Hannah Montana really had it right when she preached to us in ‘Nobody’s Perfect’. EVERYBODY makes mistakes, and it feels horrible when you do.
This is something I am all too familiar with; from the never-ending list of spelling mistakes (I mean I spelt Artz with an s on one of our recent posters, like what?!) to sending the wrong files to print, to forgetting to fix a bug on the website… the list is endless really. When I first started at the centre I felt like I was making mistakes every day and it made me feel hopeless.
But the truth is I am never going to stop making mistakes… and that is okay.
Back in October/November time I had placed an order for some tags for our Signature Z collection T-Shirts and sent the wrong files to be printed on the tag so we got 100 of these non-refundable tags with the wrong copy on – absolute nightmare. I was so stressed out, I felt so bad but in the end, that blunder actually led us to find tag’s that were even more perfect than the ones we initially ordered (and a lot cheaper)
Now admittedly it would have been much better if we’d have gotten to that conclusion without having to completely waste the 100 tags but Mark said something at the time that really stuck with me, as a team, each of us is given huge responsibility, more so than most normal teams, and because of that we are bound to make some pretty big mistakes but, as long as you learn from them, it can never be seen as a complete loss.
Now, I think that is the key part to all this; make sure you are learning from your mistakes. If you’re running around making mistake after mistake that’s not good. That’s not what you want to be doing, it’ll just cause you and everyone around you a lot of headache. But if you are learning from those mistakes and growing as a result of them then that is really not a bad thing.
Something I’ve found is that I still haven’t stopped making mistakes, but I am making better mistakes (a bit of an oxymoron, I know, so stay with me) each mistake I make is at a higher level than the one before. Now, this does mean that the stakes are higher each time, I feel even worse than before with each new mistake but it also means that in a weird way I’m actually improving and growing which I think means I’m doing something right.
And I think that thinking about it in that way can really help you to not just panic every time something goes wrong, each time you make a mistake and learn from it (or just install Grammarly and spell check in the case of my horrendous spelling!) you get one mistake closer to being a better version of yourself.
Or thats how I like to look at it anyway! Haha
So try to avoid it, but if you do make a mistake this week, just remember the sage wisdom of the early 00’s TV star, and be reassured that each mistake gets you closer to your highest, #BeYourBestYou self.
Charlotte xx
Photo credits: Brian Fowler