I was going to write a different article today, but I changed my mind to tell you what happened at work this afternoon.

Basically, I screwed up at work today and made a big mistake. I was asked to do something and I thought I had done it correctly, and in fact gave my word that it was done. It turned out that I missed a portion of the task, which affected a production business process.

For most of the afternoon, a loop was going inside my head, telling me that I’m a screw up, that I’m a failure. Over and over again telling me how badly I messed up and how this affected my integrity at work. I’m sure that we’ve all heard that voice inside our heads telling us the same thing over and over again.

Normally, I would have gone home and ate some chocolate to stuff the emotions down. This time I ignored the little voice in my head that wanted me to just go home and self-anesthetize myself, instead of doing what I planned to do which was going to the gym and working out.

I followed these steps to stop the loop in my head telling me how much I screwed up:

1. I took a deep breath. In. Out. I did this for at least 10 breaths until I felt like I was calming down.
2. I told myself that I wasn’t perfect and that I’m allowed to make a mistake. No one is perfect and everyone makes mistakes.
3. I fixed the problem as quickly as I could. It was an easy fix that I was able to correct within a few minutes, but by then the damage was already done. I’m not sure how much money was lost (if any), but I’m certain productivity was affected and people were stressed out by my mistake.
4. I emailed the people affected and I aplogized to them. I think it’s important to own up to my mistakes and let people know how sorry I was that something that I failed to do affected their jobs.
5. I had to depersonalize the effect of the mistake. I told myself that it was something that I did, but that it didn’t define who I am. I also told myself that, yes, this time I screwed up, but there are plenty of times when I don’t.
6. I had to put the mistake into perspective. After all, no blood was shed. The worst thing that happened was that some people were mad at me because they had to do extra work, plus it made me look bad. But, I told myself that they would get over it and so would I. After all, everyone makes mistakes.
7. I told myself that tomorrow I would get more training on the task to make sure that I knew how to do it correctly. Plus, the next time this happens, I’m not going to assume I know what I’m doing and am going to ask for help.

After all this, I went to the gym and worked out, like I was originally going to. In the past, I would have used the excuse of having a bad day to skip the gym and just go home. I was pretty proud of myself for overcoming this mistake so quickly and not dwelling on it all evening.

I was able break the “I’m a screw up” loop and told myself that tomorrow is another day.

This was a learning opportunity which I’m now able to share with you

Photo by: sonson

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