Lessons on Leadership from the Little Things in Life: Your Mistakes Don’t Need to Define You
Life is full of examples that teach us lessons. When we see or hear or experience something from which we can learn, it is that example and experience that often helps us remember the lesson. That’s why stories and illustrations make learning so much more effective. When a story can be used to illustrate or demonstrate a valuable lesson, the story makes it much more understandable, relatable, and memorable. And so I am sharing examples of circumstances and stories that I have experienced in my everyday life which illustrate leadership lessons that we can learn and apply. This is one of those stories, and it’s a reminder that your mistakes don’t need to define you.
I have shared before how my granddaughter loves to help. Sometimes, though, in her enthusiasm to help, it doesn’t go so well. On one particular day, I told my grandson that it was time for us to get out his Chromebook so we could do some of his learning activities on it. My granddaughter jumped up in a flash to grab the computer case, which was unzipped, and the computer fell out of the case and landed on the floor with a sound that was not very promising. I opened up the computer, and, sure enough, the screen was broken. I could see the look of panic on her face, because she knew she had done something that was not good.
There was a lot going on in that moment. She was clearly upset that she had broken something. My grandson was upset because he couldn’t do the activities on the computer. And I was thinking about what I needed to do next, what I was going to do about the computer, and how I was going to respond to the grandchildren. She had made a mistake, and it was kind of a big one! I couldn’t just excuse it, because she had caused damage. But this mistake did not need to define who she was. So, I determined appropriate consequences, set appropriate boundaries, and then demonstrated love. I let it be something that had happened but wasn’t continuing to happen, something that caused an important lesson to be learned, and then gave her room to show that she had learned from the experience. Responding in that way cost what it took to repair the computer. But reacting in a way that communicated that she was defined as a careless person who broke things would have cost a lot more, with the damage it would have done to who she is.
You will have people around you make mistakes. But you will also make mistakes. You don’t want people to define you in the present by your mistakes that you have made in the past. Likewise, you don’t want to do that to others. I am sure that you know someone who made a mistake sometime in the past, and now everyone identifies that person by that mistake. When my wife was a little girl, her mom thought that she had lost a ring. For the next 20 years, her mom would joke about not being able to give her expensive jewelry, because she would lose it. Only it turns out that her mom had misplaced it, not my wife. Yet for 20 years she was defined by a mistake that she had not even made.
People may want to put you in a box or a category based on what you have done in the past, even if it’s something that you may have only done one time. However, they don’t get to define you. So don’t let them determine who you are. If you made a mistake, accept the consequences, make restoration, set the right boundaries, learn from your mistake, and grow.
That is the lesson on leadership from this little thing in life, from not letting my granddaughter be defined by a mistake that she made when she dropped and broke a Chromebook. You will make mistakes, but you can learn and grow from them rather than letting them define who you are. You can also do the same with the people around you. When they make mistakes, help them to learn and grow from those mistakes, and don’t let that define them either. Yes, there may need to be appropriate consequences and restoration and boundaries. But your mistakes don’t need to determine who you are as you move forward. Because your mistakes don’t need to define you.
