110. I Made a BIG Mistake at Work
Mistakes can trigger panic, defensiveness, catastrophizing, and more. By utilizing coaching skills, we can move through these emotional responses to our mistakes with compassion and ease.
Shame and blame are common responses to a mistake, creating a vicious cycle that encourages inaction. It can cause our nervous systems to go into fight or flight response, resulting in shaking, extreme emotions, and feeling filled with terrible feelings. When this occurs, remember that these emotions are temporary and will not hurt you.
This week, I share three mistakes I have made in my career and offer coaching tips I wish I had at the time. Learn methods of managing mistakes so that you can move through tough times quickly. Listen in today so that you're prepared for challenging times ahead.
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What You Will Discover:
What happens when we mess up.
How to utilize “then what”.
Why blame is unnecessary.
How to settle a fight or flight response.
Why mistakes are subjective.
Resources:
Sign up for a Curiosity Call to find out if individual coaching can help you!
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey you all, I’m Marissa McKool, and you’re listening to the Redefining Rest Podcast for Public Health Professionals. Here we believe rest is your right. You don’t have to earn it, you just have to learn how to take it and I’m going to teach you. Ready? Come along.
Hello everyone, good morning if it’s morning for you. Maybe you’re listening to this on Monday when this comes out and you’re driving to work, maybe you're walking your dog. Maybe it's not morning, maybe it’s not Monday. Wherever you are, whenever you’re listening to this, I’m so glad you are here. I’m recording this first thing in the morning. I’m actually in my workout gear because around lunchtime I’m going to go to an Orangetheory class, not sponsored obviously.
But I’ve just been, I don’t know if any of you have had this experience but COVID and the pandemic really took a toll on a lot of things but for me also my exercise and moving my body. And to be honest and really just frank with you all, I gained a lot of weight. And I realized, I knew this before but I realized it even more that I am not the type of person that can just go to a gym and work out. I can do it but I don’t go as often, my workouts aren’t as intense. I’m not as consistent.
I am really someone who if I’m paying for a membership or paying for a class, especially if you get a fee if you don't show up and you have to schedule ahead of time. That's where I thrive, to be able to show up to a class that I paid for, that I scheduled and then someone else guides me on my workout. I get such a better workout. I am so much more consistent. So throughout the pandemic I tried to work out at home. Now that we’ve moved we have a nice gym. And I go here and there and sometimes I would really have a couple weeks where I was kicking butt.
But for the most part it just wasn't working for me. So now I'm back going to the studio. I’ve been doing CorePower and Orangetheory. I love both of them and I’m feeling such a difference. And it didn’t happen overnight. Even with the studio I had to kind of really build up on it. If you’ve worked with me in my one-on-one coaching program, if you’ve done any of my courses that have one-on-one coaching, not necessarily the free How to Delegate to Reduce your Workload which by the way is still available. If you haven’t checked it out, mckoolcoaching.com/courses.
But more of my five week courses where you get coaching with me. You know one of the things I talk about is how when we work towards a goal it takes time. You’ve got to take your steps and build it up and that’s okay. So it’s taken me several months to get to this point where now I’m going about three times a week. It feels really good. It feels good to move my body again. I am definitely way out of shape compared to pre-pandemic, the shape I was in but that's okay. I’m taking it day by day. I’m so proud of myself.
And so anyways, that was a little tangent but what I was going to say originally was one of the benefits I love of working from home is I can work out at lunch because I am one of those people, my face turns beet red when I work out. I sweat so much and that redness sticks around for a long time. So when I worked in the office I could never go work out at lunch and just come back to the office. I mean I could have I guess but I just don’t want to. I have colleagues who could, they came back and you would have never known they went to the gym except for maybe their wet hair or something. That was not me.
So working from home has really helped with that but before I go to the gym I really wanted to record this episode. Now, first, all of you all who are new here, welcome and I'm so glad you're here. Maybe this is your first episode you clicked on. Maybe this is your second or third. I really want to encourage you to hit that subscribe button, whatever platform you’re listening on, Apple, Spotify, Google, wherever else, hit that subscribe button because we have some really exciting things coming up this summer.
We have a podcast giveaway with some amazing prizes. For those of you who have been listening for a while, maybe you were around in April 2022, we did a giveaway, was awesome. We’re doing another one. It’s even bigger, bigger prizes. So you want to make sure to subscribe for that. So you get notified when that's happening. I also have another five week course that I'm working on that’s going to come out this summer. For those of you last year who were around and many of you took it, I had a course called How the Patriarchy Robs You of Your Rest.
I have a new course I’m developing round time and productivity. And it's going to be a similar format, five weeks. You get videos. You get coaching with me. It’s at a much affordable price point than my in-depth one-on-one coaching program. So if you’ve been thinking about, you want to do coaching but right now financially it’s not the best time. This course is a great option for you. So I’ll be announcing more details and when that’s happening later in the summer. So make sure you subscribe.
Alright, here's the deal. As you can tell by the title of this episode I fucked up this week. I made a big, big mistake. And when it happened, my body went into fight, flight and freeze, literally all three. It just cycled through all three. Someone alerted me to something I did and they shared their thoughts about it. And I was so red in the face, I wanted to first get defensive and argue. Second, I wanted to people please and explain and get them to like me and not have their thoughts about it.
And then I third, I wanted to completely stop working and hide. And I was like “I’m never doing this again.” That’s what my brain was saying. And then I was able to shift that experience and shift out of it. I was able to see their point. I was able to feel disappointment in myself but not bury myself in shame. I was able to take accountability and respond. I was able to use my responsibility to make some changes and I was so proud of that. And I was able to really get curious and learn from it.
Now, if you would have seen me making mistakes five years ago, eight years ago, ten years ago, that would not have happened. I would have stayed in either defensiveness or wanting to people please or wanting to hide. So this has been a huge shift and all of it’s from coaching. In the past maybe I could get to this place but it wouldn’t have taken two days. It would have taken maybe weeks or months or even honestly, years. I remember there were periods where my brain would have a flashback to something I did the year before and I’d still feel that shame. And that’s not a great place to be.
And some of you are there too. So it got me thinking about past mistakes I made at work and how I used to handle them. And if I could go back in time and coach myself, what I would coach my past self on. And my hope is that this will help you, no matter what recent mistake you made at work or maybe a future one. I’m going to walk through a couple scenarios and basically offer coaching for those scenarios. And I think this will really help you, even if the specifics of the scenario aren’t exactly the same, your mental and emotional experience is probably very similar to some of these.
So I’m going to coach around slowing your stress response, not getting stuck in shame or blame and how to move forward. So I’m going to share three mistakes. These are all my mistakes that I have made in my career, what happened, what I experienced at the time, when I didn't have coaching and how I would coach myself. And I really want you to think about how you can apply this to you, your work, even past mistakes you've made and really think about it from your experience.
So the first I want to share is I made a data error in a grant report. Now, those of you who work in grants, whether you’re a grantee or a grantor, you know that grant reports are a huge thing that we have to do, if you’re grant funded. So I was working on a grant report for probably two months, if not longer. It was my first year in this particular position, first time doing this report. And it was a massive report I had to submit. And I felt a lot of pressure. Where I was working they had this grant funding for quite a while, not that it was grandfathered in or guaranteed.
They just continued to do excellent work and receive it. So I felt a lot of pressure not to fuck that up. And it wasn’t a grant application, it was a grant report. But at the same time I was worried, I was really worried that the report could impact our program or at the very least my job. I hadn’t been in this position very long so I didn’t really know what they used the grant report for and what were the outcomes of it based on what they thought. I didn’t have any context around that.
And I remember after I turned it in, I had weeks of laboring over it, working so hard on it and it was like, feel like it was 60 pages or no, that’s extreme. I think it was 30 pages and it was a lot. There was some data, there was some narrative, it was quantitative and qualitative. So there is a lot going on. And a few nights after I submitted it I woke up. This happens to me sometimes, my brain remembers something and I wake up and I’m like, “Oh, fuck, I put the wrong date in.” There was a section that I actually included old data. It was incorrect. It was accurate.
In that moment the drop in my stomach I can still remember. I tossed and turned that night. I could not go back to sleep. I was so worried what would happen. I didn't know if I should tell my boss what to do. I was so embarrassed. I was really worried what my boss was going to think of me. So I wasn't sure if I should even tell them. My brain started catastrophizing that I would get in trouble, that our funding would get stripped, that I would get fired.
And maybe this has happened for you where you make some sort of mistake and then your brain starts freaking out about what’s going to happen. If you’re going to get in trouble, what’s your boss going to think of you and you go into a panic. And sometimes this can last a long time, this panic, your brain freaking out, playing out worst case scenario. And it feels terrible. So here’s how I would have coached myself in the past and here’s how I would coach you if you were going through this.
So I want you to play out that panic, play out the catastrophizing. So start with, ask yourself what is the worst case scenario my brain is constantly going to, it’s constantly worrying about. For me at that time it was that my program would get in trouble, it would be my fault and then I would get fired. And also that other people would be mad at me and think I was terrible at my job. But that's really where my brain would stop and your brain is probably stopping at the peak of fear or worse scenario, of panic.
Our brains stop at the scariest part, but you have to play it out. So ask yourself, okay, let’s just say that happens, let’s go there, let’s go all the way there and say worst case scenario happens, then what? Okay, well, if I got fired, one, I’d feel like shit, okay but then what, what would you do? You would feel like shit but then what would you do? Okay, well, I would have to start applying for jobs. Okay, then what? Just keep asking, then what? Then might have to use my savings if it takes me a while. Okay, then what? Depending how long it takes I might need to borrow money.
Okay, then what? Keep applying, I know eventually I would get a job. Okay. So it will work out. It might not feel great. It might not be your choice of events but you’d figure it out. This is what you see when you actually play out the catastrophizing is that even if the worst case scenario happens which you don't know if it will, but even if that worst case scenario happens. When you play it out, you get to see you’d figure it out. You would survive. You would get through it. You would be resourceful.
It might not feel great but that's okay. You would move through it and at some point you’d look back and it would be in your past. Now, this is so, so helpful to do so you don't just get stuck at the top of the roller-coaster. If you've ever been on a roller-coaster, kind of the scariest part is the beginning where you’re slowly inching up to the very top and then that first drop. And then after that you’re like, okay, I can handle this, I mean for most of us. If you get sick, all of that stuff, that’s different but you get the metaphor. The same thing here, you have to play it all the way out.
Okay, second scenario, I sent out something without my boss’s approval. So I had been working at this job for several years. And the people I worked with really trusted me a lot, including my boss. I was very comfortable. I had a lot of autonomy. I made a lot of decisions independently. And this was when I was in academia. So this context is slightly important, but I was a staff member and the structure was a bit different. There were aspects of my job where I worked with all of their staff and aspects where I really worked with all of their faculty.
So I had a staff boss and a faculty boss. If you’re not familiar with academia, it’s very hierarchical, staff and faculty are treated completely differently and there’s a lot of issues with that but we won’t get into all those. And actually the faculty I worked with very, very closely who I’m going to be talking about in this example, were amazing. They treated me just as an equal, absolutely amazing. But there were issues in the broader academia, whether it was the school I was working in, the university or across universities.
If you’ve worked in academia you know what I’m talking about. But anyways, at one of my faculty meetings I was the only staff person because this was the part of my job where I worked with the faculty and everyone else was faculty. And this was after Brett Cavanagh was appointed to the Supreme Court. As many of you know he was accused by many, many women of sexual assault and misconduct. And when the news came out that day that he was appointed, there was this heaviness in the air.
I worked at a school of public health. We were, the work I was focused in was around women's health, reproductive health. So there was just this heaviness in the air. My boss wasn't at this particular meeting but one of the other faculty members, who was very senior, turned to me and said, “I think you should send out a statement about what happened on behalf of our program.” So I did. It was a faculty member who was very senior, who I trusted. She clearly trusted me. I had a lot of autonomy at the time so I drafted something, wrote it and then sent it out.
Later my boss, who really had never gotten upset with me or even given me critical feedback really, saw the email and said, “Never do that again. Never do that again without talking to me first.” And she was pretty stern on that. And here’s what happened. I went straight into the shame and blame cycle. I alternated between feeling shame where I was thinking I shouldn’t have done that. What will she think of me? I really fucked up. Does everyone think this? Something is wrong with me. I shouldn’t have done that.
And then I had switched to blaming, blaming someone else. Well, that other faculty told me to do it. It's not my fault. You should trust me more, I have a right to. If you wanted me to pass everything through you, you should have been doing that before. Just repeat, repeat back and forth. And this might be happening to you more than you realize. Sometimes maybe it’s obvious but sometimes it's subtle. And again your situation might be different. But notice when you get into someone else maybe shares their opinion or you do realize you made a mistake.
And you go into this back and forth between shame and blame. Here is how I would coach myself and coach you. First I want to show you, shame really leads to shutting down. When you feel shame you really shut down. And blame really leads to righteousness, which is a different form of shutting down, neither of which drive helpful actions and really you end up feeling stuck and pretty shitty. When you're feeling that shame, you want to hide, you want to avoid email, you want to distract with social media. You don't want to take action. You don't want to go to work.
When you are in the blaming mode, you focus all your energy on ruminating on someone else and getting more upset. And you don't do much else. You just get stuck here. And it's not useful and doesn't feel good. What if, really think about this, what if no one is to blame? Think about it. What if there is no blame? What if there is no fault? If there is no fault, there is no blame necessary. Then you don't need to spend your energy being righteous or shutting down by shame or switching between the two. It's just not necessary.
Your brain is going into a response based on the assumption that blame needs to be assigned, but what if it doesn't? Blame here isn’t necessary. It’s not helpful. It’s not needed. Blaming someone else or blaming yourself, which is kind of a form of shaming, not useful. If there was no fault to assign, what would you be thinking about the situation? Really think about it, if you didn't feel like there was any need to blame or assign blame to anyone including yourself, what would you do? What wouldn’t you do? What would you say?
You probably wouldn’t shut down. You probably wouldn’t waste energy ruminating on someone else. You might decide actively, consciously if you need to take any actions or not. You might decide to change how you do something in the future. You might ask for clarification. You might get feedback. You might problem solve. You might move on and use your time and energy somewhere else. There's a lot of things you might do without all the drama your brain wants to go into and without getting stuck in blame and shame. Blame isn't necessary.
It's not necessary to try to figure out who is to blame, you or someone else because in situations like this, and again, yours might be different. But when your brain is going to blame or shame when something happened at work, blame doesn't really matter. Take the blame out of it and you'll be able to move forward. I really want you to sit with the possibility that blame isn’t necessary. No one has to take the blame, really think about that.
Okay, third piece. This is the last example. There was a situation where there were several people that were upset with something I said at my workplace office. So at one of the organizations I worked at, there were times where someone in leadership, usually the highest, highest, highest level of leadership might send out an organization-wide email about something. A lot of times it was either to be just informative, hey, we have this going on. When they really wanted to make sure everyone’s attention saw this email, they would have kind of the highest leader send it.
But sometimes they would send emails about kind of big, difficult events happening in the world, when there was a school shooting, a political policy passed that was really devastating for public health, things like that. And sometimes, not always, sometimes other senior leaders at different levels would start hitting reply all and sending their thoughts. Now, we all know it can be very annoying for the reply all, even if it’s not organization-wide, when you send an email and it’s just to be informative or share, hey, passing this along and then everyone starts replying all.
We already have enough in our inbox so we all know that feeling. And this particular incident, I don't really remember what the original email was about specifically. This was those years ago but it was related to some sort of political event happening in the US, something devastating, something, a tragic event, something like that. And our top leader sent out a solidarity statement basically. Hey, I know we’re all struggling with this, do what you need to do, that kind of thing.
And other leadership and senior employees started replying all and sharing what they thought we all should be doing in response. Both kind of as an organization but as individuals. And this was leadership in an organization that the organization itself had several power imbalances and hierarchical issues, many issues of bias and poor treatment of different staff based on that hierarchy and power imbalance. And there was a distinct line kind of between senior staff and leadership and just everyone else.
So the experience of everyone else, entry level, mid-career are often overlooked and really not taken into consideration by leadership or senior staff in general, but in their reply all. And that was something that was becoming apparent because these senior staff are saying, “Hey, we need to do this. You need to do this.” And I felt as not a senior staff representing my peers, whoa, you have no concept of what we are going through and what we have on our plate.
So I was compelled to respond and say something like again, I don’t remember the exact details, but something like, “All of us are experiencing enough stress right now, please consider that before replying all to a company-wide email.” Something like that, much more eloquently. And I remember when I wrote it, I did feel some righteousness but I did feel good about doing it. And I felt like I was advocating and speaking up. Then I got some direct replies.
And some of them agreed with me and thanked me and were really grateful. And of course that’s all good, but a handful actually disagreed and told me they didn’t appreciate me saying it. And the way I read those emails is as if they were yelling at me, as if they were mad. Now, I don’t know if they were. Text on email is hard to tell and I was already kind of activated my nervous system. But I felt deep shame. I mean I wanted to hide under a rock. My heart was racing fast. My face was getting red. I nearly started to cry. I had shaking hands.
My nervous system was responding as if I was in physical danger of being kicked out of the tribe and starving to death. My brain was saying, how could I have sent that to the whole organization? Everyone’s going to think negatively about me. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. This is so embarrassing. You should never speak up again. Stuff like that. And I don’t remember the exact, what the email said, but I remember how I felt. I remember the moment I was sitting at my desk and how my body felt. That’s how intense this nervous system reaction was.
And there might be times where you have this level of reaction. Maybe it is to an email. Maybe it's to feedback you get in your performance review. Maybe it's to a question someone asks you in your presentation. This can happen a lot. I talk about this a lot. If you've done my one-on-one coaching program, we talk a lot about the nervous system and how in modern day, our brain reacts to certain triggers as if it was thousands of years ago and our physical survival is at threat. And our nervous system gets activated and it feels terrible and we feel stuck. So this happens to many of us.
So here's how I would have coached myself and I’ll coach you if you’re experiencing this. The first thing I would have told myself is take a breath. Take a moment. Close your eyes. Let’s take a minute. Close your eyes. Now, if you’re listening to this and you’re driving or riding a bike, do not close your eyes. But if you are listening to this and you have made a recent mistake at work and you are feeling this way and you’re at home on your couch or something, feel free to walk through this.
But close your eyes, let’s take a minute to scan your body. Leave your brain for a second, let your brain just settle. Take your attention to your body, scan it from head to toe. What do you notice? What do you feel? This allows you to get into the physical sensations and out of your brain’s freakout. So what do you notice? What’s going on in your head, in your chest area, in your throat, in your legs, in your hands? Maybe you notice, my heart feels heavy, my stomach is in a knot, my hands are sweaty, what else?
And take another breath and just notice those sensations and allow them to be there, whatever physical sensations you’re feeling. Maybe it's a tight throat or a fast beating heart. They’re not going to hurt you, they can be there. You can let those sensations be there. Now, this piece, this first part of the coaching really helps slow down your nervous system a bit, slow down your brain, come back to being a little grounded to coach in a different way.
So here's what I would prompt you to consider. What if you didn't make a mistake? I know, if I had gotten this coaching when this situation happened my brain would have been like, “Wait, what?” I would have never considered that’s a possibility but really think about it. Instead of assuming you made a mistake, what if you didn’t? How do we know if something is a mistake? If we surveyed 1,000 people explaining what happened, would they all agree with you that it was a mistake? Probably not, probably not.
Some people would think it was, some people would think no, it’s not. And some people would be like, “I don’t really know.” Mistakes are 100% subjective. What is a mistake or not is totally subjective. It’s an opinion. I know, mind blowing. Let’s get out of this example for a second and go to something else a little simpler. Let's say you're baking, and scenario A is you thought the recipe said one cup of butter. So you put a cup of butter in the recipe but it actually said half a cup. But the cake came out delicious, you loved it, everyone else did too.
Scenario B, you followed the recipe exactly as written but the brownies kind of came out terrible and dry and crumbly, which one was a mistake? The one where you followed the recipe but the outcome wasn’t great or the one where you didn't follow the recipe but the outcome was great? It’s subjective, totally subjective. We often kind of assign whether something is a mistake or not based on the outcome, what was the outcome?
In this scenario, my past experience, the outcome was people sharing their opinions but my brain was totally overlooking that half the people's opinions agreed with me and were grateful. My brain was only attached to the opinions that disagreed and used that as evidence that I made a mistake. But what if that’s not true? If we just look at the opinions that were in agreement then did we make a mistake? It’s all subjective.
You are assuming you made a mistake whether that's because someone else shared their thoughts or asked a question or your brain’s just attaching to something arbitrarily. It doesn't necessarily mean you made a mistake. Only you get to decide if you made a mistake because it’s an opinion. And even if someone else says you made a mistake you still get to decide if you want to assign yes I did, or no, I didn’t. It’s totally up to you. It’s all subjective.
Okay, so those are my mistake examples through my career and how I would have coached myself and how I would coach you. Here’s the final thing I’ll say. None of us are perfect nor will we ever be. There are going to be things we say that we might wish we had said differently. There are going to be times where other people don't like what we did or didn't do. There might be situations where we do want to take accountability and responsibility and apologize and course correct and do something different.
There will probably be times where we input data wrong or publish work with spelling errors. Hello, I publish work with spelling errors all the time. I don't call it a mistake. I’m just like, “That’s how I talk, I’m not the greatest speller.” It’s okay, we are human and this is normal at all levels of career development, whether you’re a recent grad, mid-career, senior leader, doesn't mean anything is wrong with you.
It also doesn't mean you have to be stuck in shame for it or you have to live in blaming someone else or that you have to call it a mistake, or that you need to catastrophize and be stuck in that place. You can use all of the coaching tools I just offered to you and showed you in this episode, to help yourself move through it. And just know these things will continue to happen, that’s a part of it.
And if you know that ahead of time and you use these coaching questions, these coaching tools to help yourself through it, it'll be so much easier. You'll be able to get through it much quicker and not like I’m racing away from it, more like I’m not stuck in it. And you can move forward and you can learn and you can move on.
So if in the next couple of weeks, months, even in the next year, you find yourself in a scenario where you feel like you might have made a mistake or someone else thinks you did, you notice you’re in shame or blame or you’re catastrophizing. Come back to this episode, relisten to it whenever you need to and use the coaching questions I offer and the coaching tools. Alright you all, so with that I’m going to head out. Talk to you all next week. I hope you have a great, great week. Bye everyone.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
Hello everyone, good morning if it’s morning for you. Maybe you’re listening to this on Monday when this comes out and you’re driving to work, maybe you're walking your dog. Maybe it's not morning, maybe it’s not Monday. Wherever you are, whenever you’re listening to this, I’m so glad you are here. I’m recording this first thing in the morning. I’m actually in my workout gear because around lunchtime I’m going to go to an Orangetheory class, not sponsored obviously.
But I’ve just been, I don’t know if any of you have had this experience but COVID and the pandemic really took a toll on a lot of things but for me also my exercise and moving my body. And to be honest and really just frank with you all, I gained a lot of weight. And I realized, I knew this before but I realized it even more that I am not the type of person that can just go to a gym and work out. I can do it but I don’t go as often, my workouts aren’t as intense. I’m not as consistent.
I am really someone who if I’m paying for a membership or paying for a class, especially if you get a fee if you don't show up and you have to schedule ahead of time. That's where I thrive, to be able to show up to a class that I paid for, that I scheduled and then someone else guides me on my workout. I get such a better workout. I am so much more consistent. So throughout the pandemic I tried to work out at home. Now that we’ve moved we have a nice gym. And I go here and there and sometimes I would really have a couple weeks where I was kicking butt.
But for the most part it just wasn't working for me. So now I'm back going to the studio. I’ve been doing CorePower and Orangetheory. I love both of them and I’m feeling such a difference. And it didn’t happen overnight. Even with the studio I had to kind of really build up on it. If you’ve worked with me in my one-on-one coaching program, if you’ve done any of my courses that have one-on-one coaching, not necessarily the free How to Delegate to Reduce your Workload which by the way is still available. If you haven’t checked it out, mckoolcoaching.com/courses.
But more of my five week courses where you get coaching with me. You know one of the things I talk about is how when we work towards a goal it takes time. You’ve got to take your steps and build it up and that’s okay. So it’s taken me several months to get to this point where now I’m going about three times a week. It feels really good. It feels good to move my body again. I am definitely way out of shape compared to pre-pandemic, the shape I was in but that's okay. I’m taking it day by day. I’m so proud of myself.
And so anyways, that was a little tangent but what I was going to say originally was one of the benefits I love of working from home is I can work out at lunch because I am one of those people, my face turns beet red when I work out. I sweat so much and that redness sticks around for a long time. So when I worked in the office I could never go work out at lunch and just come back to the office. I mean I could have I guess but I just don’t want to. I have colleagues who could, they came back and you would have never known they went to the gym except for maybe their wet hair or something. That was not me.
So working from home has really helped with that but before I go to the gym I really wanted to record this episode. Now, first, all of you all who are new here, welcome and I'm so glad you're here. Maybe this is your first episode you clicked on. Maybe this is your second or third. I really want to encourage you to hit that subscribe button, whatever platform you’re listening on, Apple, Spotify, Google, wherever else, hit that subscribe button because we have some really exciting things coming up this summer.
We have a podcast giveaway with some amazing prizes. For those of you who have been listening for a while, maybe you were around in April 2022, we did a giveaway, was awesome. We’re doing another one. It’s even bigger, bigger prizes. So you want to make sure to subscribe for that. So you get notified when that's happening. I also have another five week course that I'm working on that’s going to come out this summer. For those of you last year who were around and many of you took it, I had a course called How the Patriarchy Robs You of Your Rest.
I have a new course I’m developing round time and productivity. And it's going to be a similar format, five weeks. You get videos. You get coaching with me. It’s at a much affordable price point than my in-depth one-on-one coaching program. So if you’ve been thinking about, you want to do coaching but right now financially it’s not the best time. This course is a great option for you. So I’ll be announcing more details and when that’s happening later in the summer. So make sure you subscribe.
Alright, here's the deal. As you can tell by the title of this episode I fucked up this week. I made a big, big mistake. And when it happened, my body went into fight, flight and freeze, literally all three. It just cycled through all three. Someone alerted me to something I did and they shared their thoughts about it. And I was so red in the face, I wanted to first get defensive and argue. Second, I wanted to people please and explain and get them to like me and not have their thoughts about it.
And then I third, I wanted to completely stop working and hide. And I was like “I’m never doing this again.” That’s what my brain was saying. And then I was able to shift that experience and shift out of it. I was able to see their point. I was able to feel disappointment in myself but not bury myself in shame. I was able to take accountability and respond. I was able to use my responsibility to make some changes and I was so proud of that. And I was able to really get curious and learn from it.
Now, if you would have seen me making mistakes five years ago, eight years ago, ten years ago, that would not have happened. I would have stayed in either defensiveness or wanting to people please or wanting to hide. So this has been a huge shift and all of it’s from coaching. In the past maybe I could get to this place but it wouldn’t have taken two days. It would have taken maybe weeks or months or even honestly, years. I remember there were periods where my brain would have a flashback to something I did the year before and I’d still feel that shame. And that’s not a great place to be.
And some of you are there too. So it got me thinking about past mistakes I made at work and how I used to handle them. And if I could go back in time and coach myself, what I would coach my past self on. And my hope is that this will help you, no matter what recent mistake you made at work or maybe a future one. I’m going to walk through a couple scenarios and basically offer coaching for those scenarios. And I think this will really help you, even if the specifics of the scenario aren’t exactly the same, your mental and emotional experience is probably very similar to some of these.
So I’m going to coach around slowing your stress response, not getting stuck in shame or blame and how to move forward. So I’m going to share three mistakes. These are all my mistakes that I have made in my career, what happened, what I experienced at the time, when I didn't have coaching and how I would coach myself. And I really want you to think about how you can apply this to you, your work, even past mistakes you've made and really think about it from your experience.
So the first I want to share is I made a data error in a grant report. Now, those of you who work in grants, whether you’re a grantee or a grantor, you know that grant reports are a huge thing that we have to do, if you’re grant funded. So I was working on a grant report for probably two months, if not longer. It was my first year in this particular position, first time doing this report. And it was a massive report I had to submit. And I felt a lot of pressure. Where I was working they had this grant funding for quite a while, not that it was grandfathered in or guaranteed.
They just continued to do excellent work and receive it. So I felt a lot of pressure not to fuck that up. And it wasn’t a grant application, it was a grant report. But at the same time I was worried, I was really worried that the report could impact our program or at the very least my job. I hadn’t been in this position very long so I didn’t really know what they used the grant report for and what were the outcomes of it based on what they thought. I didn’t have any context around that.
And I remember after I turned it in, I had weeks of laboring over it, working so hard on it and it was like, feel like it was 60 pages or no, that’s extreme. I think it was 30 pages and it was a lot. There was some data, there was some narrative, it was quantitative and qualitative. So there is a lot going on. And a few nights after I submitted it I woke up. This happens to me sometimes, my brain remembers something and I wake up and I’m like, “Oh, fuck, I put the wrong date in.” There was a section that I actually included old data. It was incorrect. It was accurate.
In that moment the drop in my stomach I can still remember. I tossed and turned that night. I could not go back to sleep. I was so worried what would happen. I didn't know if I should tell my boss what to do. I was so embarrassed. I was really worried what my boss was going to think of me. So I wasn't sure if I should even tell them. My brain started catastrophizing that I would get in trouble, that our funding would get stripped, that I would get fired.
And maybe this has happened for you where you make some sort of mistake and then your brain starts freaking out about what’s going to happen. If you’re going to get in trouble, what’s your boss going to think of you and you go into a panic. And sometimes this can last a long time, this panic, your brain freaking out, playing out worst case scenario. And it feels terrible. So here’s how I would have coached myself in the past and here’s how I would coach you if you were going through this.
So I want you to play out that panic, play out the catastrophizing. So start with, ask yourself what is the worst case scenario my brain is constantly going to, it’s constantly worrying about. For me at that time it was that my program would get in trouble, it would be my fault and then I would get fired. And also that other people would be mad at me and think I was terrible at my job. But that's really where my brain would stop and your brain is probably stopping at the peak of fear or worse scenario, of panic.
Our brains stop at the scariest part, but you have to play it out. So ask yourself, okay, let’s just say that happens, let’s go there, let’s go all the way there and say worst case scenario happens, then what? Okay, well, if I got fired, one, I’d feel like shit, okay but then what, what would you do? You would feel like shit but then what would you do? Okay, well, I would have to start applying for jobs. Okay, then what? Just keep asking, then what? Then might have to use my savings if it takes me a while. Okay, then what? Depending how long it takes I might need to borrow money.
Okay, then what? Keep applying, I know eventually I would get a job. Okay. So it will work out. It might not feel great. It might not be your choice of events but you’d figure it out. This is what you see when you actually play out the catastrophizing is that even if the worst case scenario happens which you don't know if it will, but even if that worst case scenario happens. When you play it out, you get to see you’d figure it out. You would survive. You would get through it. You would be resourceful.
It might not feel great but that's okay. You would move through it and at some point you’d look back and it would be in your past. Now, this is so, so helpful to do so you don't just get stuck at the top of the roller-coaster. If you've ever been on a roller-coaster, kind of the scariest part is the beginning where you’re slowly inching up to the very top and then that first drop. And then after that you’re like, okay, I can handle this, I mean for most of us. If you get sick, all of that stuff, that’s different but you get the metaphor. The same thing here, you have to play it all the way out.
Okay, second scenario, I sent out something without my boss’s approval. So I had been working at this job for several years. And the people I worked with really trusted me a lot, including my boss. I was very comfortable. I had a lot of autonomy. I made a lot of decisions independently. And this was when I was in academia. So this context is slightly important, but I was a staff member and the structure was a bit different. There were aspects of my job where I worked with all of their staff and aspects where I really worked with all of their faculty.
So I had a staff boss and a faculty boss. If you’re not familiar with academia, it’s very hierarchical, staff and faculty are treated completely differently and there’s a lot of issues with that but we won’t get into all those. And actually the faculty I worked with very, very closely who I’m going to be talking about in this example, were amazing. They treated me just as an equal, absolutely amazing. But there were issues in the broader academia, whether it was the school I was working in, the university or across universities.
If you’ve worked in academia you know what I’m talking about. But anyways, at one of my faculty meetings I was the only staff person because this was the part of my job where I worked with the faculty and everyone else was faculty. And this was after Brett Cavanagh was appointed to the Supreme Court. As many of you know he was accused by many, many women of sexual assault and misconduct. And when the news came out that day that he was appointed, there was this heaviness in the air.
I worked at a school of public health. We were, the work I was focused in was around women's health, reproductive health. So there was just this heaviness in the air. My boss wasn't at this particular meeting but one of the other faculty members, who was very senior, turned to me and said, “I think you should send out a statement about what happened on behalf of our program.” So I did. It was a faculty member who was very senior, who I trusted. She clearly trusted me. I had a lot of autonomy at the time so I drafted something, wrote it and then sent it out.
Later my boss, who really had never gotten upset with me or even given me critical feedback really, saw the email and said, “Never do that again. Never do that again without talking to me first.” And she was pretty stern on that. And here’s what happened. I went straight into the shame and blame cycle. I alternated between feeling shame where I was thinking I shouldn’t have done that. What will she think of me? I really fucked up. Does everyone think this? Something is wrong with me. I shouldn’t have done that.
And then I had switched to blaming, blaming someone else. Well, that other faculty told me to do it. It's not my fault. You should trust me more, I have a right to. If you wanted me to pass everything through you, you should have been doing that before. Just repeat, repeat back and forth. And this might be happening to you more than you realize. Sometimes maybe it’s obvious but sometimes it's subtle. And again your situation might be different. But notice when you get into someone else maybe shares their opinion or you do realize you made a mistake.
And you go into this back and forth between shame and blame. Here is how I would coach myself and coach you. First I want to show you, shame really leads to shutting down. When you feel shame you really shut down. And blame really leads to righteousness, which is a different form of shutting down, neither of which drive helpful actions and really you end up feeling stuck and pretty shitty. When you're feeling that shame, you want to hide, you want to avoid email, you want to distract with social media. You don't want to take action. You don't want to go to work.
When you are in the blaming mode, you focus all your energy on ruminating on someone else and getting more upset. And you don't do much else. You just get stuck here. And it's not useful and doesn't feel good. What if, really think about this, what if no one is to blame? Think about it. What if there is no blame? What if there is no fault? If there is no fault, there is no blame necessary. Then you don't need to spend your energy being righteous or shutting down by shame or switching between the two. It's just not necessary.
Your brain is going into a response based on the assumption that blame needs to be assigned, but what if it doesn't? Blame here isn’t necessary. It’s not helpful. It’s not needed. Blaming someone else or blaming yourself, which is kind of a form of shaming, not useful. If there was no fault to assign, what would you be thinking about the situation? Really think about it, if you didn't feel like there was any need to blame or assign blame to anyone including yourself, what would you do? What wouldn’t you do? What would you say?
You probably wouldn’t shut down. You probably wouldn’t waste energy ruminating on someone else. You might decide actively, consciously if you need to take any actions or not. You might decide to change how you do something in the future. You might ask for clarification. You might get feedback. You might problem solve. You might move on and use your time and energy somewhere else. There's a lot of things you might do without all the drama your brain wants to go into and without getting stuck in blame and shame. Blame isn't necessary.
It's not necessary to try to figure out who is to blame, you or someone else because in situations like this, and again, yours might be different. But when your brain is going to blame or shame when something happened at work, blame doesn't really matter. Take the blame out of it and you'll be able to move forward. I really want you to sit with the possibility that blame isn’t necessary. No one has to take the blame, really think about that.
Okay, third piece. This is the last example. There was a situation where there were several people that were upset with something I said at my workplace office. So at one of the organizations I worked at, there were times where someone in leadership, usually the highest, highest, highest level of leadership might send out an organization-wide email about something. A lot of times it was either to be just informative, hey, we have this going on. When they really wanted to make sure everyone’s attention saw this email, they would have kind of the highest leader send it.
But sometimes they would send emails about kind of big, difficult events happening in the world, when there was a school shooting, a political policy passed that was really devastating for public health, things like that. And sometimes, not always, sometimes other senior leaders at different levels would start hitting reply all and sending their thoughts. Now, we all know it can be very annoying for the reply all, even if it’s not organization-wide, when you send an email and it’s just to be informative or share, hey, passing this along and then everyone starts replying all.
We already have enough in our inbox so we all know that feeling. And this particular incident, I don't really remember what the original email was about specifically. This was those years ago but it was related to some sort of political event happening in the US, something devastating, something, a tragic event, something like that. And our top leader sent out a solidarity statement basically. Hey, I know we’re all struggling with this, do what you need to do, that kind of thing.
And other leadership and senior employees started replying all and sharing what they thought we all should be doing in response. Both kind of as an organization but as individuals. And this was leadership in an organization that the organization itself had several power imbalances and hierarchical issues, many issues of bias and poor treatment of different staff based on that hierarchy and power imbalance. And there was a distinct line kind of between senior staff and leadership and just everyone else.
So the experience of everyone else, entry level, mid-career are often overlooked and really not taken into consideration by leadership or senior staff in general, but in their reply all. And that was something that was becoming apparent because these senior staff are saying, “Hey, we need to do this. You need to do this.” And I felt as not a senior staff representing my peers, whoa, you have no concept of what we are going through and what we have on our plate.
So I was compelled to respond and say something like again, I don’t remember the exact details, but something like, “All of us are experiencing enough stress right now, please consider that before replying all to a company-wide email.” Something like that, much more eloquently. And I remember when I wrote it, I did feel some righteousness but I did feel good about doing it. And I felt like I was advocating and speaking up. Then I got some direct replies.
And some of them agreed with me and thanked me and were really grateful. And of course that’s all good, but a handful actually disagreed and told me they didn’t appreciate me saying it. And the way I read those emails is as if they were yelling at me, as if they were mad. Now, I don’t know if they were. Text on email is hard to tell and I was already kind of activated my nervous system. But I felt deep shame. I mean I wanted to hide under a rock. My heart was racing fast. My face was getting red. I nearly started to cry. I had shaking hands.
My nervous system was responding as if I was in physical danger of being kicked out of the tribe and starving to death. My brain was saying, how could I have sent that to the whole organization? Everyone’s going to think negatively about me. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. This is so embarrassing. You should never speak up again. Stuff like that. And I don’t remember the exact, what the email said, but I remember how I felt. I remember the moment I was sitting at my desk and how my body felt. That’s how intense this nervous system reaction was.
And there might be times where you have this level of reaction. Maybe it is to an email. Maybe it's to feedback you get in your performance review. Maybe it's to a question someone asks you in your presentation. This can happen a lot. I talk about this a lot. If you've done my one-on-one coaching program, we talk a lot about the nervous system and how in modern day, our brain reacts to certain triggers as if it was thousands of years ago and our physical survival is at threat. And our nervous system gets activated and it feels terrible and we feel stuck. So this happens to many of us.
So here's how I would have coached myself and I’ll coach you if you’re experiencing this. The first thing I would have told myself is take a breath. Take a moment. Close your eyes. Let’s take a minute. Close your eyes. Now, if you’re listening to this and you’re driving or riding a bike, do not close your eyes. But if you are listening to this and you have made a recent mistake at work and you are feeling this way and you’re at home on your couch or something, feel free to walk through this.
But close your eyes, let’s take a minute to scan your body. Leave your brain for a second, let your brain just settle. Take your attention to your body, scan it from head to toe. What do you notice? What do you feel? This allows you to get into the physical sensations and out of your brain’s freakout. So what do you notice? What’s going on in your head, in your chest area, in your throat, in your legs, in your hands? Maybe you notice, my heart feels heavy, my stomach is in a knot, my hands are sweaty, what else?
And take another breath and just notice those sensations and allow them to be there, whatever physical sensations you’re feeling. Maybe it's a tight throat or a fast beating heart. They’re not going to hurt you, they can be there. You can let those sensations be there. Now, this piece, this first part of the coaching really helps slow down your nervous system a bit, slow down your brain, come back to being a little grounded to coach in a different way.
So here's what I would prompt you to consider. What if you didn't make a mistake? I know, if I had gotten this coaching when this situation happened my brain would have been like, “Wait, what?” I would have never considered that’s a possibility but really think about it. Instead of assuming you made a mistake, what if you didn’t? How do we know if something is a mistake? If we surveyed 1,000 people explaining what happened, would they all agree with you that it was a mistake? Probably not, probably not.
Some people would think it was, some people would think no, it’s not. And some people would be like, “I don’t really know.” Mistakes are 100% subjective. What is a mistake or not is totally subjective. It’s an opinion. I know, mind blowing. Let’s get out of this example for a second and go to something else a little simpler. Let's say you're baking, and scenario A is you thought the recipe said one cup of butter. So you put a cup of butter in the recipe but it actually said half a cup. But the cake came out delicious, you loved it, everyone else did too.
Scenario B, you followed the recipe exactly as written but the brownies kind of came out terrible and dry and crumbly, which one was a mistake? The one where you followed the recipe but the outcome wasn’t great or the one where you didn't follow the recipe but the outcome was great? It’s subjective, totally subjective. We often kind of assign whether something is a mistake or not based on the outcome, what was the outcome?
In this scenario, my past experience, the outcome was people sharing their opinions but my brain was totally overlooking that half the people's opinions agreed with me and were grateful. My brain was only attached to the opinions that disagreed and used that as evidence that I made a mistake. But what if that’s not true? If we just look at the opinions that were in agreement then did we make a mistake? It’s all subjective.
You are assuming you made a mistake whether that's because someone else shared their thoughts or asked a question or your brain’s just attaching to something arbitrarily. It doesn't necessarily mean you made a mistake. Only you get to decide if you made a mistake because it’s an opinion. And even if someone else says you made a mistake you still get to decide if you want to assign yes I did, or no, I didn’t. It’s totally up to you. It’s all subjective.
Okay, so those are my mistake examples through my career and how I would have coached myself and how I would coach you. Here’s the final thing I’ll say. None of us are perfect nor will we ever be. There are going to be things we say that we might wish we had said differently. There are going to be times where other people don't like what we did or didn't do. There might be situations where we do want to take accountability and responsibility and apologize and course correct and do something different.
There will probably be times where we input data wrong or publish work with spelling errors. Hello, I publish work with spelling errors all the time. I don't call it a mistake. I’m just like, “That’s how I talk, I’m not the greatest speller.” It’s okay, we are human and this is normal at all levels of career development, whether you’re a recent grad, mid-career, senior leader, doesn't mean anything is wrong with you.
It also doesn't mean you have to be stuck in shame for it or you have to live in blaming someone else or that you have to call it a mistake, or that you need to catastrophize and be stuck in that place. You can use all of the coaching tools I just offered to you and showed you in this episode, to help yourself move through it. And just know these things will continue to happen, that’s a part of it.
And if you know that ahead of time and you use these coaching questions, these coaching tools to help yourself through it, it'll be so much easier. You'll be able to get through it much quicker and not like I’m racing away from it, more like I’m not stuck in it. And you can move forward and you can learn and you can move on.
So if in the next couple of weeks, months, even in the next year, you find yourself in a scenario where you feel like you might have made a mistake or someone else thinks you did, you notice you’re in shame or blame or you’re catastrophizing. Come back to this episode, relisten to it whenever you need to and use the coaching questions I offer and the coaching tools. Alright you all, so with that I’m going to head out. Talk to you all next week. I hope you have a great, great week. Bye everyone.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
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