Yesterday I was thinking about what one of my old bosses called “the Six Most Important Words” - “I admit I made a mistake”. I mused about how hard it really is to utter them, or even think them. But it’s important that we do, because there is much to be gained from that first step. It led me to a post I made to Joyful Jubilant Learning back in 2007 about my personal approach to handling mistakes in a half full way. I repeat it here in the hope that it can help you too (in case you missed it the first time).

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As someone who is always trying to “deal with the literal world in a positive way“, I have come to really appreciate the mistakes I’ve made (and there have been plenty).

Now I’m sure your reaction to that is - “appreciate mistakes??” Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?

In my half-full world, the ability to take positive things out of the errors I make is critical to making my life’s journey a fulfilling one (and, in a more “ground level” way, my business career a successful one). I’ve found that there are four important steps I need to make to leverage those mistakes properly:

1. Acknowledgment
2. Correction
3. Learning
4. Rear View Mirror

Let’s take a closer look at these steps - first, there’s acknowledgment. The simple admission, to others and most importantly to yourself, that you made a mistake.

I remember back in 1999 and 2000 when I thought I was the best stock day trader in the world. I had an E-trade account and was wheeling and dealing like a Wall Street pro - or so I thought. When the tech bubble burst around that time I refused to believe I had erred by taking so many positions in risky dot-com companies. I didn’t bail out in time because I didn’t acknowledge my mistake. I was too proud to admit that day trading was something I shouldn’t be doing. I learned a valuable lesson from this - you have to have the self-awareness to know when you’ve made an error.

Next comes correction. After you’ve admitted a mistake it needs to be fixed. This one is most important in my business world. We provide a service, and sometimes we don’t get it right the first time. We have to quickly respond and get the customer happy. There’s a great silver lining to this, one that really contributes to the ultimate benefit of errors - it’s a documented fact that a customer who had a bad experience but it was fixed to their satisfaction is much more likely to be a loyal customer than someone who never had a problem.

Talk about making lemonade out of lemons! So once you know you’ve gone wrong, correct it as soon as you can.

Then there’s the learning that comes from mistakes. This always reminds me of that great saying “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” by George Santayana. The lessons I’ve taken from my errors have been without a doubt the most valuable learnings of my life.

The biggest mistake I’ve made in my career, for example, was to decide to make a cross-country move to work for someone I was just not compatible with from a leader/manager standpoint. I’ve written in my blog about how I had to pull myself out of that situation to get my “mojo” back, but the other thing I took away from it were two great lessons - I was never going to put myself in that kind of work situation again, and better still, because of the mistake I now knew exactly the kind of leader I wanted to be and the kind of business environment I wanted to be in.

Yes, we have to learn from those mistakes we make, or we will indeed repeat them.

Lastly, while we need to take the time to reflect on the lessons from our mistakes, once that is done and we’ve absorbed the learning, we must let the mistake itself go, or what I call “put it in the rear view mirror“. Why? because if we don’t we can become paralyzed because of the fear of making another mistake. This isn’t the easiest thing to do sometimes - there have been occasions for me where I would be poised to do something and all of a sudden the memory of a past error (and its consequences) would flash in my head, and I would hesitate. Most of the time I can stifle it, but there are still occasions when I can’t.

But I try to learn from that too - it’s a constant and consistent desire that keeps driving me forward. I need to learn. I HAVE to learn.

I hope that this 4-step approach that’s come from my life experiences can help you with your learning too, and as you use them, be joyful, jubilant and brave!

I encountered a perfect example of grace the other day - I was checking my WordPress dashboard and I saw a link to Joyful Jubilant Learning, a site that I contribute to.

Rosa Say, the founder and leader of JJL, posted about a essay I had written nearly two years ago about one of my college teachers, a man named Brother George.

It was something that I enjoyed writing and was honored that it was given a second life, but what really got me was the way that Rosa presented it - I was receiving a gift from someone blessed with grace.

How did I know this? I simply traced back to my own definition of grace that I had posted many months ago:

When one lives with grace, it means that in one’s manner, talk and action, there flows an elegance and warmth that respects and honors all individuals with kindness, compassion, understanding, and tolerance. This warmth is capable of spreading to everyone this person encounters, so that the person is described as adding “grace” to an occasion or to any other gathering (or a blog, for that matter). When one lives with grace, they also possess grace, in that they draw moral and spiritual strength from it, and ultimately, true happiness and fulfillment.

That’s Rosa Say, right there. She “walks the walk”, every day. And I’m blessed and thankful to be her friend.

She also inspires me to live in the same way - with grace.

Thank you Rosa!

Last week while I was on the road I finally got a chance to read the book “The 4-Hour Workweek“, by Timothy Ferriss (check it out here on my Amazon page).

I’ll be posting a full review of the book on March 10 on Joyful Jubilant Learning (bookmark it or subscribe now so you don’t miss it), but I wanted to raise a particular leadership point featured in the book today, because I believe in it so fervently.

I’ll put the point in my own words: “Empowerment Equals Leadership Freedom”

Or perhaps a more pointed subtitle, “Be an Enabler, Not a Disabler”

Ferriss talks about this in a quite different context than I would (he uses it as a means to a different end - stay tuned for the book review), but he makes a powerful case nonetheless for “pushing down” as much responsibility as possible. His key observation:

“It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them”

Ah yes, trust. I’ve personally seen someone grow two inches taller upon my utterance of these magic words - “I trust you”.

It is a marvelously enabling string of words - and not without risk. It takes a good degree of courage to let something go, since as humans I think we have a tendency to be control freaks. I can personally attest it’s a pretty strong thing to resist.

But resist we must, because from a leadership perspective enabling reveals something else - our effectiveness in selecting and hiring teammates.

Because if we can’t entrust someone with proper responsibilities commensurate with the job description, we simply shouldn’t hire them. Having too many “disabled” teammates chains a leader to too much minutiae, and gives him or her much less freedom to do what leaders really should be doing - LEADING.

And that’s the kind of freedom that leads us to our own promised land of job fulfillment.

Ferriss included a great quote from Henry David Thoreau in his book that sums it all up very nicely:

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone”

So set them free, and find the richness in your leadership life.

Just a quick note to acknowledge three milestones today - one is the first birthday of Joyful Jubilant Learning, the blog dedicated to learning founded by Rosa Say .

I am honored to have made several contributions to a year’s compilation of excellent essays on the many pleasures and benefits of learning and the learning process. Rosa is our wonderful leader and mentor, and I want to express my personal thanks to her and to all of my JJL colleagues for all you have done to make my experience as a fellow contributor and teammate a great one.

The other two are birthdays - Tim and Abigail Johnson, father and daughter, both celebrate another year on the planet today. Abigail is three, and Tim won’t disclose his age as anything but “something-greater-than-three”.

In writing a post to commemorate the day, Tim said this:

“The more I think about it, the more I believe that childhood should be a lifelong state. There should always be wonder, imagination, and curiosity around every turn… even if we think we know the answers. We should continue to get skinned knees and wear them like trophies. We should check out that little forest at the end of the block because… well… you just never know…. We should revel in reading a swashbuckling adventure book under a tree on a lazy afternoon because every boy should know the finer art of swashbuckling. We should ask why… again… and again… and again. Maybe the answers the “adults” are giving are not complete enough for us to put our minds around. We should eat ice cream at our own pace, and if it drips… that’s what the dog is for.”

Lovely and inspired, isn’t it?

After reading this I looked at that scar I got on my knee when I was 14 for the first time in 20 years, and my inner child was reborn. And, of course, tonight I had ice cream.

Thanks Tim for this reminder, and Happy Birthday to you both!

Please take a look at my latest posting at Joyful Jubilant Learning, entitled “Learning From Mistakes the Half-Full Way - a 4 Step Approach“.

I’ve synthesized my process of gaining the greatest leverage from my (many) errors over my 47 years into 4 digestible parts - Acknowledgment, Correction, Learning, and Rear View Mirror.

Check it out and let me know your thoughts - I could always pick up a few new pointers on this particular topic!

While you are at JJL please welcome our newest contributor, April Groves. April publishes two great blogs, My Beautiful Chaos and Making Life Work For You. Great to have you on board April!

You too can participate in this grand learning experiment known as JJL - check out the “Where to Get Started” section on the left hand side of the home page.

Come share the joy (and don’t forget to read my post)!