The art of bouncing back from blunders

This blog started life as an episode of my podcast, Unfrazzle. You can listen here if you prefer.

When the details started to slip

Towards the end of last year, I had an identity crisis.

I've always been good at the detail. It's why I was good at my job before I set up my own business. It's why I was such a great VA for the first few years of running my business.

But at the end of last year, I suddenly found myself making lots of silly mistakes. For example, a kind soul emailed me letting me know that I'd uploaded the wrong audio for one of my podcast episodes. I had a few diary malfunctions that resulted in double bookings. I sent an email about an upcoming workshop to the people who'd come to that same workshop the year before.

Thankfully the people in my world are lovely and they don't mind me being human. But although none of those mistakes were the end of the world, they really got under my skin. Not in a way that made me beat myself up - I've done a lot of work over the years to separate my self worth from these sorts of mishaps - but in a way that had me questioning my very identity.

Because I used to take care of these sorts of details for other people. So how can I now be making such silly mistakes? What's happened to me? Who even am I?!

And yes, I know that sounds ridiculous, but these are the thoughts that crossed my mind each time I became aware of another silly thing I'd done.

So why am I telling you this slightly embarrassing tale? It doesn't paint a very good picture of me, does it?

But I'm telling you this in case you've experienced something similar.

Why it might be happening

So I remember 10ish years ago I was supporting a client who'd often talk about brain fog and the fact that she wasn't as on it as she'd been in the past and it was driving her nuts. Since then, people have been speaking a lot more openly about the changes that they notice as they're in perimenopause.

And I suspect that might have something to do with what was happening for me at the end of last year as well. It was either that or the fact that the year was coming to an end and I was ready for a break. Or maybe it was a bit of both.

But instead of spending loads of time trying to figure out what was going on, I decided I was going to do something about it. I figured that if these small mistakes are creeping in more often, I need to think about how to prevent them from happening again. I know they probably will because I'm human, but it would be nice to not have them happen three times in one week!

What I decided to do about it

So what I've done is build in a fail safe.

I've built in extra time so that I can do some checking that I wouldn't have needed to do a year or two ago.

So, for example, when I was launching Tame Your To Do List earlier this year, I scheduled lots of different emails, each going to different groups of people on my mailing list. I set them up and I got them ready to go as usual. And then I put a note in my diary to revisit them a few days later.

I went back to each email with a fresh pair of eyes and double checked the date and the time they were sending and the people they were going to. Of course on that occasion everything was perfect and I didn't need to fix anything, but building in that buffer to check and not just assuming I've got it right first time feels like a really smart move, at least for now.

Are you in a wonky phase too?

So have you ever had a period where things just kept going wonky in ways that could have been avoided?

Maybe you're in that right now.

Instead of beating yourself up, what can you do to safeguard against that thing continuing to trip you up in the future?

Here’s another quick example of what that might look like. If you keep forgetting about calls until the last minute - this is something that came up in a conversation I was having with someone recently - maybe you could change the notifications in your calendar so that it sends you a reminder 15 or 30 minutes beforehand.

You might not have needed to do that before. You might have turned off those notifications because it was annoying. But if suddenly you're going through a phase where you keep forgetting about things like that, maybe it's a good idea to turn them back on again.

It’s ok to be human!

Feel free to drop me a line if there's something silly that you keep doing repeatedly that's getting on your nerves and you want to find a solution; maybe I can help you come up with a fix. But the most important thing is to remember that we all make mistakes. It's a part of life, and if anything, our hiccups make us more relatable.

I received a handful of replies to my apology emails from people saying they were relieved it's not just them who does such daft things. So if you are one of those people that also does daft things from time to time, it's not just you!

And if you have lovely people in your world, they will forgive you. As the saying goes, the people who matter don't mind, and the people who mind don't matter.

As always, I hope that this helps and I look forward to seeing you again soon.