Feeling a Little Overwhelmed
My life is a rollercoaster of ups and downs. It's been on the up lately, which, is really good. But every so often I slip into a down, and it's tough to keep myself on that much-needed upward trend.
When I'm most successful, I always make mistakes. Now, I guess in some respect mistakes are natural. No one is perfect. But I'm talking about stupid mistakes. I can solve the hardest problem and mess up the easy stuff. Maybe it's my ADD. Maybe I'll just never be good with the details.
And that is what depresses me so much. I can work my ass off, I can really, really care, and still, in the end, it probably looks like I've been lazy or didn't care at all. Which is extremely frustrating.
When there is all this news about job losses around the world, and esp. in the US, I feel so fortunate to have my job, yet at the same time totally terrified about losing it, or worse, having my bosses be bitter for employing me when I'm causing more trouble than I'm worth.
I don't mean for this to be a bitch fest, but truth be told I'm feeling depressed right now and I can't kick the feeling. I'm happier than I've ever been thus far in my life and I'm still stuck in a wee bit of self hatred. How can I get over it? How can I stop making mistakes? That really is the only thing that will allow me to stay happy. Ugh.
3 comments:
Hey there,
You obviously did a good enough job for them to want to hire you, so don't beat yourself up too much on the mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Just think about if you can prevent yourself from making mistakes in the future. I'm not really sure what you do for work, other than work for a non-profit. But can you make a list of things to do before you submit something? Maybe you need to spell check, review for grammar?
I always tell my friends who want career advice that first impressions matter a lot. If you make a good first impression, I think people are more likely to dismiss future mistakes as anomalies. But if you make a bad first impression, people dismiss good work as the anomalies.
@calgirlfinance hey thanks for your response. i actually work in marketing at a for-profit startup. i've been working for the company on and off for about a year and just got hired full time. So this isn't a first impression, but it is a first impression of my full time self. There are some other things going on in the company so everyone is just stressed around here. I hate making mistakes.
I hate (hate hate) mistakes too, and while I'm very good at my job, I still flub up on occasion.
So I get good at fixing mistakes. :)
But have you tried tackling the mistakes as a problem to be solved? Obviously, I'm not sure what kind of stupid mistakes you're talking about but if it's something like typos, or mismatched numbers, if it's something that someone can eyeball for you, that might help.
Also, for specific errors of carelessness/fatigue-induced errors, I do my best to break up the work into sections so that I'm not just coasting through 12 steps in a row. I'm more likely to be accurate when I'm doing three sets of 4 steps.
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