You f*cked up. Congrats!
I recently had a pretty major blunder and it affected about 50 new people on my mailing list. They didn’t get the one email they wanted to get! It was embarrassing and it made me feel like a total amateur (which at email marketing, I kinda am).
Instead of wallowing and thinking my life was over and I’ve potentially lost new clients and enquiries because of this, I took it as a learning opportunity. I solved the problem (lots of googling) and then corrected it. I owned up to the mistake. I told the truth of what happened, said sorry and pointed them in the direction that they originally wanted!
It was all fine, of course. A little bit embarrassing, but not the end of the world. And it got me thinking.
Okay, so you fucked up. Congrats!
Mistakes are a sign that you are learning. You are learning to take risks and not being afraid to fail. Mistakes are a sign that you are willing to grow your business.
So, let’s get one thing straight. Mistakes are a good thing!
Mistakes are actually a really positive thing. I’ve began rephrasing them as learning opportunities because that’s exactly what they are. They are an opportunity to do something differently to how you’ve done it in the past. It’s an opportunity to fix it in a new and innovative way that might lead to something totally different and unexpected!
“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
A lot of being a business owner is knowing that you will fail, at some point and in varying degrees. It’s absolutely inevitable, but not something you should get yourself down about.
Reframing your mistake mindset
Instead of immediately thinking negatively about the situation, think to yourself, ‘ok, what went wrong’ and try to resolve it with an objective mindset. Get yourself out of the nitty gritty of the ‘what went wrong’ and step back to evaluate the facts.
Once you’ve got the facts (and fixed the issue), it’s time to think about how you can do it different next time. What can you try to yield a different result? How can you change your process for a different, potentially better outcome?
Evaluate what other opportunities are there for doing this different? How can you/your business benefit from doing this differently? Is there a lesson to be learnt? An opportunity to take advantage of? Just because it’s different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
How can you use this to be better next time? What can you learn from this mistake? How have you grown as a business owner because of this? Can you share it with others to help them?
Always remember that this is an opportunity to grow and evolve as a business owner and that is more important than a mistake. And just to prove my point, I’ve turned a minor mistake into 4 different types of content and spread it across every single one of my platforms. So, really, it was a good thing because I have new, fresh and relevant content to share with you!
Making a mistake really isn’t that bad. It’s how you react to it that will determine whether it’s a positive or negative. If you choose to think about it in a positive way, you’ll eventually retrain your brain to embrace the challenges and learn from them, every single time.