Monday Motivation - A new blog post each week intended to inspire & motivate. Hope your week's off to a great start!
"Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them"
-Andrew V Mason
I saw this quote this morning while prepping for the day, and thought it was appropriate because it reminded me of something I saw last week. On a mortgage forum, a loan officer posed a scenario where they'd screwed up quoting costs, and asked for opinions on the best remedy and how to cover up the mistake.
Whether we misquote a rate or fee, miss an important date or deadline, forget to call someone back, or even something catastrophic enough to ruin a deal, my advice would remain the same - man up, admit the mistake, and move forward. Not every mistake can be remedied, but "I'm sorry, I made a mistake" will earn a lot more respect from most people than passing blame on to other people, hiding behind excuses, or, worst of all, being that person that suddenly disappears and becomes unreachable when things go wrong.
This is a public blog post, and I'm OK with telling the world a secret....
I've made mistakes. I will probably make mistakes again. I do all that I can to avoid them and I'm certainly not careless, but I'm also not perfect. The thing is, though, I'm ok with that. I'm not ok with screwing things up (I'm particularly hard on myself for it), but I am ok with owning up to my mistakes.
My advice will always be to own up to mistakes, and do everything possible to remedy them. Sometimes it will work out, sometimes it will not. It comes with the territory.
We work in a sometimes thankless industry - we can do everything right from start to finish, work miracles behind the scenes, spend countless hours to help someone, and take care of every single detail along the way, and at the end of the day, sure we get a paycheck, but we're lucky to get a 'thank you' beyond that. But screw something up? Miss a single detail that causes someone inconvenience or headache, and rest assured the entire world will know about it, especially in today's world of social media and instant communication. When those types of mistakes are made, it's never good, but owning up to them will earn respect. Remaining accessible will let whoever was affected by your mistake vent directly to you, and not to their keyboard.
In the end, I find it wise to be our own worst critic. If not, someone else out there will be happy to do the job.
photo courtesy of SEO from Flickr
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