After the Oops! Post-Mistake Traps and How to Avoid Them
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new”- Albert Einstein
No matter how many wise and witty quotes I read about the value– even the necessity– of making mistakes in life, it’s still uncomfortable and sometimes painful for me when they happen.
There have got to be very few people in this world who actually enjoy making mistakes.
Even the most laid-back, easy-going souls among us probably cringe when they say the “wrong” thing, drop a plate full of food on someone’s white carpeting, forget an important deadline or some other blunder among the millions of possible blunders a person could make.
Making mistakes is almost always unintentional. What is most important is what happens after the oops.
In fact, it is not so much the mistake itself that can make or break a situation, relationship or career, it is how the people involved respond after the mistake occurs.
There are many post-mistake traps that are oh so easy to fall into. These are our reactions to whatever happened that can make the mistake itself seem much larger and damaging than it actually is.
And, it is these traps that keep us stuck in the mistake itself.
Here are a few examples…
Deflecting blame
“It wasn’t my fault, it was hers.” Or– as an attempt to “protect” another person– “It wasn’t your fault, it was his.”
Playing the victim
“I can never do anything right.” “I always screw up.”
Defensiveness
Related to deflecting blame. “How dare you say this is my fault!”
Rage and blame
This may be thought and not spoken aloud or it might be verbalized. “You always let me down.” “You never get it right.”
Shame and Fear
“How can I ever show my face at the office again?” “They’ll never speak to me after what I did.”
Self-castigation
“I am worthless at this.” “I don’t deserve to be forgiven for what I’ve done.”
We wallow, judge, criticize, feel ashamed, beat up on ourselves or beat up on others for an interminable period of time when we’ve fallen into a post-mistake trap.
There are a lot of true-in-the-moment thoughts and feelings wrapped up in these reactions. When you make a mistake, you might feel ashamed of what you’ve done. When someone messes up a situation that involves you, disappointment and anger may be what come up.
It is healthy to acknowledge these uncomfortable and seemingly inappropriate feelings. But, this doesn’t mean that you have to focus in on and fuel them.
“Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.”- Confucius
You absolutely cannot learn from a mistake if you remain stuck in a post-mistake trap.
My family and I took a road trip recently to a large city in Canada. As happens when trying to navigate highways and exits, not to mention translating kilometers into miles, we took wrong turns quite a few times.
While we were all tired from being in a car for many hours and we all wanted to get to our next destination safely and easily, we mostly managed to avoid falling into post-mistake traps.
When my husband took the exit leading North and we actually wanted to go South, I didn’t scream and yell at him. I wasn’t happy that this happened, but I knew that my criticism was not going to help us get turned back around in the direction that we needed to go.
When I (reading the map) failed to tell my husband to take a certain road which caused us to travel several miles out of our way, he didn’t swear at me or pull the car over and refuse to drive any longer.
This is not to say that neither of us experienced frustration and irritation because of these oops moments. We most certainly did.
But, we moved on. We breathed, reminded ourselves that the goal was not to belabor the fact that an error had occurred, it was to get where we were going…and to have an enjoyable vacation!
As you probably know all too well, when you are the one to make a mistake and you fall into defensiveness, being a victim or self-castigation, you cannot see any way to correct whatever has happened.
And, as you are also probably aware, when someone else makes a mistake, your judgment and criticism of him or her will not fix anything.
These post-mistake traps will always and only make things worse. The literal situation and your relationships with those involved will suffer because of them.
Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”- James Joyce
When you recognize that you are going to a place of blame, judgment, defensiveness or playing the victim after a mistake, pause. Breathe and give yourself the chance to be with those feelings in that moment.
In the next moment, your choice is to remain stuck in the past and in that mistake OR to move on and open up to remedies and course-corrections.
You can take responsibility for your role in whatever happened without making it a guilt-fest. You can hold another person accountable for his or her actions without holding the error over that person’s head.
When you greet everything and everyone in your life with as much love, humor and forgiveness and you can muster, mistakes truly can be portals to discovery.
You may be pleasantly surprised by the wondrous places that they’ll lead.
