Entre-Talk: When You Mess Up Publicly

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, Entre-Talk: When You Mess Up Publicly.

Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master-certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.

Hey there everybody. So I want to talk to my entrepreneur friends in our special Entre-Talk Monday episodes that we do here about when you make a mistake. And maybe you will never make a mistake and I hope so. I hope you will never publicly anyway make a mistake. But just in case you’re human and you make mistakes sometimes publicly, I want to talk to you about how I think about it and how I like to handle it on the backend. And of course I’m sharing this episode because I recently made a pretty public mistake, somewhat public mistake within my membership.

I sort of executed something in a way that wasn’t the highest quality and didn’t provide exactly the experience that I like to provide to my Be Bold members who I love and value and appreciate. And I’m not going to go into the details about what it was because it’s not really relevant and it involves other people. And I just don’t want to make anybody uncomfortable but I will just say that it was me not thoroughly communicating, that’s why this mistake happened.

Now, I make mistakes all the time, I really do but most of them are mistakes that I make behind the scenes that really only affect me or my team or maybe we lose money or it’s wasted time you might say or something like that. So those kinds of things happen all the time but occasionally something like this happens and I want to say that when you realize oops, I sort of dropped the ball there and especially if it’s public like this was. It’s really tempting for me anyway to want to go to blame.

I want to push it, I want to be like, “It wasn’t my fault.” No. Immediately, defenses go up. Like no, not me, I didn’t do that wrong. Somebody else is the reason this went wrong . And so I just notice that, if I have that resistance and that defensiveness, that it means a part of me is triggered by somebody pointing this out. And therefore part of me at least agrees. Now, in this particular example what I decided to do was to own the mistake because I do think it was 99% me anyway. There may be 1% that involves other people, but 99% of it was me, it really was.

Like I said, it was me not communicating clearly, not being thorough enough in some preparation that was necessary. So what do you do when that happens? Well, of course you want to own it and apologize. That’s the only option as far as I can see. I mean I guess the other option is hide, blame someone else, pretend it didn’t happen but that usually doesn’t go well in the long run or even in the short run. But that often creates a lot of tension and animosity and disgruntled dissatisfied customers. So what do you do when you own it, what is the difference?

Well, some people still might be upset. And here’s what’s challenging. Do you go out in ‘public’ and say to the people that were impacted. Do you bring it up and risk that there might be a whole bunch of people who didn’t even notice that you’d done that or hadn’t considered it to be a mistake in the first place who now are going to be like, “Oh yeah, that wasn’t great, Jody Moore, what you did there.” That’s the risk is wait a second, there might only be a handful of people who even noticed or who even think that it was wrong.

And if I put it out there and say, “You guys, I messed up, I’m so sorry.” Then we bring it to the attention of a much broader percentage of the people. And that is something that we pause and consider. But you have to go with your gut on what feels right. And I decided what felt right to me was to make a statement to the group that was impacted and say, “You know what, I totally messed up, I’m so sorry. That wasn’t me at my best. I’m going to commit to try to do a lot better going forward and I just want to apologize.” And just own it.

So that is what I did, for those of you in Be Bold, today is March 13^th and in today’s Monday Magic you’ll hear my apology so you will know what I’m talking about if you’re in Be Bold. I don’t know that I definitely didn’t do a perfect job on the apology. That’s the thing is, am I even going to get the apology right or am I going to say that wrong now? I probably said some things wrong. I didn’t mean to. I did the best I could but I decided to just go, “This is on me. I’m so sorry. I’m going to commit to doing better going forward.”

Now, here’s the other thing I want to tell you is that doing that to me, cleans up all of my shame because I do, I have shame about it when I’m like, “Oh, I messed up. Shit, I did that wrong.” I totally have that shame feeling about it. But when I own it instead of deflecting it, when I just admit out loud because that’s what deflates shame. Making it public, bringing it out of hiding is the remedy, the solution for shame. So in an appropriate way I bring it out of hiding and by apologizing and owning that I messed up. And I don’t make excuses for it.

I don’t go, “You know, I had a really long week, I’m really sorry. I’m just really tired right now.” I just go, “No, you know what, that was not me at my best. And even if after that, even if I have people that are like, “Well, I’m mad at Jody Moore and I’m leaving your program”, or whatever. Or, “I want to go talk about it online how mad I am”, whatever people decide to do. I am going to feel really good about it. I’m okay with that because all I can do is try to do better when I make a mistake. That’s it, all I can do is what now, who do I want to be now? Okay, I messed up, who do I want to be now?

I want to be the person who owns it and apologizes. And if people aren’t okay with that, bless their hearts, they can move on because I probably will, I for sure will make mistakes again. I will try not to. I probably won’t make that mistake again now that I’ve learned my lesson but I will make other mistakes again, I will.

And here’s what I want to say too, though is I used to, when I worked in corporate I did a lot of training. I mostly trained salespeople but for a while there I got to also train people who are in customer service. And so I got to study what all the experts teach about customer service and customer support and how to take care of your customers. And one of the things I remember learning that I thought was so powerful was that there was a study done when businesses make mistakes and our trust level of those businesses.

They studied customer and client trust. And what the study found was that customers trust a business who has made a mistake and then handled it well more than they trust a business that they’ve never had a mistake happen with. Isn’t that crazy to think about? If I, let’s say I go to a restaurant and they mess up my meal, they get it wrong and I say, “Hey, this isn’t what I ordered.” And they say, “Oh, my gosh. We’re so sorry, you know what, we’ll take it back, we’ll bring your new food right away. And in fact we’re going to give you dessert for free”, or whatever.

If they take care of me then I like that restaurant even more and trust that restaurant even more than a restaurant I’ve been to that’s never messed up my meal. That’s interesting. Why is that? It’s because a part of us knows that there is no such thing as no mistakes. We know that mistakes are inevitable at some point. And we’re actually really okay with mistakes when it’s handled with kindness and when people just own it and especially if it feels like they go above and beyond to take care of you.

But at the very least if they own it and then do what they can to make it right, then we trust them. But if we’ve never seen them make a mistake we don’t know how they’re going to handle it when they do. And it’s not an if, it’s a when. Everyone makes mistakes at some point. People make mistakes, businesses make mistakes, that’s the way of it. So sometimes when I have a mistake like that I remind myself, alright, well, this is an opportunity for me to show people how do I handle it when I mess up, that’s it.

And some people may not like it. Some people may think I handled it the wrong way but as long as I feel like I handled it to the best of my ability I can feel good about it and move on. And I do think that that invites kindness. When you choose to try to be kind, you invite more kindness into your life. You attract people who are forgiving when you’re honest and you can drop your pride or your shame or your ego or whatever it is. And when you can just handle things as best you can you attract other people who are like that and who are also kind and forgiving.

We have, I will say this, the most kind, loving people in Be Bold. I mean I didn’t get anybody that was upset with me over the mistake. I had some people somewhat confused. I had some people bring it to my attention but I didn’t get anybody that was really upset and angry and acting ridiculous about it. In fact, a lot of people didn’t think it was a mistake at all. But the ones that did were so kind and lovely about it.

And I just think that we’re trying to put goodness out in the world and we’re trying to be authentic and real and so luckily we attract people who are also very kind and understanding. So there you go, when you mess up publicly it’s your opportunity to build extra trust with your clients or customers. Use it as such. Most people are very forgiving and you will recover. And then one day you’ll make another mistake but probably not that same one at least.

Alright, you guys are amazing. Thanks for joining me for Entre-Talk. I’ll see you next time. And if you haven’t grabbed my free training yet by the way, make sure you head to jodysfreetraining.com. jodysfreetraining.com, it’s totally free. It will tell you how I went from no idea what I was doing to a million dollar coaching practice and you can just take it and run with it. I hope you do. Alright, I’ll see you next time. Bye.

Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.