This week I had the great fortune of realizing I had made a mistake. Yes, I said I had the great fortune of realizing I had made a mistake, a significant one at that. I don’t know about you but I haven’t always been so willing to accept mistakes, particularly when others are pointing them out to me. It takes a lot to swallow your pride and own what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter if it was something you should have known better than or a mistake that happened by pure happenstance, it’s hard to know you messed up.
You have to own your mistakes though. It’s essential. It lets people know that you not only are you wiser than you were before, you’re trustworthy. The world around us has conditioned us to deflect things away from ourselves; to make sure that you protect yourself at all costs no matter the long-term repercussions. The big problem with this thinking is that if you don’t own your mistakes, your mistakes will eventually own year. This happens through either a lack of growth and learning (repeating the same basic mistake over and over again) or a compounding effect where one mistake leads to multiple others. Soon, you can’t keep up. If you will own your mistakes, and own them sooner rather than later, you’ll be amazed at the responses you get. You’ll move from the feeling of someone giving you corrective action to the people knowing you will correct your actions, with the likelihood you will never end up with that mistake again. Remember, people expect from you only what you give them. The world is not looking for people to be mistake-free despite what you hear, it’s looking for people who will grow from their mistakes. Start owning your mistakes now, otherwise, they’ll start owning you.
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AuthorJeff Lahey Archives
January 2020
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