Don’t beat yourself up
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One of the most uncomfortable legacies of education, that really does not equip people for success in the real world, is a fear of making mistakes. In education, there are usually ‘right answers’, whereas in the real world we often have to tackle the unknown. While teachers will set tasks that can easily be marked, managers or businesses may have no idea how to solve a problem when delegating the work. In addition, competitive, point-scoring classmates can make people feel bad if they get something wrong. I’m sure all of us can think of a time when a teacher has exercised cutting wit on someone who has got something wrong.
I was so delighted last year to see educationalists recognising this and moving to tackle it as with this example.
Yet people are still coming into the workplace who are oversensitive to mistakes. They beat themselves up so badly when they make a mistake, that it makes them far too cautious. They hold themselves back, and don’t seize opportunities to make a contribution in a situation if it could result in failure. And yet it isn’t possible to come up with innovative solutions without risking failure.
If you seek to minimise mistakes, you will never realise your full creative potential.
So how can you overcome a habit of beating yourself up, and open yourself up to take a leap in the dark?
One solution is to review your decision while setting aside 20:20 hindsight – if I had to make the decision again, knowing exactly what I knew at the time, was it a reasonable decision? Maybe you made the best decision with the information available at the time, and later information gave you a different view. That means you did a good job. Perhaps there is learning from it about what extra information you could find out next time? But don’t beat yourself up about that – it’s just a new insight. You can never be 100% informed when you make a decision – and this is especially true if you are fast-tracking your career.
Change the questions you ask yourself when you fail at something. If you instinctively ask “why me?” then you’re inviting your brain to come back with answers that beat you up – such as “because I didn’t prepare well enough” or “because I’m so indecisive”. Ask yourself better questions – which don’t assume that failure is all your fault!
A man working for IBM made a serious mistake which cost the company half a million pounds. Summoned to the office of the CEO, he burst out “ I know what you’ve called me here for – you’re going to fire me, aren’t you?” The CEO replied “ Fire you? Why would we fire you when we’ve just spent half a million pounds training you?”
TAKE AWAY
Sometimes you win, and sometimes you learn – there is no down side.
I was so delighted last year to see educationalists recognising this and moving to tackle it as with this example.
Yet people are still coming into the workplace who are oversensitive to mistakes. They beat themselves up so badly when they make a mistake, that it makes them far too cautious. They hold themselves back, and don’t seize opportunities to make a contribution in a situation if it could result in failure. And yet it isn’t possible to come up with innovative solutions without risking failure.
If you seek to minimise mistakes, you will never realise your full creative potential.
So how can you overcome a habit of beating yourself up, and open yourself up to take a leap in the dark?
One solution is to review your decision while setting aside 20:20 hindsight – if I had to make the decision again, knowing exactly what I knew at the time, was it a reasonable decision? Maybe you made the best decision with the information available at the time, and later information gave you a different view. That means you did a good job. Perhaps there is learning from it about what extra information you could find out next time? But don’t beat yourself up about that – it’s just a new insight. You can never be 100% informed when you make a decision – and this is especially true if you are fast-tracking your career.
Change the questions you ask yourself when you fail at something. If you instinctively ask “why me?” then you’re inviting your brain to come back with answers that beat you up – such as “because I didn’t prepare well enough” or “because I’m so indecisive”. Ask yourself better questions – which don’t assume that failure is all your fault!
- What is the worst possible result of this? Allow yourself to wallow in misery for a couple of minutes…OK, you are on the street, homeless and without a job and your partner has left you… Now, what’s the much more likely, realistic result of this? Someone will be annoyed for a bit, and you’ll have to put in effort to fix the situation.
- What is a sensible action I can take to fix this?
- What have I learned from this that will be useful to me in future?
- What are 5 good things about the situation I now find myself in? Force yourself to take the time to come up with this different perspective. Don’t move on until you’ve done it! Maybe a good outcome will be that you build a stronger relationship with the person you’ve disappointed – because they learn that if something goes wrong, you really care, and will pull out all the stops to make things right. The strongest relationships are those that have successfully weathered a few storms.
- Don’t whip your ‘inner child’! Be as kind and encouraging to yourself when you make mistakes, as you would be to another person in your situation. Remember that mistakes are useful. Mistakes are the quickest and best way to learn judgement.
A man working for IBM made a serious mistake which cost the company half a million pounds. Summoned to the office of the CEO, he burst out “ I know what you’ve called me here for – you’re going to fire me, aren’t you?” The CEO replied “ Fire you? Why would we fire you when we’ve just spent half a million pounds training you?”
TAKE AWAY
Sometimes you win, and sometimes you learn – there is no down side.