Things go wrong.  Everyday.  Often they are small things, we don’t even notice.  The keys slide off the table. We bump into a colleague coming out of a meeting room.  Our phone signal drops.  We spill our coffee. 

Sometimes the things that go wrong are much bigger.  And sometimes the amount of shame we feel make the mistake much bigger than it is.  And yes, sometimes our colleagues or family members make comments which make it worse.

Mistakes can cost us money and customers in the short term.  However often it is how we respond to our mistakes that have the long term impact.  Do we blame others or some internal process for what happened? Or do we acknowledge the mistake, do what we can to repair it (and the relationships) in the immediate aftermath, and learn from it?

Mistakes become tragedies when we keep repeating them and don’t learn from them.

Photo by Sarah Kilian