Ep133: The art of bouncing back from blunders

00:07 Welcome to Unfrazzle, a podcast for solo business owners with a big vision who are ready for a kinder more sustainable approach to productivity. I'm Louise Miller and each week i share bite-sized insights to help you step away from the hustle stop faffing and stay focused so you can make your brilliant ideas happen and make a bigger impact in the world Before we dive into today's episode, if you enjoy what I'm sharing here on Unfrazzle and you'd like to support the podcast. You can buy me a cuppa by going to BuyMeACoffee.com slash Louise Miller and making a one-off donation. I'll pop a link to that in the show notes. Okay grab yourself a cuppa and let's get started! Towards the end of last year i had an identity crisis

00:51 I've always been good at the detail. It's why i was good at my job before, I set up my own business it's why I was such a great VA for the first few years of running my business but at the end of last year I suddenly found myself making lots of silly mistakes! For example A kind soul emailed me letting me know that I'd uploaded the wrong audio for one of my podcast episodes. I had a few diary malfunctions that resulted in double bookings I sent an email about an upcoming workshop to the people who'd come to that same workshop the year before. Now thankfully, the people in my world are lovely and they don't mind me being human but although none of those mistakes were the end of the world they really got under my skin not in a way that made me beat myself up! I've done a lot of work over the years to separate my self-worth from these sorts of mishaps

01:41 And yes, I know that sounds ridiculous. But these are the thoughts that crossed my mind each time I became aware of another silly thing that I'd done so why am i telling you this slightly embarrassing tale? It doesn't paint a very good picture of me does it but...I'm telling you this in case you've experienced something similar So I remember 10-ish years ago, I was supporting a client who'd often talk about brain fog and the fact that she wasn't as on it as she had been in the past and it was driving her nuts. And since then you know people have been speaking a lot more openly about the changes that they notice as they're in perimenopause and I suspect that might have something to do with what's happening for me at the end of last year as well It was either that or the fact that the year was coming to an end and I was ready for a break Or maybe it was both

02:37 But instead of spending loads of time trying to figure out what was going on, I decided that if these small mistakes are creeping in more often I need to think about how to prevent them from happening again. I know they probably will because i'm human but it would be nice not have them happen three times in one week! So what I've done is build-in a fail safe, right? I've built in extra time so that I can do some checking that I wouldn't have needed to do a year or two ago. For example when I was launching Tame Your To Do List earlier this year I scheduled lots of different emails each going to different groups of people on my mailing list

03:14 I set them up and got them ready to go as usual, then put a note in my diary to revisit them a few days later. So went back each email with fresh pair of eyes and double checked the dates & time they were sending & people going too! Of course on that occasion everything was perfect so didn't need fix anything but building in that buffer to check not just assuming you've got it right first time feels like smart move at least for now So have you ever had a period where things just kept going wonky in ways that could have been avoided? Maybe you're in that right now. Instead of beating yourself up, what can you do to safeguard against that thing continuing to trip you up in the future? Just to give you another quick example of what that might look like... If you keep forgetting about calls until the last minute this is something that came up in a conversation I was having with someone recently

04:01 Maybe you could change the notifications in your calendar so that it sends you a reminder 15 or 30 minutes beforehand. And you might not have needed to do that before, you might have turned off those notifications because it was annoying! You know? That's me I tend to do that but if suddenly you're going through a phase where you keep forgetting about things like that maybe it's a good idea just to turn them back on again So feel free to drop me a line If there is something silly that you keep doing repeatedly that's getting on your nerves and you want to find a solution maybe I can help you come up with a fix But the most important thing is to remember that we all make mistakes. It's a part of life and if anything our hiccups make us more relatable, so I received a handful of replies to my apology emails from people saying they were relieved it's not just them who does such daft things! So if you are one of those people that also does daft things from time to time...it's not just you and if you have lovely people in your world they will forgive you

04:53 As the saying goes, the people who matter don't mind and the people who mind don't matter. So as always I hope that this helps and i look forward to seeing you again soon Thank you for listening to Unfrazzle. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who needs a dose of calm productivity in their life and I'd love it if you could leave me a rating and review as that will help more people discover this podcast. If you would like to hear more from me to help stop faffing and take back control of your time, you'll find the link to join my mailing list in the show notes and I would really love for you to join us! So thanks so much for your support and I look forward to seeing you next time