Very few of us get it right all the time. Most of us don’t mean to get it wrong.
I mean, doing a few star jumps is a good way of warming up. It’s just with the current situation with price rises imminent and families struggling it feels tone-deaf.
How do you know if you’ve got it wrong?
You’ll know you got something wrong
I’m a muppet.
I realised it was true this week when my own newsletter landed in my inbox on Wednesday.
My unfinished newsletter that needed editing and I was supposed to have done on Tuesday. But life got unexpectedly in the way, And I’ll be perfectly honest, at the end of that day I had forgotten my own name, let alone that I’d set it ready to go the next day.
It wasn’t the worst newsletter. The February dates are right, but it’s just not the quality I want to put out.
I didn’t need anyone else to tell me I’d messed up. That’s not always the case.
Sometimes the world lets you know you screwed up
The blog post from SSE Energy that’s been in the news probably sounded very reasonable when it was written. Maybe even when it was reviewed.
But the world told them very quickly that it wasn’t okay.
You could say the world did the same with those that thought parties in your workplace garden during lockdown were ok.
What you do next is the critical thing
I am really sorry that you got a sub-par newsletter this week. I can’t say life will never get in the way again, but there are a couple of things I’m going to do differently so it (hopefully) shouldn’t happen again.
SSE might have put in different sign off processes after this week. They’ve apologised and said they are embarrassed by the content, which they’ve removed from their website.
Doing the right thing probably has two elements to me:
- Say sorry as soon as you can, and be honest and authentic
- Put it right
It might not be enough, but it might be
Memories can be long on screw-ups. If you’re of a certain generation you’ll remember Gerald Ratner, or the Hoover free holidays fiasco. And Barnard Castle is going to mean something to many of us for a long time.
But they can be very short too. The better, and quicker, your apology the shorter that memory might be.
So while it’s always better not to screw up, none of us is perfect. It’s all about what you do next, and what you can learn from it.
Don’t ignore it
Or think no one will notice. That you’ll get away with it.
Eventually, things seem to catch up with us. And then the old adage about trust taking a lifetime to build and a moment to lose comes true.
Then you might wish you’d just held your hands up and said sorry much, much earlier.
