12 Ways to Bounce Back After Making a Dumb Mistake at Work

8. Get Back Out There

When you’ve made a mistake, especially a visible one that has an impact on those around you, it’s natural to question your ability to perform. But you need to get past those doubts. It may not be easy, but you need to get back out there. Don’t allow your mistake to prevent you from moving forward. Don’t allow it to make you so fearful of making another mistake, you are unable to perform properly.

If you are obsessed with not making a mistake, you are more likely to make another one. You may find that when you make a big mistake, your future small errors look magnified. Perhaps you have always come in five minutes late and no one noticed, but now they do. If you make a small, avoidable error on a presentation, people may question your competence. So make sure that small things don’t erode their trust in your performance.

It can be hard to rebuild people’s trust and confidence in you. Recovering from a mistake takes some perseverance and resilience. Many people have made mistake after mistake and still reach their goals. Others make the same mistake time after time. They end up repeating the same mistake because they haven’t learned from it.

One of the biggest lessons to learn when facing big mistakes is you need to examine your own ability to make changes. Until you make mistakes and then correct them, you don’t know what it requires of you. You need to see your mistakes as part of your journey. So regard them as opportunities to gain more insights, knowledge, and experiences.