The ideal response to a mistake, according to an article in Psychology Today, is compassion and curiosity.
The not-so-ideal response?
Well, anger, of course—not that I needed an article to tell me that.
What delighted me about this article, though, was that it made me reflect on my own recent mistakes and I realized that my boss acted completely in tune with this thinking.
He insisted that I not beat myself up too much about it (compassion) and then opened a tentative discussion about how to address the mistake, and how it had happened in the first place (curiosity).
It’s difficult to be this level-headed in the face of error. It’s certainly not instinctive for me to begin with compassion. But it seems obvious from the outside that this route is the best reaction.
Taylor Coe 