Making Mistakes at Work Feels Terrible. It’s Also OK
Today, I made a typo on an event flyer that was circulated to a wide audience. I am speaking at a panel next week and am in charge of putting together the marketing materials for the event. I put together a flyer that looked very nice, spent a lot of time playing around with the graphics on it, and then ended up misspelling the work “Language” in the title. After which I and the rest of the team ended up spending a lot of time circulating the flyer with the typo to multiple people at multiple firms.
When I got the note about the typo, my body was immediately flooded with stress hormones. I felt very embarrassed, disappointed, and angry at myself for not catching this sooner and allowing such a silly mistake to happen.
In response to those feelings, I went through three different stages. First, there was the reaction that my body and brain are extremely used to because I’d used it for the vast majority of my life. Then, there was the reaction I have learned to spring into when I first discovered stress-management coaching. And finally, there’s the reaction that actually works for me when stages 1 and 2 fail. Let me explain.
Stage 1: Feel terrible and beat myself up
Early on in my life I started associating being really good at school with being loved and safe. No one explicitly told me this (and I am certain my parents would not have stopped loving me even if I was terrible at school), but since I got a ton of praise for being diligent and getting good grades, in my brain being good and very careful academically was what I needed to do to get approval and to feel good.
Unfortunately, that also led to me thinking that I had to ensure I was always very good at school. And the way to do that was by being incredibly vigilant with myself in order to avoid mistakes. And to really, really beat myself up if I did make a mistake, so that it would never happen again. So, from a very early age, being very mean to myself for making any mistake seemed like the safe and logical thing to do. My brain and nervous system learned that message and learned how to spring into action when a mistake happened, flooding my body with urgent alerts so that I would pay attention.
For the longest time, that is exactly what I did. I would feel terrible for days on end after even the smallest misstep, all the while convincing myself that feeling that way was the “right” thing to do. And, since I sometimes needed a little reprieve from feeling terrible, I tried to get that by looking for blame in others too. Blame my teacher for not preparing me better for that question on the test. Blame my teammates for not catching the typo on my flyer. You get the point.
Then, with time, each specific incident would get a little less prominent in my mind. I might get a short-lived dopamine boost if someone praised my work. Or, more likely, I would find a different thing to criticize myself for, and the cycle would start all over again.
When those intense feelings came up as I learned about my typo today, my initial impulse was to go down this very familiar and very well-established route. I wanted to have a talk with myself, go over all the things that contributed to me missing this typo, tell myself I was being unreliable and irresponsible, and come up with a strict plan about how to avoid this in the future.
I managed to stop myself from going down this path fairly early in the process. But then I went into stage 2, which seemed more productive and pleasant on paper, but was neither of those things in reality.
Stage 2: Try to swap each of my negative thoughts for a more positive one
When I first discovered coaching and learned that I could question and change the critical thoughts I was having about myself, I thought “Great! Now I can learn to swap all of these negative thoughts and I’ll live happily ever after!” My brain wanted to become an endless stream of inspirational quotes that I would think about myself, so I would never have to experience a negative feeling ever again.
Today, after stopping myself from going down the self-chastisement rabbit hole, my impulse was to coach myself really hard out of the negative thoughts that came up for me (such as “I discredited the whole program by circulating a flyer with a typo” or “People will think that I’m being sloppy, I’m not paying attention to my work, and I am not to be trusted.”)
I wanted to rush and find alternative thoughts to think. Maybe I could think that I was not that unreliable? That it was possible I did not discredit the whole program? That everyone makes mistakes and a typo is not a big deal? And I sort of believed those thoughts (though I also still believed the critical ones). In fact, if anyone tried to reassure me about my mistake, I would say some of those back to them: “Don’t worry about me, I’m doing great. After all, nobody is perfect, right? And one typo is not the end of the world!”
Shockingly, quickly trying to run away from my feelings and shower myself with positivity did not work. Luckily, I remembered there was an option 3.
Stage 3: Allow the experience of stress and embarrassment in my body
Something I need to be constantly reminded of is that the first (and absolutely non-negotiable) step to working though any feeling is to first allow it. By that I mean, allow the sensation to be in your body without trying to outthink or outaction it (pretty sure I made that last word up).
So, after going through stages 1 and 2 and seeing that neither was working, I remembered why my nervous system was reacting the way it was (because it was used to doing that and it was trying to protect me from perceived danger). From that place, I was able to sit with the embarrassment, disappointment, and anger and watch them flow through my body (embarrassment for me feels like a tight grip around my chest; disappointment feels like a heaviness all over my body; anger feels like a rush of heat throughout my head). And I automatically put some distance between me and the thoughts I had about what happened. Meaning that I did not rush to change them, but also knew that they were not necessarily true.
From that place, it is now significantly easier for me to 1) take action to correct the mistake (I re-did the flyer and re-circulated it to people) and 2) decide whether and what lesson there is to learn from this.
In this particular instance, despite my brain’s intense reaction, the mistake was pretty minor since no one was hurt by it. However, even in a situation in which a mistake does end up hurting someone, I would still be in a much better position to respond to it, check in with the person, apologize, and learn from the mistake if I have first spend some time to calm down my initial nervous system response and allow the flood of intense feelings to exist in my body for a bit without taking frantic action to fix or escape them.
Does making mistakes activate your nervous system and create a flood of stress and embarrassment too? Let’s talk about it! Schedule a consult here.