Originally posted – Nov 25, 2014
“Write the bad things that happen to you in the sand; that way they can be easily erased from your memory.” – Middle Eastern proverb
I’ve noticed that very often when things “go wrong”based on one’s past decisions – either from a management, marketing or financial standpoint – many laundry owners, depending on their personality of course, spend more time beating themselves up over past decisions than they do enacting better plans for going forward and forgetting the past.
Are you one of them?
There are many of us around. Perfectionist-type individuals suffer this problem more than those who are stoic and accepting of life and taking it as it comes; the latter tend to avoid the “what if”syndrome by not constantly dwelling on the issue of “what if I just had not made that mistake in the first place?”Or, constantly asking the private question, “How could I have been so foolish? What on earth was I thinking?”
Here is a typical example: You decide to launch an expensive new advertising campaign that you are sure will absolutely increase your market share and generate more revenue. This great idea just came to you one day. And, in your opinion at the time and based upon the facts and information available, you decide to move forward and spend the extra money on the program. You are confident it will work out just fine and are excited about its launch and potential results.
After spending the funds and waiting patiently (well, sort of) for the program to exert its hoped-for dramatic impact, nothing significant happens and your customer base remains the same as it was prior to spending the cash on the new program.
Here’s another common occurrence: You interview a number of potential laundry attendants and finally decide on one particular person to whom you offer the job. You’re absolutely sure that she is exactly the right person for the position. Then, after a month or two, you find out that you have made a terrible mistake, because the individual turns out either to be dishonest or to relate poorly with your customers and other employees, thereby causing you a number of new problems you didn’t anticipate.
The issues here are how you react to your past decisions and how those reactions to your mistakes impact your peace of mind, self-concept, attitude, personal life and business.
Are you the type of person who constantly revisits the decisions you’ve made that did not work out, and do you allow those experiences to affect your self-image and perhaps your attitude toward people in general? Actually, this is a very common phenomenon, and it often causes one to become cynical, distrustful and lacking self-confidence. Reacting in this manner can – and will – have negative effects on your business, your personal life and your future relationships.
It can be depressing reviewing your past mistakes, but don’t take up psychological residence in them because self-pity is a defeating emotion. The only thing you can gain from looking in the rearview mirror of your car is where you have been.
The future is only observable through your windshield. If you keep unpacking your luggage, you will never get to enjoy the trip. And, essentially any time you spend regretting the past mistakes that you have made is taking away energy you need to do things right in the present. Take a lesson by watching trees in the fall (in colder climates) because they are experts at letting things go.
It’s best to learn to pay only once for each mistake. If you can accomplish this mindset, you very likely will lead a happier and more productive business (and personal) life.
The worst part of not letting things go is that we constantly retain all of the emotional poison and add the new stuff. Then, the next time something occurs, we get to revisit all of it again – the cycle continues because we likely have great memories of past consequences of our actions.
Hanging on to self-resentment over your past mistakes is like letting someone you despise live rent free in your head. You can and should take control of your life and evict this painful tenant.
Here’s how:
Acknowledge the mistake. This will tend to calm you, and you will feel more power over the event. According to noted author Steven Covey, who wrote the best-selling book “Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, to best accept responsibility for a situation we make ourselves, “we must learn to be ‘response-able’ not responsible.” See the difference?
Try to objectively identify why the mistake occurred in the first place. Don’t personalize it. When revisiting the project that didn’t work, look for the part that you didn’t think was important. I think you will find out that it was. Try to determine where you slipped – and not where you fell.
Avoid re-punishing yourself. Learn to let things go. Everyone makes mistakes no matter who they are. Spending a lot of time constantly beating yourself up over past mistakes is like being in a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but doesn’t get you anywhere.
No matter how smart or talented you are you cannot change the past. And much of successful living consists of making the best of bad past situations.
Dr. Adam Phillips is considered to be Britain’s foremost psychoanalytic writer. He dislikes the notion that we should all be out there always striving to fulfill our greatest potentials and never making mistakes. Instead of advocating that we should have a better and more perfect life, he believes we should simply live as gratifying a life as possible by doing the best we can; otherwise, Dr. Phillips says, we’re setting ourselves up for bitterness. Yet, many of us do exactly that, and in so doing we engineer our existence to become a protracted mourning and an endless trauma about the lives we were unable to live.
Making decisions based upon the knowledge available to us at the time is the norm. Only in retrospect can decisions be accurately judged. Down the road, after the actual facts have finally disclosed themselves can we then determine if our decisions were correct or flawed. It’s called the human condition. Therefore, we all must take chances and simply do the best we can. If we take no risks, we most certainly will limit our success.
Going through business life does not enable you to experience just the good parts. Psychological comfort is not a given. Taking a risk, developing a new highly creative marketing program and paying good money to launch it is like saying, “I want to play football and win the Heisman Trophy, but before I try out I don’t need a guarantee that I will in fact even make the team.” Or, “I want to be an Academy Award-winning actor, but I sure don’t mind having to audition for the role.”
The difficult parts of business life are always there, so we have no choice but to embrace them. Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.
We are all bound to fail at one time or another, due to the frequency with which failure drops by totally uninvited and without warning.
Investing in stocks is the best analogy I know when it comes to dealing with past mistakes and regrets. When individuals invest in a given stock and lose their money, they generally find a way to blame themselves by using phrases like, “What was I thinking?”or “I can’t believe how stupid I was!”
Whereas, if the stock investment was successful and a lot of money was made, they generally will use descriptive observations when referring to themselves, such as, “Look at me… the sun never sets on a legend.”
As humans and business owners, we’re essentially caught in the process of having to make decisions all of the time. Some of them turn out well and some do not. How we react to the outcomes defines us. It’s easy to react to the good outcomes, but much more difficult to deal with the decisions that turned out poorly, which can affect us emotionally and financially.
Many people go through life like they are rowing a boat, merely focused on the wake they generated and where they have already been rather than on where they are headed. Don’t be one of them.
The need for perfection and the desire for inner tranquility will always conflict with each other. Therefore, instead of thinking “what if…,” perhaps substitute the phrase “oh well…” and then move on.
According to American writer Henry David Thoreau, “never look back unless you are planning to go that way.” In addition, lecturer and famed self-improvement guru Dale Carnegie used to say, “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put the past together again.”
Lastly, to paraphrase my late aunt, Ann Landers, the popular newspaper columnist, one of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everything and everyone – including yourself – before going to bed every night.
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