What Awesome Looks Like: How To Excel In Business & Life

In full disclosure, I have not read the book, just an article that was highlighting this particular piece of useful content from it. 

Mistakes are a natural part of life. We all make them. And I don’t think any of us would want to live in a culture where no mistakes are tolerated. There has to be a path for recovering from mistakes, and the difficulty of that path should probably be proportional to the harm caused by the mistake. 

Amy Rees Anderson offers this nifty framework for properly apologizing for a mistake. A key component of recovering from one: 

• Admit — I made a mistake
• Apologize — I am sorry for making the mistake.
• Acknowledge — I recognize where I went wrong that caused the mistake.
• Attest — I plan to do the following to fix the mistake, on this specific timeline.
• Assure — I will put the following protections in place to ensure that I do not make the same mistake again.
• Abstain — Never repeat the same mistake.

Going to keep this one handy. Just like any other human, I’ll probably need it sooner rather than later.