Tag: mistakes

Check it Twice

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

About a decade ago, I sent out an important email with a major mistake in it. The blowback was a mess.

Someone I was working with at the time—a former journalist who had both more wisdom and life experience than I had—told me that I was overdue for a practice that she’s employed for decades: any time she had something important to send out, she would hold off on sending it for a few hours or even a day, and come back to it a second time. She said that I needed a structural fix to my process, or I’d make that same sort of awful mistake time and again.

She was right. I’ve employed that tactic ever since and it’s saved me countless similar blunders.

(Aside: the “Schedule Send” feature in Gmail is a nice way to implement this.)

The goal of this extra step isn’t editing—the document is supposed to be finished—it’s simply to ensure there are no important mistakes or inconsistencies.

For the way my mind works, this step is most successful when I look at the “final” draft in a different form factor. So, if I’ve written it in Word or PowerPoint, maybe I read the final PDF instead. Or if I’ve written on my laptop, I reread on my phone (the latter works especially well with my blog posts). And, if it’s really important, I force myself to read the whole document out loud.

I also apply this approach to anything I write when my emotions are high. In these situations, my orientation is different: instead of rereading for content, consistency, and typos, I’m reading for what the content makes me feel, and where the emotional dial is set. More often than not, if the emotional vibe is negative, upon rereading I decide not to send the note at all, and instead to talk to the person directly. Negative things immortalized in writing rarely age well.

One of the deceptions of how we all work today is that all our communications seems quick and impermanent, when they are anything but.

Our words make as much impact as they ever have.

It might be time to build a habit of stopping, taking a breath, and reading what we wrote with fresh eyes.

Good Mistakes, Bad Mistakes, No Mistakes

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

We all know we’re supposed to be OK with mistakes, that they happen.

And yet, if you’re like me, you hate mistakes. You hate making them. And, sometimes, you can’t help being frustrated when those around you make them as well.

Which, of course, is both right and wrong.

Some mistakes really are a problem.

Careless mistakes—a term I mean literally, a lack of care taken for something important—really must be avoided. The discipline of a professional requires us to do our work with care and attention. This is the promise we make to ourselves, to our colleagues, and to our customers, and it’s our job to honor it each and every day.

Repeated mistakes are also a problem. They mean we’re not learning.

But no mistakes…that’s not OK.

It’s our job is to move at a certain pace, with a certain sense of forward motion, and with a willingness to walk out on limbs we’ve never stepped out on before. If we are doing all these things, we will have to get some things wrong some of the time–either because we moved too fast, or because we are trying things that are truly new to us, things that we’re not yet good at specifically because they are new.

If this seems counterintuitive, think of it this way: if we are getting nothing wrong all the time, that has to mean that we’re either absurdly lucky or that we’re not moving fast enough, not moving forward quickly enough, and we’re not walking out on limbs in the way we’d like to think we are.

Viewed in this light, mistakes aren’t just “not a problem,” they are valuable. They are the data that tell us: look at that, we are moving fast enough, we are being brave, we are taking enough risk.

We might still reflectively dislike mistakes in the moment, but it’s our job to praise the right kind of mistakes, and to praise the mistake-maker (whether ourselves or someone else) for their courage and bravery.

They (or we) are moving in the right way, taking the right risks, walking out on enough limbs, and, naturally, sometimes mis-stepping.

That’s good news indeed.

Apologies for the Missing Spaces

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Hi everyone.

You’ve probably noticed that a number of my recent posts are missing spaces between words.

WordPress has a new editor and it’s giving me trouble. I swear there are gremlins in there, because I reread all of my posts before I publish them and am pretty sure I would have noticed “Microsoft built itthat way” and “fabric of ourdays.”

I will try to get to the bottom of this.

In the meantime, thank you for your patience.

And if anyone is out there using the new WordPress editor and has a solution, please let me know.

The right reaction to a mistake

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I come from a family of musicians and have played classical piano all my life. So, naturally, all three of my kids play too. It’s not always easy, because unless they practice regularly at home, they don’t make any progress–and very few kids want to sit down and practice every day.

In an effort to bridge the gap between how I grew up (rules for how many minutes, and then hours, to practice daily) and what seems possible in our family, I try to spend a good deal of their practice time with them to help them make the best of it. Over the years I’ve worked on finding the sweet spot between the helpful role I can play as a more experienced musician; the somewhat stern role I need to play to push them to practice more productively; and being careful not to be too tough on them and take the fun out of things. It’s a delicate balance, one I’m still working on, and I don’t always get it right.

This fall, I’ve been noticing my middle daughter as she’s been making her way back to the piano after a summer at camp. She’s started doing something new that I think is just wonderful: when she misses a note that she knows she should get right, she lets out a small chuckle. It’s almost as if she’s saying to herself, “oh, I know that’s a B-flat, isn’t it funny that I played a B-natural.”

What a lovely, elusive reaction to a mistake:

I see myself making a mistake.

I observe the mistake, and see it clearly.

I note what I want to do differently the next time.

And I take the whole thing lightly.

This is not the typical response to a mistake. Normally, when we notice that we messed up we show up with piles of excess emotional baggage. This baggage doesn’t make us better the next time, nor does it deepen our ability to make a change. All it does is associate our misstep with self-criticism and an imprecise emotional mixture of fear, anger and shame.

Much better to notice with curiosity, be deliberate about what changes to make, and let escape a nearly silent little chuckle.

My bad

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Nearly every legitimate customer complaint could be turned around right away with an immediate, forceful reply:

This shouldn’t have happened.

I’m sorry.

It was our mistake.

I’m going to fix it right now and make things better than they were before.

In other words, “I feel as bad about this as you do, because I care as deeply as you do – or more – about keeping the promise I’ve made to you as a customer.”

The power to diffuse comes from your definitive and quick response, which is only possible when the person hearing the complaint has the power to make things right.

Once a complaint has gone through four levels of escalation, no matter what you do it’s too late.