We all make mistakes. Every one of us.
Rare is the church communicator who doesn’t have a story of an embarrassing typo or an email with a broken link. We’ve all been there.
Our Mistakes
In her book, You’ve Got This: A Pep Talk for Church Communicators, Kelley Hartnett shares one of her mistakes. She got the measurements wrong and couldn’t send thousands of postcards.
Want to know a secret?
We made a mistake in telling Kelley’s story. In the book we said she made the postcard 1/8 of an inch too small. Then we said it was .0625 inches off.
Do the math: .0625 is not 1/8 of an inch, it’s 1/16 of an inch.
But that’s math—math errors don’t count, right?
Want to know another secret?
We made a typo in the title of the book. When the print copy of the book appeared on Amazon, we spelled “Communicators” with only one ‘m’ in the listing: Comunicators.
No big deal, right? You catch the mistake early, fix it, and move on.
Yeah, we made the mistake back in December. The book officially launched in January. We didn’t see the mistake until May.
Ouch.
Thankfully it’s just a typo in the listing. We did manage to spell it right on the cover of the book.
Still, mistakes suck.
We All Make Mistakes
We’ve been talking a lot about mistakes, and we all know the feeling.
Kelley made a mistake with her mailer.
Seth Muse used a GIF of a porn star.
Lori Bailey had a typo in an annual report.
We asked for your mistakes, and we got some big ones:
- Spelling the name of the church wrong on the cover of a 10,000-print run magazine.
- Flying through the church worship service slides in 60 seconds.
- Getting the wrong name at a funeral.
- Sending an email intended for the pastor to the entire church.
- A temporary direction sign that points two ways at once.
- And lots and lots of typos.
Everybody makes mistakes. Even the universally celebrated Eleanor Roosevelt made a pretty embarrassing mistake.
After the Mistake
The question is, what do we do after making a mistake?
There’s a temptation to wallow. To beat yourself up. To flinch the next time around, holding back a little for fear of failure and not pursuing your absolute best.
As Kelley says in her book, “It makes sense to be upset over mistakes. What doesn’t make sense is to assume that your mistake defines your worth.”
You will make mistakes. We all do. (We’ve been doing this since 2004 and we still make stupid typos… we probably made one in this post.)
But you can make a mistake and still be OK.
Let’s fix those mistakes. Absolutely. Implement a proofing team or a better system or print off a list of common issues and tape them next to your desk (Courageous Storytellers has a resource that allows you to do exactly that).
But never let mistakes hold you back. Don’t allow a fear of failure to keep you from trying.
“Show me a person who has never made a mistake and I’ll show you someone who has never achieved much.” -Joan Collins
Failure is an opportunity. We’ll never accomplish anything if we’re too afraid of failure.
More:
If this pep talk has been helpful, you need to check out our book You’ve Got This: A Pep Talk for Church Communicators.
