Apologize, Forgive Yourself and Move On

What do you do when you screw up? Do you beat yourself up when you make a mistake? Do you expect perfection from yourself?

A consultant colleague was hosting her first half-day workshop, and did an excellent job of preparing, planning, rehearsing, and making checklists to make sure she had all her ducks in a row for the 8:30am start. On the morning of the Big Day, she got up early, got everything ready, then started to putter on some odd jobs around her home office. Then, before she knew it, it was already after 8:00am and she still had to get across town to the hotel. Needless to say, despite all the preparation, she was not there on time, walking in to a room full of registrants who'd made themself comfortable and were wondering where the facilitator was! Awkward, embarassing, but she handled it with grace, apologizing, moving on, and facilitating a good workshop.

Another experienced speaker was introducing two female speakers at a business meeting. And, in an unfortunate slip, accidentally combined “She'll take it from here” with “She'll start it off”. The resulting “She'll take it off” had a rather different and unfortunate connotation. Awkward, embarassing, and not my proudest moment. Oops, I mean, not the afore-mentioned anonymous speaker's proudest moment. So, all there is to do is apologize, accept and share the humour of the situation (if any), and move on.

We all make mistakes. We can practice and prepare to try to minimize them. We can create systems that help minimize them. We can use Root Cause Analysis, and Six Sigma, and Statistical Process Control, and Human Error Prevention, and Behavioural-Based Safety and [name your preferred brand of magic here], but errors will still, inevitably, occasionally happen.

When they do, accept your humanity, embrace your good intentions and apologize. Make restitution if any real damage was done, and then move on. Nobody's perfect.