{"id":24,"date":"2012-03-21T13:26:59","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T13:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/?p=24"},"modified":"2012-03-21T13:26:59","modified_gmt":"2012-03-21T13:26:59","slug":"stress-and-consequences-of-mistakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/stress-and-consequences-of-mistakes\/","title":{"rendered":"Stress and consequences of mistakes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don\u2019t stress the big consequences<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes it\u2019s the little things that stress us.\u00a0 As they say in some circles: \u201cIt\u2019s not the elephants that get you stressed, it\u2019s the ants!\u201d. We\u2019ve all made trivial mistakes and got away with them (God knows I have). We\u2019ve almost all also made big mistakes and got away with them. (Again, God knows I have!)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m pretty sure that we\u2019ve all also made big mistakes and not<\/strong> got away with it – these things stress me but in a sense I don\u2019t mind getting hauled over the coals for that kind of thing… because if I\u2019ve made a big mistake I deserve to face the consequences.<\/p>\n

The times I get annoyed though, are the times when I make a tiny<\/strong> mistake and I don\u2019t get away with it – the mistake may have been trivial but the consequences snowball out of proportion, somehow taking on a life of their own.<\/p>\n

Putting a stamp on an envelope that doesn\u2019t have enough value to cover the cost of postage is a trivial mistake. If the envelop is addressed to the Inland Revenue and contains your VAT return (in the UK) the chances are also that it\u2019s trivial because the envelop will just travel second class.<\/p>\n

But……<\/strong> if you\u2019ve already left it close to the deadline and you now miss that same deadline, your trivial mistake can have significant consequences.<\/p>\n

And in terms of managing our stress, this is a problem.<\/p>\n

We beat ourselves up because of the wrong things.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Looking around me in the various places where I get called in to consult and support stressed staff I notice time and time again that people are orientated around the effects of actions, not the actions themselves.<\/p>\n

Now, don\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m not saying that no one should worry about the consequences of mistakes – just that only<\/strong> worrying about the consequences of mistakes is nothing more than a stress-inducer. Sure there are times when the effects of a mistake are so serious that we\u2019re bound (rightly) to get stressed by them but as a long term stress-survival tactic that\u2019s not a good place to be.<\/p>\n

What we should, self evidently, be looking to minimise at a personal, stress-carrying level, is the number of mistakes we make<\/strong>. After all, the consequences<\/strong> of those errors are largely out of our hands. The mistakes themselves are something that we, by definition, can control.<\/p>\n

Think of other people as \u2018multipliers\u2019. They can be greater than one or less than one but they can only apply to a mistake you<\/strong> make.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t make a mistake, their multiplier\u00a0 can\u2019t work.\u00a0 Multiply zero by anything and you get zero, after all!<\/p>\n

If I make a small mistake with a big multiplier because of other people\u2019s actions, the consequences are serious. (Usually we don\u2019t need to get stressed because other people\u2019s multipliers are less than one: one (mistake) times nought point two (the other person barely cares about your mistake) only gives you a total score of zero point two!.<\/p>\n

Can you easily(!) control other people\u2019s multipliers? I doubt it. That means the biggest portion of the consequences of mistakes is unchangable from your perspective. Is there any point in getting stressed about that? No.<\/p>\n

Can you change the number of mistakes you make? Yes. Is there any point in getting stressed about that? Well no, not really, just try and improve!\u00a0 But if you must stress about something, stress about your own mistakes, not other people\u2019s reactions.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a personal example.<\/p>\n

I made a mistake when I read, recently, the cooking instructions on a ready-meal. As a result the food was going to be ten minutes late.\u00a0 Had my wife had ten minutes spare in her timetable for the evening that wouldn\u2019t have been a problem at all.\u00a0 As it was, my wife (who\u2019s generally a saint) had real problems finding time to eat her meal before she had to leave the house once more.<\/p>\n

Okay, okay, I shouldn\u2019t have had the meal ready ten minutes late, but that was, in and of itself, a trivial mistake.\u00a0 The stress only arose because of other people\u2019s responses (my wife having booked her day so tightly that she didn\u2019t have ten minutes spare to wait for food).<\/p>\n

How stressed should I have got? As stressed as I would because a meal was ten minutes late?\u00a0 Or as stressed as I would have got if my wife didn\u2019t have time to eat?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don\u2019t stress the big consequences Sometimes it\u2019s the little things that stress us.\u00a0 As they say in some circles: \u201cIt\u2019s not the elephants that get you stressed, it\u2019s the ants!\u201d. We\u2019ve all made trivial mistakes and got away with them (God knows I have). We\u2019ve almost all also made big mistakes and got away with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}