You may know that I’ve recently started coaching in French, which meant for a while that I had to brush up on my French. To do that, I like to read real page-turners—they’re fun, and they’re teeming with adjectives and verbs that, as a French-speaking coach, I should not only know but also learn.
Right now I’m reading a very entertaining book by Sophie Kinsella, *Samantha Bonne à Rien Faire*: Samantha is a high-flying lawyer who works day and night, outsourcing her personal life to put all her eggs in one basket—namely, her promotion to partner at the firm. Well, that’s when she makes a very, very expensive and far-reaching mistake. SHE, who NEVER makes mistakes. (The story then unfolds in typical Kinsella fashion—simply wonderfully bizarre.)
I’m not usually a big Kinsella fan, but I like this book. It has so many parallels to what’s going on in real life. Make NO mistakes. Is that how it is for you, too? For you personally? At your company? Make NO mistakes. It’s like a mantra.
Is that a good thing? Our culture of embracing mistakes?
I don’t think so—what do you think? I sometimes look back on the mistakes I’ve made in my professional life. Of course, it’s still not a pleasant thought, but ultimately I know that I’ve grown the most from those mistakes. The more unpleasant the mistake, the better I can recall the improvements that came from it—and what has thus rightfully become part of my personal wealth of experience.
I think there’s too much emphasis these days on “not being allowed to make mistakes,” coupled with an “if I see something bad, I turn a blind eye” attitude. We don’t allow for mistakes; we deflect attention from ourselves by looking for someone to blame, or we deny that mistakes exist. We don’t face up to our mistakes… not really.
Isn’t it much more important that we be allowed to learn from our mistakes and draw something constructive from them? Then mistakes become milestones on the learning curve.
But to do that, we must own up to our mistakes and learn to cope when a mistake happens. Easier said than done. Every person has developed a series of (coping) mechanisms over the course of their life. In psychology, these are referred to as (personality) parts (e.g., inner team, inner family, ego states). In what follows, I’ll refer to these parts and their expressions as “inner voices.”
Certain situations trigger a host of inner voices—such as those of self-doubt, feeling overwhelmed, or the need for control. These voices are responsible for turning a mistake that happened externally into a deeply emotional experience internally. We fall into an inner imbalance and would love nothing more than to crawl into a corner and pull the covers over our heads.
But there is hope. When we are exposed to such unsettling internal discord, what matters is how we respond to it. If we can say to these voices, “Thank you for bringing this to my attention; I’ll take this into account and address it!”, we have a good chance that the inner voices will calm down, that our inner and outer worlds will come into balance, and that we’ll be able to adequately address the external problem.
Only then can we think deeply about the question “What now?”, talk openly about it, identify the root of the problem, and effectively apply our solutions there.
My grandfather had put up a sign in our printing shop back then that read:
“Anyone who works makes mistakes. Anyone who works a lot makes a lot of mistakes. Anyone who doesn’t make mistakes is lazy.”
We can all take that to heart….
