I was working on a Sunday morning, doing compensation planning, right after a big merger and my eyes were starting to see double. I had a huge master spreadsheet that I was piecing data from and sending to each individual Director with their team’s information. I had gone through the process at least 20 times already and it was feeling very routine, but I was also dying to be done and spend some time with my family, so I was rushing. In my effort to do so, I didn’t paste correctly so the hidden fields wouldn’t transfer and I ended up sending the entire organization’s compensation information to one of our leaders, which included all of his peers. All I could think was “I am going to get fired for this.” I quickly made a phone call and we got the file erased before the leader claimed to have opened it, but the mistake continued to haunt me. If I am capable of that large of an error, then am I really the right person for the pressure of this job?
My story isn’t unique. Mistakes happen all the time in business and in life. When you spend your days working with sensitive information, the time usually comes when something gets inadvertently shared. We are taught accountability and stepping up to accept responsibility, which I did. What I didn’t quite understand yet, is how to accept myself despite mistakes.
We all know the feeling, when our mind just replays situations over and over, looking for different angles that might provide some relief but really just make us feel worse. Sometimes it wears different masks, but the underlying thought is typically around “It shouldn’t have happened this way”. It’s a telltale sign that we aren’t accepting a situation at face value and we are making it mean something significant about ourselves.
When we don’t accept the situation for what it is, we can also get into a spiral of self doubt or self criticism.
If it happened once, it will happen again.
If I was better at my job, this wouldn’t have happened.
That spiral has absolutely no value to anyone. Have you ever heard the saying “Where your focus goes, energy flows”? If all your thoughts are on making an error, it’s almost a sure way to commit another one.
When we accept ourselves and our errors, they don’t haunt us or keep us awake at night. Acceptance takes us to a place of neutral, where we can allow the situation to be, and not make it mean something bad.
I am a human who made an error, but I don’t have to let that overshadow all the things that I’ve done right.
We can move on from the incident without a continuous thought loop that creates an expectation it will happen again.
What errors are you struggling to accept right now? I can help you start down the path of acceptance. Schedule your free consultation to get started.