I’m not one to promise anything in treatment, but for the sake of this post I can almost guarantee that this title is making high-achievers and perfectionists everywhere cringe. Aren’t we supposed to focus on doing everything right and minimizing error? Is your biggest fear that you will make a mistake at work and this will permanently ruin your reputation? If the word “mistake” activates your fight or flight, this post is for you. Take a break when you’ve read the first half if you need to, but try to tolerate any discomfort that might arise until the end.
First, I need to differentiate between encouraging complacency and becoming more comfortable with making mistakes. I often hear my clients worry that if they stop approaching every task with such rigid and high standards, they might overlook something important. They could be seen as lazy or incompetent. These concerns are real, and it would feel terrible to have them happen. But let’s not jump to conclusions just yet. If you never allow yourself to think about what would actually happen if you made a mistake, this can be a necessary first step in exposing yourself to discomfort and eventually being okay with it. I often see how the anticipation and fear of making a mistake can feel worse than it actually happening.
I can imagine your inner monologue as you protest this idea of making mistakes. You might envision the fallout of not proof-reading your messages or checking your calendar 5 times in the morning for meetings. If you’re a woman in a male dominated field, errors like that could do damage with your credibility. Instead, let’s consider a different scenario where the stakes can feel less high. Shifting to accepting a small mistake in your personal life can seem more realistic when you compare it to the alternative of trying to make a mistake at work that will have lasting effects. I will also offer the opportunity to reframe how you define a mistake when sharing these two examples of doing something in a way that’s not perfect or ideal. Keep reading to hear how I try to connect a dishwasher and laundry to your mental wellness.
My fellow New Yorkers know that having a dishwasher at home is a luxury and not a guarantee, but stay with me for a moment. Picture yourself loading the dishwasher once until it’s full, and then starting it immediately. Cut out the part where you rearrange, and do it again, and spend 15 minutes trying to optimize the order of dirty dishes. Notice your worries about whether you could have fit more dishes in, when you’ll have to run it again, or if you could try just one more time to load it even more perfectly than you already did. Consider the worst case scenario, and the most likely outcome. Maybe you don’t get to use your favorite mug the next morning, but you’ll still have some clean options. You might run the dishwasher again the next morning, or even another load right after you unload this one. You might dwell for a moment about wasting water and not being as efficient as you could… or you could just let it be. The dishwasher is there to clean, and it will. No one is grading you (except maybe your partner) for how well you organized things. This machine can make your life a little bit easier if you let it. Can you consider how you would spend 15 extra minutes on self-care or another task if you didn’t lose that time by trying to do a chore perfectly? What about the extra 5 minutes that come with accepting a chore being good enough to be finished, instead of 5 minutes wasted ruminating or beating yourself up for being so rigid? If you say that you never have time to do anything, try to evaluate how much time you could save when you allow things to be less than ideal. I’m not saying that this will work for everything in your life, but I hope that the dishes can be pretty low on the list of things that have to matter so intensely and be so perfect.
Laundry is another great example of being able to do something without every step being perfect. If you are someone who feels relaxed and content when doing laundry, I applaud you. But for many, there are several smaller steps involved that lead to the eventual completion. There’s gathering and sorting your clothing, running one or several cycles of the washer, hanging things that don’t go in the dryer, folding or ironing the dry clothes, and then putting everything away. This might be the perfect approach from start to finish, and it might not always be possible if you feel like you don’t have enough time in a day. I won’t encourage you to leave wet clothes in the washer for hours on end (especially if you are in a shared laundry room!), but I might ask if you can tolerate waiting until the next day to iron a shirt or if you can put your socks into a drawer without pairing all of them together first. In any process that involves various components, try to think about what steps are absolutely necessary, and which ones can wait a day. Maybe you can omit some steps entirely.
A personal note on my own anxiety around making mistakes: I was mentally kicking myself recently for typing a message to a prospective client too fast when I sent it before I was finished. I scrambled to squeeze in a quick explanation, “sorry, didn’t mean to send that yet!” and then finished writing my message. I was embarrassed. And it was fine. They wrote back to me and we chatted some more. I demonstrated that I was a human. And I’m relieved to say that I thought about it less afterwards than I imagined I would. I may have conditioned myself to fear a small mistake all the times I would re-read an email or note multiple times, almost obsessively scanning for a typo or ensuring it made sense in my head. I didn't realize that I was signaling to myself that I should be very afraid of not writing perfectly all the time. This mistake ended up being fine, and it was a lesson learned. I have since been more careful when typing.
You might be wondering what the ultimate outcome of my mistake was. Did this prospective client stop answering me? What if they warned their friends who were looking for a therapist to not work with me? Did they decide to begin working with me even though I messed up, or did I ruin my chances? I have purposely decided to not share that outcome in this post for two reasons. If I said that all went well, I would be providing reassurance about outcomes being okay after a mistake. If I shared that we did not move forward, this could reinforce the cycle of fear of proving that bad things follow when a mistake is made. The ultimate end goal is to have you be okay with the unknown, instead of feeling like you can only tolerate a decent outcome.
Like all exposures, it’s best to start small and gradually increase. See how you can test this in your own life with something where the consequences may be minimal or nonexistent if you don’t do it perfectly. I hope that you can relax a bit in the process, and practice this more often for the sake of your own mental health.