If You’ve Been Doing Stuff Perfectly, Plan in Some Mistakes

We have few good role models to show us how to clean up the messes everyone inevitably makes in life, love, and leadership. Our president, in well-conditioned masculine fashion, won’t even entertain the idea that he’s made any.

Our public relations industry and social media accounts dominate our institutions with their ability to put a positive spin on anything, even if their mistakes are deadly. Our corporations can’t admit problems even to their stockholders. Cover-up and confusion, deception and denial are second-nature to a business model that produces numerous failures and bankruptcies, such as Trump industries.

Back in 1993 M. Scott Peck in A World Waiting to be Born: Civility Rediscovered argued that there will never be true civility and community until our institutions, including our businesses, are willing to publicly speak of their mistakes and how they’ve corrected them, and to risk the vulnerability they fear such admissions would entail. 

It's unlikely that we learned from our parents how to clean up messes with others. They were so indoctrinated into believing that they needed to be “perfect parents” that when they made the mistakes everyone makes who tries to do anything well, they couldn’t admit their imperfection to their children. So, as children we couldn’t experience them as models of how to clean up relationship messes. 

“Perfectionism,” Codependent No More author Melody Beattie reminded us, “leads to procrastination, which leads to paralysis.” In the end we fear the consequences of admitting mistakes and won’t even attempt to do anything that might not be done perfectly.

We, then, never believe anything close to: “anything really worth doing is worth doing imperfectly,” much less the basic kindergarten principle: “If you make a mess, clean it up.”

Our first response to a mess is more likely to be denial. Though a mistake is merely something that if we knew when we made it what we know now we wouldn’t have done it, we’ve somehow been taught that a mess is more than a mistake — and our role models even act as if making mistakes is shameful.

When we think of a mess as more than a mistake, we’re in a difficult space for fixing it. Just listen to our self-talk:

“What’s wrong with me that I did that? Why am I always making mistakes? How can I like a person (myself) who isn’t perfect? Am I worth anything if I am imperfect? Who will like me if I look like a person who isn’t perfect?”

These useless messages hinder healing of ourselves and our institutions, reconciling with others, and our changing what can become disastrous courses.

It takes an unusually positive self-concept not to fall victim to these messages. It takes an unusually positive self-concept to clean up messes without worrying about what others will think of us if we don’t appear perfect.

We might instead deny responsibility like preschoolers denying they made their messes: “I didn’t do it.” “It’s someone else’s fault.” “I don’t know who did it.” “I didn’t start the fight.” “I’m upset that you thought I did it.”

Often we’re afraid people, especially those we admire, will think less of us.

Some will. They might prefer a focus on our imperfection to take attention off their own. 

Yet others will recognize humanity when it appears through our vulnerability. They’ll identify with mess-making.

One of the most appreciated recommendations I offer parents in my workshops is: “If you’ve been the perfect parent, stop it. Kids don’t need models of perfection. So, plan in a mistake to model cleaning them up.” You can hear the sighs of relief.

But we don’t clean up our relationships, dealings, and business so others will applaud us. We do it for our own integrity and because we want a world where people are authentic and no human being lives hidden in any closet.

If we decide to respond to our messes, we’ve also learned to do so without doing it. We make pseudo-confessions: “I’m sorry if I (or it) hurt you.” “I’m sorry you took it that way.” “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Such “apologies” might actually seem like admissions of mistakes. They’re certainly easier to say than real confessions of responsibility.

The meaning such statements communicate, though, is denial. It’s really that a person’s reaction is the issue, not the mistake I made. It’s saying: “I would have done the same thing, but your reaction is a problem. I really did nothing wrong. Sorry about how you reacted.”

Maybe when we try to clean up messes, we add excuses for ourselves. Often these excuses are real, but admissions of wrongs that are loaded with excuses focus on reasons, not our responsibility. It makes us look as if we’re victims of the excuses and not, again, responsible for what we’ve done or said.

Highlighting our excuses or reasons doesn’t clean up the mess or threaten us like true admissions: “I really made an error. It was wrong. I should not have done it and I can give you all the reasons I did, but the real point is I made a mistake. I hope you will forgive me.”

We can’t control the reactions of others to us doing our part to clean up messes. We cannot guarantee that everyone will like us as a result.

We cannot know whether someone will have the personal space to forgive a mistake we’ve admitted. We cannot know what motives are behind their positive or negative reactions when we thus try to model our world as a healing place.

We can, however, set an example for how to clean up messes. We can walk away from an incident confident that we did our part to try to make a relationship, institution, or nation better, and that our side of the relationship is clean.

Or we can participate in the political maneuvering that dominates nations, institutions, and workplaces around us as they live unconscious of what is going on in themselves and the human beings with whom they have to do.

We can promote their dysfunction and inhuman perfectionism, or we can pioneer something better that will improve our life, loves, and leadership so that we aren’t among those whom society’s perfectionist demands burn out before we’ve lived a life that’s full enough to wear out.