Business Without the Bullsh*t: 49 Secrets and Shortcuts You Need to Know (30 page)

When you’ve completed your list, stick a copy of it on your bathroom mirror. Read your list aloud right when you get up and just before you go to bed. Doing so will improve your performance in your current job, making you more valuable both to your current employer and to any future employer. Focusing on the positive will also help provide extra energy that will prove useful in the final step.

If there’s a mismatch between what you need and want, and what your current job is providing to you, you owe it to yourself (not to mention your boss and your current coworkers) to find a different job.

Elsewhere in this book, you’ll find “Secret 24. How to Find Your Dream Job” and “Secret 25. How to Land a Job Interview.” You’ll find those techniques far easier to execute when you’re coming from a place of dissatisfaction and amusement rather than hatred and desperation.

In the heat of the moment, we blurt out something we wish we hadn’t or send an e-mail laced with profanity. Under pressure to perform, we provide half-baked information that leads to bad decisions. Or some other screwup.

Screwing up is part of life. Even great geniuses make mistakes. When you do screw up, however, what’s important isn’t the screwup (that’s history), but what you do afterward. Here’s a step-by-step approach:

The moment you realize you’ve made a big mistake is usually
not
the best time to take action to correct it. Any action you take when you’re in panic mode is likely to make the problem worse.

For example, suppose you blurt out in a meeting with your boss and Customer A that your company gave Customer B a huge discount. You immediately realize that bringing up that discount means Customer A will probably demand a similar discount.

Trying to recover on the spot is a bad idea. If you tell the customer, “Of course, big discounts aren’t our usual policy,” you’ll only
call more attention to the discount. Same thing if you apologize to your boss the moment the two of you leave the meeting.

When you realize you’ve blundered, your first priority is to get yourself into a resourceful state of mind so you can take the
right
action rather than the
first
action that comes to mind.

So if at all possible take a deep breath, shake yourself out, maybe go for a short walk. Get a little distance from the situation before you react.

In the example above, delaying your reaction gives the situation some time to play out. Perhaps Customer A is less concerned with discounts than with quick delivery, for instance, and thus never brings the matter up.

But suppose Customer A
does
demand a discount. In this case you might point out to your boss that big discounts have a tendency to become public knowledge anyway and that by bringing it up, you were preventing a future problem in the relationship with Customer A.

You’re much more likely to come up with a “creative solution” to your gaffe when you’re not caught up in your own embarrassment at making it.

If you’re like most people, your imagination is probably conjuring up a worst-case scenario. However, while your blunder may seem monumental to you, it may be far less significant to the other people involved.

If your mistake is uncharacteristic of you, chances are that people who already know you will simply put it down to your having a bad day. That doesn’t mean you don’t need to make amends, but the situation may be less dire than you assume.

Furthermore, ten years from now—heck, probably ten days from now—people will have probably forgotten all about your mistake.

For example, I once had a conversation with a boss of mine in which I later felt I’d been completely unreasonable, putting pressure on him and making him look bad right when he was struggling to keep his own job, which he soon lost.

I felt
terrible
about that conversation for a decade before I got up the nerve to call the guy and apologize. Turns out he didn’t even remember it. While it loomed enormous in my mind, he’d long since moved on.

Understanding that your huge, embarrassing mistake is insignificant in the grand scheme of things helps you put your subsequent fix-it attempts into perspective. Yes, you want to make amends, but there’s no reason to go overboard.

Now that you’ve gotten some distance and perspective, revisit your blunder with one or more of the other people who witnessed it. Because you want to find out how much damage has been done, put your inquiry in the form of a question. Examples:

Reality checks are best delivered via e-mail rather than in person, because e-mail provides distance from the emotions of the moment,
giving both you and the other person the opportunity to assess the actual importance of the blunder.

The response that you get from your reality check in the previous step lets you gauge what you’ll need to do in order to get past the mistake. For example, if the response is something like “You screwed up badly, you jerk,” you’ll need to do some groveling.

On the other hand, if the response is more like “Yeah, I was offended/angry/surprised but it’s no big deal,” your apology can be more perfunctory. In either case, your apology provides an opening to address whatever actual problem (if any) your blunder created.

Here are some examples:

As a general rule, groveling works better in person or on the phone rather than in an e-mail. The main thing, though, is to apologize for screwing up and then move on.