If you do anything in life

You risk making a mistake – so let them happen

We’ve already discussed how to craft your emails, going through the planning, the writing and the proofing, but what about the sending? Clicking send can be daunting  What if you’ve made a mistake and failed to catch it? What if you’re too close to your own righting that your eyes correct what your reading? (See what I did there?) You have two options.  You can allow your fear to paralyze you and never send your email.  Or, you can send a test email or two, accept that mistakes are a part of life, and then let your email fly.

Mistakes Happen

We spend so much time working on this one email that we forget what it actually is.  We forget that it’s just one of many emails that your intended recipient receives in a day.  To you, this email is extremely important, you want to make a good impression as it is likely your first chance to do so.  It’s understandable that you don’t want to make a mistake.  I don’t like making mistakes either but I’ve recognized that they happen and that they will not kill my career or even my chances with that prospect.  Go ahead and strive for perfection.  Send yourself and maybe a friend or a family member a test email so that you can read the email with fresh eyes and experience the very same that your recipient will.  But once you’ve done this it’s time to send the email.

Plan to Make Mistakes

Accepting that mistakes happen will help to lessen your nerves.  Don’t be that exacting boss from whom we fear reprisals – you will stifle your own ability to work and this is often one of the reasons that we seek and strive to become entrepreneurs after all.  You can take this exercise one step further and plan to make mistakes, determining what course of action you will take when you have realized that you made a mistake.

What to Plan for

1. Your mistake goes unnoticed.
   1. Plan: Do Nothing
2. Your mistake is caught, most likely by a single person…Gasp! What do you do?
   1. Plan: Graciously thank them and then use this opportunity to take the conversation one step further!

Yea, you read that right.  I just said you that you can turn a mistake into a positive situation.  I’ve done it many times before.  If they are responding to you in order to tell you that you made a mistake, they have opened a line of communication.  They are at at least somewhat interested in you or what you have to say in order to make the effort to send a response.  This is not a bad thing!

I make mistakes pretty often – from typos an grammatical errors in my blogs posts, to accidentally putting the wrong link into an email and I’m still here talking to you.  They say that if you never made a mistake, you’ve never really done anything.  In my opinion that statement oxymoronic, because if you have never done anything then you have never lived, and that is the biggest mistake of them all my friends.