, right? So now, after many years of coaching people and having lived with someone who was like that, 'cause that's one extreme situation, but many situations were like that, and very small little mistakes during the day, like forgetting to communicate something trivial or just very simple things that I didn't even know were mistakes would mean that he wasn't gonna talk to me for 2 hours or he was gonna be mad or we weren't gonna have dinner together or we just weren't gonna go do the plans that we had because he was now upset. And so this just became really unhealthy, but I didn't know it was at the time. I honestly thought, you know, you made a mistake, now you have to pay the price for that mistake. It's kinda like you're in jail, and you have to pay your time, you have to do your time. And I thought that's how it was. And now I think of mistakes quite differently. And as I evolved in that relationship, I stood up for myself and I acted differently in those times. So fast forward to the end of the relationship, when I still did things that weren't perfect, right? And I do them, I'm still not perfect in my current relationship, but that dynamic is much different, is— Something like that would happen, and then instead of me making myself small, crying, feeling bad because I thought, you know, you have to do your time and you have to feel bad and that's the point, you have to do that otherwise he will never forgive you because he'll, he'll think you don't care kind of thing. Instead of that, this would be my mindset. It would be like, yes, I made a mistake, I have my own back, I know that I've done everything I can to repair the mistake. And I'm okay with that. And this is kind of when I was really invited to allow human error in my life more than I had ever really allowed it before. I was like, I'm just gonna allow it. I'm gonna make that decision to allow it. So another story I had, and this really helped me coaching a client because she had— I had, um, a client named Sarah. Let's call her Sarah. She had missed a meeting on her calendar. And she felt so, so terrible about this. Okay? She had missed a work meeting with her manager and a few teammates where she needed to bring some important information to the meeting. And for some reason, it wasn't on her calendar for the day. She didn't see it. Maybe it was in a different calendar. Whatever the reason, she didn't get to the meeting. Right? And so, when she— when it was discovered, she felt terrible, but it was too late. And And she was beating herself up in the same way that my ex used to beat me up, and then I would consequently beat myself up in the same way. And she was just so paranoid. She was like, I'm checking all my calendars every day, like I'm checking them every few minutes just to make sure I'm not missing anything. And it was just— she was going over the— to the other line of extreme, right? Like extreme, I can't miss a thing ever again, and if I do, then you know, it's the worst thing in the world kind of thing. And you can take that and make it mean that, right? You could— if you miss a meeting. So for example, if this has ever happened to you, or you've ever done something inadvertently that you didn't mean to, it was a mistake, honest mistake, but then you feel so bad about it afterwards that you are kind of overcompensating for it, right? It's like me being like, oh, I'm gonna check all my passwords every day, right? I'm gonna spend a lot of time making sure that passwords aren't— are being changed, or that this is happening, right? And that wouldn't be an effective use of time, just like Sarah's effect— Sarah wasn't effectively using her time when she was obsessing over her calendar, right? So she could take some steps and be like, yes, I'm gonna put in— I'm gonna put in a system so that doesn't happen again. And she could look at it rationally and reasonably and be like, okay, now I'm not gonna do that again. But she was obsessing over it, and she was feeling preemptive anxiety. beforehand, right? Like even before another thing happened, right? And so I was sharing with her, I was like, okay, but what if that does happen again? Because it could, right? It could happen again. Even it could even happen and it might not even be her fault. Like somebody could put something in her calendar and she might not see it. She might not have received the email so she couldn't accept it. Like it could happen and it couldn't— it might not be anything she could have done. And then I said, What are you gonna do then? Let's assume it just happens, it happens again, what are you gonna do? And she's like, I don't know, I have to do everything I can to not let it happen. And that's where she wanted to put all her energy and focus. And I said, I understand that, but are you going to allow for human error in your life? And that question was kind of what, what she had to sit with. It's like, are you going to allow for that? Because if you're not, then you make the decision to just overcompensate, double-check, double, triple-check everything all the time, become chronically anxious around things that haven't happened yet. Or you can decide, okay, I might make another mistake in the future. I'm gonna try my best not to. These are the things I'm gonna put in place. But if I do, then this is how I'm gonna talk to myself. And so that was kind of the lesson that I learned when I was treated in that way, or when I was met when I made a mistake in that way. It was like Okay, how am I gonna choose to talk to myself now? Because he could talk to me like that all day long, but if I refuse to talk to myself like that, then I'm the one who actually has the experience, right? So yes, he would do that to me, but then I would think, okay, that's just ridiculous, right? It's just so silly. Why are you making that such a big deal? This is really not such a big deal, right? And it's funny because when I made a mistake and I did beat myself up over it, and to me it felt like a really huge mistake, he would just say, get over it. It's not like people died. Like, get over it. What's your problem? Why are you having such a hard time with it? So when I was— when I made a mistake and it didn't have anything to do with him, like I didn't harm him, he just wanted me to get over it because it inconvenienced him and it made him feel bad. So I couldn't really win. And I can share with you another mistake that I processed in a different way. So when I was working in events planning And I had an event that I had to plan. There was lots of moving parts to this event. And the one event was we had to get a bus. We had to get buses. We had to get people from the hotel at the venue to, uh, it was a fun day event and there was a bus ride involved. So everybody had to wait outside of the hotel, get onto the buses, and then head out to the fun day event, which was 20 minutes, 30 minutes away, but it was not walking distance. So we had to, we had to get on the bus. And so it was 1 o'clock and we're standing there. Everybody, like hundreds of people, are standing there waiting for these buses to come. And it's 1 o'clock and the buses haven't arrived. And I'm just standing there like not even thinking about it because I thought, you know, it's all been arranged, the buses are coming. Like, I had never messed something up like this in my life, so I trusted myself. I thought, you know, you've got it all covered, you are really good at what you do, this is all working well. The buses were not there, okay? So the director of engineering comes up to me and he goes, hmm, shouldn't we be loading the buses by now? Like, What's going on? And so I looked at my phone and I'm like, oh my goodness, it's 1 o'clock. Yeah, why aren't the buses here? So I immediately get on the phone and I discover that the buses are actually booked for the next day. So we've got hundreds of people standing outside a hotel venue and there are no buses and they are not coming. So I investigate. I'm like, what happened? Why are they coming tomorrow? Today is actually the day of our fun day. I spoke to somebody this morning to confirm that. And I don't understand. So they sent me a contract that was signed for the next day. And guess what? It was signed by my assistant who wasn't at the event. So that was a different thing. I was like, okay, I got to figure out why she did that. But anyway, in the moment we had to deal with this problem. So what was past was past, bygones be bygones in this moment, and we had to solve for it in the moment. So they were able to rush and scramble and get some drivers for us and Bring the buses, and we had it sorted. We got to the event, but it was very stressful for me and very, very publicly humiliating because there were hundreds of people looking at me being like, "What happened? You messed up. Why aren't why didn't the buses come? What did you do?" It was very embarrassing. So for the rest of that event, I was feeling a lot of embarrassment and a lot of feelings, and my ex was with me because we were allowed to bring our partners even though they weren't participating in the company meetings and the company. event, they were allowed to come and just enjoy the hotel room and be in the place we were at, Whistler. It was a really gorgeous place to be. And so in that moment, I was humiliated. I was embarrassed. It took me a long time to recover from this mistake. It felt like it lasted a long time. All the while, my ex is saying, what's your problem? Get over it. Nobody died. You're acting like people died. You need to get over it. And in that moment, I was like, No, actually I don't. I need to process some feelings because it's actually very normal and human that I would feel what I need to feel right now, and I need to feel it for as long as I need to feel it so that I can process it and get through it. And so there's just different ways in which you need to deal with when you make a mistake, and it's, it's going to be up to you to how you, to how you do it. But the biggest takeaway is how you talk to yourself, because if you talk to yourself the way that my ex talked to me, Like breathing fire at me. If you talk to yourself that way whenever you make a mistake, you will be afraid to act. You'll be paranoid. You'll be spending a lot of time trying to prevent mistakes instead of acting and doing the things you need to do to move forward towards your goals. So that's my point, is the way that you talk to yourself might be different in each situation depending on how big the mistake was or how impactful it was. But you need to be able to talk to yourself in a way that you would talk to your child, for example. So when it came to the password mistake, it would be different than it would be for the bus leaving 200 people waiting mistake, right? So for the password mistake, it was, you know what, it wasn't a big deal. Nothing got hurt, like nobody got harmed. There was no breach in security. We caught it in time. It's all good. You learned your lesson. that may have been close, but it's okay, right? And then— and that, that's my voice talking to me because he wasn't talking to me like that. And you might have a boss who's talking to you kind of mean, but you get to decide how you talk to yourself. So in that situation, that's how I— that's the decision that felt right for me. And then in a big situation where it was publicly humiliating and you made a huge mistake, for example, like I did, I might need to say to myself, you know what, that's perfectly acceptable that you feel that way. Of course you feel that way. That's perfectly normal. Whatever feelings are coming up, you just need to allow yourself to feel them, because if you resist them and you push them down and you tell yourself that you shouldn't be feeling them, they are just going to— they are just going to scream louder to want to be heard, right? It's like that. It's like a child. If you keep on telling the child, just shut up and get over it, they might swallow their feelings, but eventually they are going to either explode, they're going to come out at another time, they're going to traumatized, something else is going to happen and they're going to have to express them. So we want to process the feelings in the moments when we need to. And surprisingly, when you allow yourself to feel and process your feelings— what they would— so for me, it was embarrassment, humiliation, it was disappointment, it was stress. It's just sitting with, with those feelings and just being like, I'm gonna go about my day, but yes, that's how I'm feeling right now. And just being like, this is embarrassment, this is, this is shame, this is like when allowing myself to just feel those feelings and be aware of them, name them, describe them, and just have them there, they do dissipate and they do lift. And even just being able to name them really helped me, right? And in that situation, I would not be telling myself to shut up and get over it and suck it up, sissy pants, as he used to say to me. I would not be doing that. I would be giving myself compassion and space to feel. And with a smaller mistake, I might decide, hey, That wasn't a big deal in the end. Nothing, and and it's all just you decide, right? And the point of my message and what I really want to get across to you is don't let other people decide how you should feel about when you make a mistake. Also, mistakes are going to happen, and I know that you know this, right? You know that if you're a human, you are going to make a mistake. You are going to make an error in judgment. You are going to do something that wasn't perfect that you could only see in hindsight. That is going to be a part of your life. So how you handle those things and how you talk to yourself after is huge, right? So don't be this guy, okay? Don't be this guy to yourself. Don't breathe fire at yourself every time you, you make a mistake, right? Because what that's gonna do is it's gonna make you fearful. It'll make you fearful to not want to take any other risks, to not want to do any other events. Like, I could have said to myself, you know what, I can't be trusted to do events, I don't want to. And I, I was telling myself those things. It was only natural, and it's okay. It's like, yeah, you're— it makes sense that you feel that way. I was like, I don't want to do any more events. That was terrible. I want to hide. I never want to have that experience again in my whole life. So please don't ever give me any more responsibility. And you see how this is how we get smaller, right? Like, we get smaller instead of getting bigger when it comes to making a mistake like that. And how you handle it is everything. How talk to yourself. It's everything. And thankfully, I did have a coach going through this, and she said to me— because I was— I came to her and I'm like, okay, help me get over this. Like, help me just get— because I didn't even want to go to work. Like, when we came home from the event, I did not want to go to work. I wanted to hide in bed under the covers and not do anything. And she said to me, she's like, the only way that you're going to be able to get out of that is by moving through it. And that means allowing yourself to feel embarrassed and ashamed and disappointed and stressed and all those feelings. Invite them in. Allow yourself to have them. Name them. Get familiar with them. Don't push them away. Don't shut them down, because that will make you less likely to ever want to go back to work, right? It'll be like, let's just go work at Starbucks where things are easy, where you have no responsibility and you don't have to do anything harder than pouring some coffee. Then you won't make any mistakes. And everything will be fine. That's what the brain would want to do in that situation, which is what I was— I really was considering. I'm like, I just don't want to go back to work. Let's— I like— I don't— because it was a yearly event and it would be the next thing that I'd be doing, and I just didn't want to think about it. So allow yourself to feel what you need to feel and also be reasonable with yourself. So the whole message of this video, if I can get you to take anything away, is How you talk to yourself will either make you bigger, help you to take more risks, make you less afraid of things, or it'll make you smaller and it'll make you disappear and it'll make you invisible because you'll be scared, right? Or it'll make you paranoid and more anxious and obsessive about trying to prevent mistakes, which is also not a possible goal in life because if you are a human, You have to allow for human error in your life. Would you agree? Is that fair to say? All right, this is Natalie Fisher. I'm a career and life coach. I help people land jobs, negotiate promotions, negotiate raises, and I also help you work through everyday work situations, mistakes— if you make a mistake at work, or if you're having conflict with your boss— or help you work through all these situations so that you can become more valuable in your life and have a better experience of it and truly live an extraordinary life in your career. And a lot of people tell me this work really spills out into the other parts of their life as well. So I bring it all in here. I'm very human. I bring in stories about my personal life, about who I am, about what I've learned. And I really believe that's my mission is to share all of that with you so that you can learn from it too. And I really hope it was helpful. If you like this video, give me a thumbs up. If you did not like this video, give me a thumbs down because the engagement still helps me, and then just get out of here and don't watch any more of my videos. And I will see you next week here on YouTube.