Disaster Recovery
“Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.” James Allen
Last night we went out with friends for a birthday celebration dinner at a gourmet Mexican restaurant. It was my first visit there and the food was exceptionally good. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for our young waiter. We ordered drinks before dinner; when he returned he promptly dumped an entire strawberry margarita in my lap. (I’ll pause here for a moment while you giggle at the image…)
Fortunately (for him) I wasn’t really upset, despite being wet and sticky. In fact, we all went out of our way to help him not feel so badly about his mistake, until it dawned on us that he really didn’t feel very badly at all! He apologized in the same way you might say “Sorry, we’re out of Chilean seabass tonight.” We had to beg him for extra napkins to mop me up, ask him to comp the drink, and I then fermented in margarita in the same booth for the rest of our dinner.
All in all, it would have made for a funny story except that his disaster recovery was so atrocious. Luckily, I like to turn these things into life lessons. While it’s natural to focus on mistakes, the real issue is really how you recover from those mistakes. Handling missteps with integrity and grace is key to both better relationships and greater confidence in yourself.
For example, when you make a mistake with another person around, how do you handle it? Do you:
1) deny
2) laugh
3) blame
4) apologize
5) flee
6) ignore
I’m sure your response depends on the circumstances (and the mistake) but looking at how you handle mistakes says a lot about how you handle your life in general. How does your reaction affect the person impacted by your error? Do you make it better, or worse? And how does that impact you? For example, had the young waiter bent over backwards to fix the situation, he would have likely gotten an even larger tip (despite the accident); instead he got a small tip and a disgruntled customer.
And what about mistakes you make when no one is around? What do you say to yourself?
1) oopsie!
2) what a klutz!
3) how funny!
4) I’m always doing things like that…
5) why can’t I do anything right?
6) what can I learn from this?
How does your inner dialogue affect how you feel about your goof-up, or how you approach a similar situation next time?
Personally, I tend to handle mistakes affecting others better than ones that impact me alone, so as part of my own “disaster recovery training” I’m learning to be kinder to myself when they happen. And it makes me wonder — did that waiter beat himself up when he got home? Maybe so…
