Don’t stress the big consequences
Sometimes it’s the little things that stress us. As they say in some circles: “It’s not the elephants that get you stressed, it’s the ants!”. We’ve all made trivial mistakes and got away with them (God knows I have). We’ve almost all also made big mistakes and got away with them. (Again, God knows I have!)
I’m pretty sure that we’ve all also made big mistakes and not got away with it – these things stress me but in a sense I don’t mind getting hauled over the coals for that kind of thing… because if I’ve made a big mistake I deserve to face the consequences.
The times I get annoyed though, are the times when I make a tiny mistake and I don’t 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.
Putting a stamp on an envelope that doesn’t 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’s trivial because the envelop will just travel second class.
But…… if you’ve already left it close to the deadline and you now miss that same deadline, your trivial mistake can have significant consequences.
And in terms of managing our stress, this is a problem.
We beat ourselves up because of the wrong things.
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.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that no one should worry about the consequences of mistakes – just that only 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’re bound (rightly) to get stressed by them but as a long term stress-survival tactic that’s not a good place to be.
What we should, self evidently, be looking to minimise at a personal, stress-carrying level, is the number of mistakes we make. After all, the consequences of those errors are largely out of our hands. The mistakes themselves are something that we, by definition, can control.
Think of other people as ‘multipliers’. They can be greater than one or less than one but they can only apply to a mistake you make. If you don’t make a mistake, their multiplier can’t work. Multiply zero by anything and you get zero, after all!
If I make a small mistake with a big multiplier because of other people’s actions, the consequences are serious. (Usually we don’t need to get stressed because other people’s 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!.
Can you easily(!) control other people’s 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.
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! But if you must stress about something, stress about your own mistakes, not other people’s reactions.
Let’s take a personal example.
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. Had my wife had ten minutes spare in her timetable for the evening that wouldn’t have been a problem at all. As it was, my wife (who’s generally a saint) had real problems finding time to eat her meal before she had to leave the house once more.
Okay, okay, I shouldn’t have had the meal ready ten minutes late, but that was, in and of itself, a trivial mistake. The stress only arose because of other people’s responses (my wife having booked her day so tightly that she didn’t have ten minutes spare to wait for food).
How stressed should I have got? As stressed as I would because a meal was ten minutes late? Or as stressed as I would have got if my wife didn’t have time to eat?
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