Transcript

After The Mistake · Wanzology

After The Mistake Yo, yo, yo! Yo!! What's happening with you? What is it? What's going on? Hi. Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!! I am your host, The Wanz, welcoming you to another episode. This episode is, I'm not sure how I feel about talking about this, but I feel like I need to talk about it. We are human beings, and human beings make mistakes. It's just a fact of life. Nobody's perfect. So what actually happens after the mistake is made? What should happen? For everyone, this is different. There are those who will make a mistake and totally brush it off, ignore it like it never happened. There are those who will make a mistake and then relive that mistake for like a year. And then there are those who are in the middle of both of those two extremes, right? There is a lot of talk about what is healthy, healthy behavior. I've never really known what that meant, I've had various experiences with psychiatrists and psychologists and self-help books. I've done all these things to try to help me handle me after I've made a mistake. Now I'm not talking about the mistake is, oh, I, I dropped this, or the mistake of I forgot someone's name, even though that happens a lot, I mean, the mistake of like, the consequences of that mistake hurt somebody's feelings or you're saying something, not realizing that it's just ripping apart the insides of the person who's not the subject, but can relate. They're not who you're talking to, but they hear it. I've been saying for a long time that life is an inside job. What that means for me is you can think and think, and think all you want to, but it's when you actually do something that matters. There are no mind police, yet. Until there are, we are free to let our thoughts run wild, but on occasion, what we think is a good decision, isn't. What we think we should say, we shouldn't. When we go somewhere that we wanna go, maybe we shouldn't have gone. But you don't find this out until after the fact. What do you do? There is a lot of different angles that people have come up with over the decades to hold yourself accountable for your actions in a way that is what they call healthy. I'm not really sure what that means, healthy, because I don't like to feel bad, I don't know anybody who likes to feel bad. If you make a mistake that injures someone else physically or mentally, how do you deal with it? Well, first you gotta find out about it. So if you find out about it, then what do you do? I think for a lot of people there is a lack of self-accountability. I think a lot of people don't realize that people are in their life and they are in other people's life. Just like a pebble into a still pool, ripples get made and those ripples affect other things totally unrelated to the stone or you. But when you find out what do you do, how do you tackle, such a, such a challenge? In my recovery I had to gain an understanding of being rigorously honest with myself. I struggled with it for a while, you know, “Oh, you dropped this.”’ That's one kind of honesty. I don't know very many people who buy with cash anymore but, “Oh, you gave me too much change.”’ there's that kind of honesty. They used to call it ‘cash register’ honesty. Then there's that kind of honesty in relationships like when your significant other asks, “Do these jeans make my butt look big?”’ and you wanna tell the truth, but what would be the consequence of telling the truth? How would you be accountable? Being rigorously honest is not a license to go out and just lay everybody to waste telling them exactly what you're thinking. There is a modicum of tact that must be applied. People don't like to hear the truth. They say they do, but they really don't because then it forces them to be accountable as well. “Do these genes make my butt look big?” “Well, compared to some of the other jeans you have, yeah, they do.” Now what happens? I'm putting the pregnant pause in there on purpose, because you've said it, it's out there, you can't unhear it. Now what happens? I guess it depends on whatever your relationship is with whoever said or did whatever. For me, I try really hard not to make too many ripples in somebody else's life, because I don't like it in my life, so why would I do that in someone else's life? There's this practice called mindfulness, being aware of what your actions are actually doing and how they line up with what you're thinking. Being mindful of other people means they're on the same level of consideration as you are, and sometimes what you would say to yourself is not what someone outside of you is ready to hear. Tact, honesty, without tact can be very cruel. So you've made a mistake, do you go with the, “I'm sorry.”? More times than not, that's the go-to path, right? “Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to step on your foot.”, “Oh, I'm sorry. I was gonna hold that open for you.”, “Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot I was supposed to pick you up.”, “I'm sorry, that's not what I wanted to say.”’ So now what? The apology is out there, but that's only part of it. Accountability is more than just words, isn't it? “I'm sorry if it rained today.” “I'm sorry if it didn't rain today wherever you are.”’ The words together, “I'm sorry” , is the, how I say, the ‘pre-funk’, the preliminary, that's the boilerplate. “I'm sorry”, comma, not, “I'm sorry”. Period. “I'm sorry”, comma then you get to say what you're sorry for if you can articulate it. Humans, they make their choices, right? Everybody makes a choice. Some people choose to do something totally not realizing how it would affect anyone else around them, and I'm not saying that's bad, what's bad is once you realize the effect that it has on somebody else, and that effect is negative if you just keep going like nothing ever happened, that's bad. Accountability and honesty inside, these are skills that some people never develop, I still work on them, I still work on being accountable. Case in point, I did an open mic with a friend of mine playing guitar and singing with that person and I made a lot of mistakes, I made a lot of mistakes. I'm not a good guitar player and all the way home I was thinking, It seems like I practice enough that I would gain the ability to execute playing without many mistakes. I won't say I'm perfect, I don't want to be perfect. I felt really bad. I felt like I was getting in the way because I was flubbing strokes and flubbing chords. Maybe I'm being too hard on myself because I didn't talk to this person about it. For me, it's personal. I apologized. I said, “I'm sorry. I messed up in so many places, I thought I had practiced enough to do what we were doing. In fact, I practiced right before I came to do what we were doing. What happened while we were performing was not what happened when I was practicing.” So how do I improve that? How do I do whatever it is that I can, to not repeat those mistakes? The simplest answer, just practice more. This person said, “Practicing one thing, what you practice is another.”’ Now, when you rehearse, say you want to ask for a raise, you rehearse it in your head what you're gonna say. You put it out there that you think that you've done the work you've put in the time and you are deserving raise in your wage. You have five or six reasons what you accomplished and why you feel you're deserving of a raise in your wage. But if your supervisor or your boss doesn't see the same thing you see and you get denied, then what? Was it a mistake? No. You said how you felt. You put it out there. There are no guarantees when it comes to humans. Maybe you said it incorrectly. Maybe you asked a less than desirable way. Maybe you didn't use the right examples. You can drive yourself nuts trying to figure this stuff out, but I learned in recovery, there's a phrase that goes, “It is what it is.”’ It's accompanied with, “Do your best and leave the rest.”’ You don't have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ to find the right things to say if you mess up. If you just keep running it over and over and over and over and over and over in your head, “What did I learn from this experience, not feeling very good about my performance, my playing.” Well now that it's over, there's nothing I can do about that, so I gotta prepare for the next time. How am I gonna do that? I'm not sure yet. In my head, I know there are weak spots in my playing, and maybe I'll do some research and figure out a way to practice more effectively. Maybe I need to start slower in executing the movement on my fingers and playing guitar and then, increase my speed. I've never had patience for that. We are going to make mistakes. Some of those mistakes are going to affect other people, and some of those people are people that we care about. I want to impart on you how important it is to remember that you are one of those people. Life is an inside job. So if you make a mistake, the first thing you need to do is get right with yourself. If you get right with yourself, and I'm not saying just shove it under the carpet. Be honest, ‘I messed up.’, ‘I said the wrong word.’, ‘I didn't show up.’, ‘I forgot.’ Great. The words are great, but unless they're followed by action, unless they're followed with living amends, then they're empty. Words without deeds are just words. What we ‘do’ is what matters. What we ‘do’ is what matters. There are consequences for mistakes, and there always have been. It's not about making the mistake. It's about what you learn from making the mistake. If you focus on what did you learn, how can you improve, what can you ‘do’, not say, what can you ‘do’ to guard against making that same mistake again? God only knows when you're gonna do it again. Could be five years from now. Are you gonna remember this in five years? How you hold yourself accountable is up to you. Me, I really need some work on being okay with making mistakes, 'cause I'm not very good at that. I'm very good at beating the crap outta myself. From my experience, that is one thing you really don't wanna do. It's not helpful. It won't erase the mistake, and it won't help you prepare to not make the mistake again. Go easy on yourself. Evaluate what happened. Figure out what you could have done and then try to remember that, so that if you get into another situation that starts to look familiar, you increase the chance that you remember what you did the last time and don't do that, do something else. Words without deeds. Yeah, that doesn't work. That's not the way it's supposed to work. Make sure that you have your ‘tact packet’ so you can say the things that you want to say instead of pulling your punches. Everybody loves honesty until it's turned on them. Someone else will make a mistake and that mistake will affect you, ya feel me? Right on then. That's it for this episode of WANZOLOGY!! Go forth and make mistakes but remember to forgive yourself, first. Practice on forgiving yourself first and then use that to apologize to whomever or whatever is affected by your mistake. Take action, alright? Cool!! Take care of yourself. I hope that your summer is going well and I really, really hope you tune in again next week! Later!