We all make mistakes. They may be big mistakes with far reaching repercussions, or small mistakes that no one else sees, but we all make them. There are two ways to react to your own mistake; accept responsibility or make excuses.
When you make excuses, you aren’t learning how to get better. You are learning how to blame others. There is no growth in an excuse.
When you accept responsibility for what happened, even if it was not your fault or there are legitimate extenuating circumstances, you can then evaluate and learn from what happened.
At Mindscape, one of our core values is Make Mistakes. Now, it helps that we aren’t brain surgeons. Our work is digital, and digital is usually easy to fix. But the reason we embrace mistakes is to help our team grow. If we yelled at our team members every time they made a mistake, first we’d go hoarse, and then we’d have a lot of people unwilling to experiment, quick to blame others, and not learning from what happened.
By allowing our team to make mistakes, we encourage them to accept responsibility for it, figure out how to fix the issue, and learn about themselves in the process.
Try it out yourself. Instead of spending time and energy looking for someone or thing to blame, just take the responsibility. Own up to it, figure out how to fix it, and move forward.
Life is too short to spend it on excuses!
