Mistakes Aren’t Here To Reveal Your Inadequacy
Mistakes Aren’t Here To Reveal Your Inadequacy
Recovering From That Big Mistake Your Business Just Made
I once blasted out 10+ automated emails all at the same time to my email list and it completely transformed my business for the better. ⠀⠀
Imagine sending multiple “future” emails, back-to-back to hundreds of people on your email list? It was a tech screw up on my end and it was insanely embarrassing. I felt like a major idiot. ⠀⠀
After that experience I completely shut down, I was overwhelmed by the feeling of failure. I decided to scrap version 1.0 of my business and start from scratch again but do it right this time under a new brand. ⠀⠀
It was the digital version of running away from home, getting a new passport made and hopping on a flight to start a new life somewhere where no one knew my name. ⠀⠀
Version 2.0 of my business benefited greatly from that experience — you can sure as hell bet that I never made that email blast mistake again. ⠀
There were other equally debilitating and public mistakes I made with my new business though, but this time I didn’t run. I realized that if I made my mistakes an excuse to turn myself into a punching bag, then I was missing the point of the mistake. ⠀
Mistakes Aren’t Here To Embarrass You
Big, public mistakes aren’t here to expose how inadequate we are, they’re here to clue us in on the mistakes that we’ll continue to make if we don’t correct them.
It’s a callout to stop doing things on the fly and to systemize. ⠀
No matter where that email mistake happened on my personal timeline, it was always going to happen because I didn’t put a system in place to double and triple check my work. ⠀⠀
My mistake wanted me to see that I needed a gated system that stopped faulty automation and bad emails from leaving my hands before hitting send. ⠀
After my mistake, I created a system to prevent it from happening again, and I haven’t made that mistake again since.
And even if I do? So what.
Have you ever stopped shopping with a brand you love after you blasted out a test email that wasn’t ready to go live? Or because they accidentally sent you the wrong product?
You probably completely forgot about the test email because you knew it was a mistake too — we tend to file away information that’s not relevant to us and drop them from our memory.
Or, because you love the brand, you let it slide that the wrong product was shipped to you and you’re still excited for the right product to arrive.
When we make mistakes, our whole day or week is rocked by the failure of it.
The humor in this is that no one in our audience sincerely cares that the mistake was made — we’re all in our heads beating ourselves up when everyone else doesn’t know there’s a fight going on. ⠀⠀
The next time you make a big, public mistake, give yourself some grace.
Mistakes are here to give us feedback, not embarrass us. They inform us of what we need to do to not make recurring mistakes multiple times a year — the one-offs are here to teach us what to do next. ⠀
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