(Continued from Part I)
At this point I've been unleashed onto the world, and I have no idea how to admit to making a mistake. I have never made a mistake that wasn't punished harshly. I've never NOT been yelled at, criticized, called stupid for making mistakes I didn't know existed.
"Never put metal in a microwave!" Cool, daddy-o. Do you think you could have told me that when we got the microwave?
"I shouldn't have to tell you how this works!" Um, why not?
"You should know better!" I heard this approximately four zillion times. I could never figure out how I should know better, since no one had ever explained anything to me.
So any time I was in a position to say, "Oops, sorry," I couldn't. I froze. I was terrified of being yelled at. I didn't know what to do. It's been twenty years since I attended college, but I can think of three classes off the top of my head that I could have gotten credit for taking if I'd gone to the professors and said, "Um, I'm having trouble with the material. Can you help me?" A single five minute conversation, and I would have known what to do. Instead, I let it build until it was too late, and then just ghosted the final class. I loved the schoolwork, I loved classes, but when I got stuck, I didn't know how to handle it. In my brain, it was always my fault, and I had to pretend I knew what I was doing in order to be accepted. After I bailed on the last class, I would avoid that professor for the rest of my life because I knew they hated me now.
Super healthy, right??
All that to say, not so much with the whole admitting-I've-made-a-mistake dealio.
I worked a crappy temp job after college. I did a great job, and the boss kept saying she'd hire me as a regular employee, but it kept not being true. We always had a ton of work, and she was happy to authorize overtime for me to catch them up with different tasks. I was hired through a temp agency, so I filled out a little carbon postcard timesheet every week, and my boss signed it and we mailed it to the agency. One Saturday, I forgot that I'd put down overtime hours for that day, and didn't come to work at all. I panicked when I arrived on Monday and saw my timesheet. I thought I would just skate by, but my boss called me into her office. I told her I'd worked the hours, and she asked me what times. I didn't know what else to do, so I said I'd worked in the afternoon. She let me go back to my desk, and then called another employee to see her. Then my coworker went back to her desk. I tried to concentrate on work, but I was panicked. I could see this activity from my desk, playing out moment by moment. My boss called me back in, and said that my coworker had worked during the afternoon, and I wasn't there.
I was terrified that she would yell at me, that she would fire me, that she would tell me I was a horrible person and didn't deserve to have the job.
She asked me what had happened, and why I said what I did to her. I told her what happened, that I was really scared, and that I could make up the hours during the week. She said that we'd fix the timecard and that there wouldn't be any more overtime after that.
That was all.
There wasn't any yelling. There wasn't any blame. She even served as a reference for me when I applied for and got a regular position in another department. She didn't hate me. It was a mistake, and she probably chalked it up to my inexperience in the workplace. That's what I would do now, as a manager. I would probably do a little more behavioral coaching than she did, but that's how I roll.
What I don't do these days is lie, or hide, or look around for cover or plausible deniability. I learned from my mistakes. (No, that wasn't even close to the only one!) I've developed a healthy relationship with the truth, and, as malleable as the world around us may be, I do my best to see my behavior clearly. When someone accuses me of doing otherwise, I check myself, and then I look carefully at them.
That's what life with my mother taught me.
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