Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein's The Power of Resilience includes a chapter titled "Dealing Effectively with Mistakes," and I'm finding it particularly useful at the moment.
Today I tried to pay a colleague a compliment while discussing our personal working relationship, and I wound up inadvertently insulting and hurting her. Thankfully, that very same relationship helped make it possible for her to share her feelings, and we work in an environment where that's strongly encouraged, so everything was laid on the table and not swept under the rug. And although our miscommunication says something about the challenges we've experienced in this relationship, we're also both sufficiently invested in it that we spent a lot of time afterward discussing what happened and why.
And I'm finding The Power of Resilience so helpful at the moment because the book's chapter on mistakes describes four steps to "manage mistakes and setbacks" that are both thought-provoking and encouraging:
Step 1: Examine Your Assumptions About Mistakes
The assumptions we hold about why we make mistakes exert a significant influence on our lives. We typically do not identify, reflect on, or challenge these assumptions, so they remain powerful but unrecognized forces directing our actions... When people [attribute mistakes to personal shortcomings that are not easily corrected or blame others for their mistakes], they surrender personal control, an essential component of a resilient mindset.
Step 2: Challenge Self-Defeating Attributions
Attributions are assumptions within a [personal] mindset [about one's mistakes and failure.] When these assumptions serve as roadblocks to a resilient lifestyle, they must be defined, understood and challenged. If we are to be resilient we must strive to ensure that we avoid playing the role of a prosecuting attorney when we offer self-assessments about our mistakes. Instead, we must assume the stance of a defense attorney.
Step 3: Learn Something Positive From Every Situation
A vital step in overcoming self-defeating attributions for mistakes is to address the question, What can I learn from this situation?... It is not always easy to discover the learning potential in our mistakes, especially when negative self-evaluations dominate our thinking. However, even if one's self-esteem is high...many mistakes trigger feelings of disappointment and doubt... As we focus on the theme of learning from, rather than feeling condemned by, mistakes and failure, it is helpful to remember Willie Stargell's view of mistakes...["My success is the product of the knowledge extracted from my failures."]
Step 4: Decide On a Plan of Action to Attempt New Scripts Based on New Attributions
Once we have become aware of and challenged negative attributions about mistakes and failure and once we have adopted the view that mistakes are experiences to learn from, our next step is to translate this new, more positive mindset into a specific action plan... Ask yourself what are different things you can do to change your behavior so that mistakes are less likely to occur or to change how you view and respond to mistakes when they do occur... We wish to emphasize that by directing attention to what you can do differently, you also assume personal control for your life... As we know, this sense of personal control is a major feature of stress hardiness and resilience.
So let me look at today's situation through the lens of these four steps:
Step 1: Examine Your Assumptions About Mistakes
I certainly don't blame my colleague for my mistake, nor do I believe it was caused by a personal shortcoming that I can't correct. I don't believe I'm making any assumptions that surrender my personal control over the situation, which feels empowering.
Step 2: Challenge Self-Defeating Attributions
Maintaining a sense of personal control also allows me to manage any potential negative attributions about myself. I don't feel that I'm a fundamentally bad communicator or a bad colleague. I'm examining what happened--that's obviously the purpose of this post--but I'm not beating myself up about it. I've had some moments of deep regret, but I'm not overwhelmed by embarrassment or shame. And I recognize that there's a larger interpersonal dynamic between the two of us that was a contributing factor. So in addition to not blaming my colleague for my mistake, I'm also not blaming myself in a way that would undermine my resilience.
Step 3: Learn Something Positive From Every Situation
The key word here is positive. I do feel a childish temptation to take away some negative lessons, such as "Keep my mouth shut," but that's obviously not a resilient response. I feel good about the fact that my colleague trusted me enough to share her frustration and hurt--it would have been easier for her to withhold those feelings, which would have prevented me from learning anything from them and would have inevitably undermined our relationship. So I learned that I can build a trust deep enough to survive such a strong blow.
I also feel good about my response to my colleague in the moment--I was able to hear her feelings, express my regret at hurting her, and share my own hurt and frustration as well. I learned that I can be fully present in a confrontation, take in some strong emotions that were hard to hear, and manage my own strong emotions while not ignoring or discounting them.
Finally, I feel great about our ability to hang in there through the post-incident debrief. That's not to say we completely healed the rift, but we did come to some important new understandings about ourselves and about our relationship. In the end I'm not glad it happened, but I'd rather have it happen and reach these understandings than miss the learning opportunity, as painful as it might be, and that's the ultimate positive lesson.
Step 4: Decide On a Plan of Action to Attempt New Scripts Based on New Attributions
Today's experience suggest some immediately actionable items: I just came off an emotionally intense, weekend-long retreat, and after experiences like that I need to pause before I speak and think about what I'm saying, because I'm a little depleted and my judgment isn't the best. In addition, I believed that my intentions were clearly understood by my colleague when they were not, which made it easy to misinterpret my comments. And perhaps most importantly, I failed to register her lack of immediate response, which actually indicated the depth of her distress. So I have plenty of work to do.
Brooks and Goldstein conclude their chapter on mistakes with a few heartening words:
Mistaken attitudes about mistakes are a bigger problem than making mistakes. Resilient people view mistakes as experiences to learn from. If you are to lead a resilient lifestyle, you must recognize that mistakes and failure are a natural occurrence within that lifestyle. Your choice is the manner in which you respond to these events.
My choice today has been to channel the energy that remains from the exchange into this post, and to assume that Willie Stargell's right: "My success is the product of the knowledge extracted from my failures." And by that logic I'm hopeful that some big successes are right around the corner.
