 Making mistakes isn't a big deal. It's what we do after we make the mistakes that's important. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. This April we're talking about growth and rebirth here at Evil Genius Leadership and there's no better example of rebirth than overcoming a mistake we may have made. Sometimes it may seem that we're living and working in a culture that doesn't tolerate mistakes, but the truth is mistakes are inevitable and overcoming a mistake in a healthy way can help us improve ourselves for the future. While we'd all prefer not to make any mistakes we all do and recognizing you've made a mistake is the first step towards getting past it. So how do we know when we've made a mistake? Well usually someone else will tell us and that's not a very pleasant experience, but sometimes we find that the results of a decision we made or an action we took don't match the results we intended and if this is a small difference that can be okay, but sometimes the difference between intended results and actual results is so great that we've got to admit to ourselves we made a mistake. The first thing to do when we see we've made a mistake is to admit it to ourselves. This sounds really easy, but in practice it can be very difficult. We might find ourselves saying it's not so bad or maybe no one will notice, but if we hear ourselves saying these things we might be rationalizing and not really looking at the situation objectively. Equally important is admitting we made a mistake is accepting accountability for our role in it, and this is also easier said than done, but being honest to ourselves about how our decisions and actions might have caused the situation will help us proceed clearly and objectively towards finding a solution. Now that we've admitted to ourselves that we made a mistake and accepted accountability for our role in it, there's one more thing we need to do before we can move on and that's to stop beating ourselves up over it. Dwelling on the past isn't going to change anything and continuing to be down on ourselves isn't going to help us learn anything positive from the situation. Once we've got our mindset right about making a mistake now we can start the process of figuring out what we can learn from the mistake. There are lots of reasons that a mistake can occur, but here are some questions we can ask ourselves to help us learn. First, was there information out there that I didn't have that could have helped? Was there information that I had that I didn't use to make my decision? Was there someone I know with experience I could have consulted before proceeding? Were there others who had an opposing or different perspective that I could have considered? Were there external factors that I didn't consider or fully understand? Or did I have a thorough understanding of the flow of the activity and the people who needed to be involved? These are just a few examples, but asking some reflective questions like these from an objective mindset can help us learn from our mistakes. Armed with the answers from our reflective questions, now we can start to put together a well thought out plan to correct the mistake. And notice that I said well thought out, as we've talked about in other videos, need-jerk reactions to bad situations often cause more trouble than the problem they were originally meant to solve. Assessing all of the answers to our reflective questions and digging down to root causes is the best approach to correcting a mistake. And this doesn't have to be a long time consuming process. If we get our minds right, ask the right questions, and dig down to the right answers, we can come up with a really effective plan in less time than it took to watch this video. And certainly less time than it took to film it. What's really important when it comes to getting by mistakes is accepting accountability, finding an effective solution, and not beating ourselves up over it. The sooner we get past a mistake, the sooner we can put our time and energy into that next great challenge we want to tackle. If you found this helpful, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don't forget to join us every Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time for a live interactive leadership discussion on GLAAB. If you can't do that, subscribe to our email list by clicking off on that globe to the right, and that'll get it just subscribed to all of our content that'll come directly to your inbox. Thanks for watching, I really appreciate it, and remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.