Have you ever been in a professional situation where you made a completely avoidable stupid mistake?

This is exactly what happened to me the other day. I was faced with the task of translating a technical document from English to Vietnamese. This was a complicated piece of writing; I didn't relish the thought of working on it, so I forced myself to sit down and work.

I didn't think of hitting Save.

After a few hours of dealing with what seemed like a river of technical terminology, I managed to finish the translation. And I was so excited and exhausted that I hit 'Delete' instead of 'Save'.

In that single second, 100% of my translated document was lost. I was dumbfounded. I felt like I was falling from the top of a high-rise building.

And I began to fall into a spiral of negative thoughts.

"Damn, I was just one click away from completing the hardest task of my day ... and ahead of deadline to boot! Now I have to work on the whole process again. My other tasks will have to be postponed. I might have to work overtime tonight and I can't skype my family ...

How could I be so stupid?

How could I be so careless?

How could I, how could I …?"

The more I fell into my negative spiral, the more I felt my energy levels drop. My day was ruined. My mood went from good to bad, to worse.

I lost all motivation for doing things for the rest of the day.

Which only made my workload worse.

So let's pause here.

If you're anything like me, you may occasionally experience what I call negative thought spirals. You do something stupid, and then you blame yourself for hours afterwards. Ultimately, you spend as much time blaming yourself, as you have on the task itself.

If you take a step back and you look at this behavior — like I did — we would both agree that it was unreasonable. I had spent a huge amount of my time letting my mistake dominate how I saw the rest of my day. I projected outwards to my immediate future, and I thought of all the things that my single stupid mistake had affected.

What ideally should have happened — if I didn't have such feelings! — was that I would acknowledge my mistake, accept that it had happened, and then move on to plan for the rest of my day!

But this is easier said than done. I am human, as are you. The solution here — as is with most things like this — is to fix your thinking, before you can fix your actions.

What I eventually did was the following exercise:

Step 1: I focused on my breathing. I focused on my breaths in ... and then my breaths out ... and I took deep breaths each time. This calmed me down. It allowed me to shift my mind, gently, from the shock and anger at myself. And as I did so, I repeatedly told myself: “This has happened. I accept it! I can deal with it.”

Step 2: When you find a sense of peace, immediately ask yourself: “What is the best way to fix this?” and continuously repeat this question — gently! — till the solution presents itself to you.*

(* This should be done before or as soon as any dis-empowering thoughts/questions come to your mind such as:

  • Blaming or being angry at yourself: "I am so stupid, how can I do something so silly?"
  • Projecting into the future: "What if the customer complains about this? What if my performance rating is affected?" ... and so on)

Step 3: Quickly jot down any ideas that you come up with and pick one to take action on.

What I should have done was to catch myself early, at the beginning of my thought spiral, instead of after an hour or so of self blame. But as I've mentioned in the past, catching your thoughts as you think them is very difficult! I struggle with it, and I am sure that most of us do, too.

But I eventually managed to silence my thoughts, and I adjusted the rest of my day to fit around my mistake. And it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

The next time you have a negative thought spiral, give this technique a shot. But if you fail to apply it early, and burn an hour or two of self-blame, don't worry about it. This is difficult stuff. The point is to try.