I was once wrongly convinced that a worthy goal of personal and professional excellence was to avoid making mistakes. Mistake-making was a seal of doom, so I would go out of my way to avoid doing anything risky enough to result in a mistake. Like everyone else, I would rationalize the mistakes I made or deny the ones I couldn't dodge.

Fortunately a close friend kindly reminded me that a person who doesn't make any mistakes doesn't make much of anything. I usually don't learn much from my successes, but I learn a lot from my mistakes. You are bound to make mistakes, but you don't have to be bound to those mistakes you make.

The pursuit of personal and professional excellence invariably involves making mistakes. We need to learn how to make mistakes and recover gracefully. Mistakes allow us to learn valuable lessons and make improvements. Mistakes also remind us of the importance of humility, and mistakes bring out our humanness.

Long ago, I discovered a simple recovery strategy having five steps:

1. Own the mistake. When you make a mistake, take immediate ownership. Don't go looking for a place to hide. Openly confess, “I made a mistake.” Denial, blaming, lying and other conniving strategies can only have unhappy endings. Honesty in admitting a mistake can often preclude any negative consequences of your mistake. Such an admission will always take the wind out of the sails of a person who may have an ax to grind with you.

2. Apologize. It may seem unnecessary to say you are sorry once you accept blame for the mistake, but a genuine apology often encourages the forgiveness that is waiting to be given. A quick, sincere apology defuses hostility no matter how grievous the injury.

An apology is not only an expected social propriety, which can hurt you when not offered, but it is also a practical act that can open the door to further communication. A mistake without an apology is one that often isn't forgiven or forgotten.

3. Implement a quick fix. It doesn't impress anyone to admit you goofed, ask for forgiveness, and then not do anything to make the situation better. This inaction puts the credibility of your apology at risk and wastes the energy it took to courageously own the mistake and humbly apologize.

People want mistakes rectified now. Even if you have to plug up a hole with your finger, you show a willingness to correct a problem you created. This step will buy you some time until you figure out what to do next. Not correcting a small mistake while you still have the chance may result in one too big for you to do anything about later.

4. Develop a cure. When you are a victim of a mistake, you usually want the other person to admit fault without your having to conduct a major investigation. You also want to hear an apology and get some immediate relief. At some point, you also want to be reassured that the same problem won't reoccur. Why not treat others the way you want to be treated?

When you think about preventative solutions, you learn a valuable way to stop making mistakes. Once the new procedure is in place, the problem may never happen again.

5. Offer some penitence. This last step completes the mistake-correction circle on a positive note. When you make a mistake that causes loss or inconvenience, it is not only polite to offer some penitence—it is the right thing to do. When you pay good money for a service that you don't get, you want at least a partial refund.

Offering victims of our mistakes a token of penitence acknowledges their worth and confirms the sincerity of our apology. Something, no matter how small, will be remembered positively.

When you make a mistake, first admit that you made it, apologize for making the mistake, take action to fix things, plan to prevent the same mistake from happening again, and offer some penitence. This strategy will help you to recover from mistakes gracefully. PE

William S. Cottringer is a Management Consultant and co-author of the book Passwords To The Prosperity Zone. 618-654-7823 or ckurtdoc@charter. net.

ACTION: Implement these steps to rectify mistakes.