How To Be Wrong

it can really suck to be wrong and it can be even worse to have somebody else point out that you’re wrong or that you made a mistake and as soon as you realize that you’re wrong it can affect your presence in a couple of ways you can either get dragged down into kind of a self-deprecating cycle of God what is wrong with me or you can kind of rear up and push back against being wrong and both of those reactions are problematic because they get in the way of communication they and they get in the way of resolving the mistake or addressing the mistake and making things better so I want to point out two things that you can do when you make a mistake and it’s become sort of public knowledge that you’ve made a mistake the first thing is you can kind of extract yourself from being the main character in that story it’s really really easy to feel like a mistake is all about you because you’re the person who made the mistake but what I want to suggest you do is look at the bigger picture look at everyone that’s involved in the story and see if you can look at it from an an us perspective or a we perspective look at it like it’s about this team that has been impacted by this situation and the second thing is to look at it as a situation and as a result you can kind of subtract your ego from the mix and you can start to look at it from a bigger picture perspective and you can start to see okay who needs to do what in order to improve this situation and create a better situation for everyone that we’re all sharing so it allows for some Freedom where previously you might have felt trapped because you might have felt trapped in defending yourself and pushing for something that really was problematic so consider this the next time you make a mistake or the next time there’s a problem that you have caused see if you can look at it from the bigger picture and operate in it in a larger way that does acknowledge that you made a mistake but it’s not about kicking yourself it’s not about taking a punishment it’s about figuring out a solution that will improve the situation that impacts everyone