Mistakes happen. It’s a fact of life and of business. The world doesn’t stop when you make mistakes. Sometimes that seems like a good thing. Other times, you’d give anything for time to stand still just long enough to undo the mistake you’ve made.
In a career, the important thing isn’t that you made a mistake or two. It’s how you respond to them when you do.
Treat Yourself with Compassion
Sure. There might be a few moments where you want to pull out your hair over making a mistake, especially in your career. The bigger the mistake, the balder you may feel you need to be. However, it’s important to move beyond that as quickly as possible—preferably before the extreme hair pulling commences. Offer the same level of forgiveness and acceptance of human frailties to yourself as you offer to the people around you.
Chances are good that you’re the harshest critic you’ll ever encounter. If you treat yourself with a little bit of compassion after your mistake you’ll find that you’re able to not only move forward but also to bring about improvements much faster than if you wallow in a moment, or two, of self-castigation.
This idea of forgiving yourself for mistakes is not something that’s really new at all. But it is gaining credibility. A recent British Psychological Society Research Digest post indicated that students who forgave themselves for substantial procrastination on their first round of exams were less likely to procrastinate again on the second round of exams. This teaches an important lesson that it’s more important to be able to forgive yourself, pick yourself up and move on rather than attempting to punish yourself for the setbacks you encounter.
Once you can forgive yourself for making a mistake, take the time to make things right again. Learn to be a better person. Develop new skills. Focus on the positive aspects of your life instead of the negatives. Convey remorse and make amends with anyone you have wronged. Then, move forward in life and leave the past mistakes behind.
The bottom line is that it’s not our mistakes that define us. Rather it’s how we respond to those mistakes, and whether or not we’re able to rise up and prove that we are more than the mistakes we make along the way, that make us truly successful. In your career, you can bounce back after a mistake by taking a fresh approach to it and moving ahead, rather than looking back. To move forward in a new career, try Venteon for a fresh start in a temporary or contract assignment.