In the early days of our relationship, my husband used to say, "I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken." After 40 years of togetherness, I don't hear him say that anymore.  Why? Because he's old enough and wise enough to realize that if you are never wrong, you won't learn anything valuable.  Sure, you can learn a lot of factual information by information gathering without needing to be wrong, but the truly important stuff, the stuff that matters in your life, sometimes you need a humbling moment to realize you are/were wrong, and you need the opportunity to own it.

No one really likes to be proved wrong. I hate it. It's even worse when you are wrong and it isn't pointed out, but you know deep down you are in the wrong, and then you have to live with it, or fess up to it and acknowledge it. I'm sure it makes me uncomfortable because I had perfection expectations heaped on me as a child. Ironically, my husband has those same pressures as well, probably more intensely than I did.  Two perfectionists navigating a marriage, children, life changes, setbacks and opportunities has been very interesting, to say the least. 

For me, being able to admit I'm wrong and say I'm sorry was a learned behavior. The only way it became easier was to just do it. I had to overcome a lot of feelings that would scream "DON'T DO IT" in my head every time I had to admit I was wrong and apologize.  At first, I felt like I was somehow 'less,' when actually, the exact opposite was true.

I became more mature, more self-aware and ready to see other perspectives besides my own. I can honestly say my relationships improved by being able to admit when I was in the wrong. And I felt so much better about myself, too, once I got over those silly notions that being wrong was the end of the world or that I had failed.

During my full-time working years, I had the opportunity to mentor a young woman, fresh out of college. She had started studying accounting in school but switched to finance, instead, which normally indicates that a person didn't like accounting or struggled with it. During her tenure with our firm, she attempted to become a licensed CPA but did not succeed in that. I'm explaining this so you have some background. 

My experience with her indicated that she was one of those people who needed rote tasks, tasks that did not vary and were basically the same thing over and over. If she didn't know something, she struggled to figure out how to learn what she didn't know. She had a hard time learning and retaining new, complex, tax information with respect to clients. She struggled to figure out the "why" of something. Her focus was "for Person A we do X." She didn't seem to grasp WHY we did X. She wanted comfortable and familiar tasks that were fairly straightforward. 

In our line of work, mainly tax work, most everything we did was complex and complicated, and each client was vastly different from the next. We did every type of tax return there was to do. Some I never knew existed until I worked there. Each task we did was unique. However, there were a few clients that had 15 or 20 almost duplicate tax returns to be completed. Those type of tasks were assigned to her, and she learned how to do those and did them well. 

One day I went to lunch with her and took it upon myself to have a conversation with her about her career choice. My frustration with her caused me to feel in my gut, to the depths of my soul, that she was supposed to be doing something else with her life that she was more passionate about. To me, she was struggling so much, didn't seem to want to learn anything new, couldn't 'self-start', that I decided that she was only in this job because my colleague wanted her there.

This was totally my assumption. I mentioned to her that she might want to find something she felt really passionate about and pursue that, because I didn't see that she had the passion for this job. Ironically, this was such an unfair statement coming from me, because when I went back to work full time, I took the first job I was offered, doing something I was familiar with, rather than waiting for the type of job I really wanted. I didn't feel passionate about my job at all. It was something I had experience with, trained in, had taught classes for, but I really didn't want to do it anymore.

Yeah, it was sort of a career suicide type of move, on my part. However, after I got yelled at... bitched at.... and not fired because I was needed in my role, I settled into to continuing to mentor her. And she stuck it out, learned how to do the clients I normally did because I was retiring, was there when I retired, remained there when her parent retired and stayed until a few months ago, when she resigned during tax season to start her own tax preparation business. 

I was stunned.

I have to admire her confidence and bravery. Even with my experience and credentials, I did not have the courage to do something like that. She had secretly studied for and passed a test to be a credentialed tax professional, while working, presented that fait accompli to the owner of the firm and walked out. 

After I heard this news, I came to the realization that maybe she really did want this career after all. I was wrong to have discouraged her back when I did.

So, I did what a normal former colleague would do. I talked to my former boss and got the full story, decided to reach out to her to congratulate her on starting this new endeavor. I found her website and it had an email section, so I wrote her an encouraging email.  I didn't get a response. She also happened to be a Facebook friend, so after not getting a response, I decided to send her a Facebook message. I discovered I had been defriended. This prompted me to chat with my old work buddies, who discovered they had been defriended as well.  I decided to find her on Facebook again and found her professional page and sent her another message, with the explanation I wasn't sure she'd received the prior one. 

But THIS time, I included a paragraph in my note, explaining how a former boss of mine, before I became a CPA, had discouraged me from it, saying it was way too hard. I can remember the name of that boss, exactly where we were when we had this conversation, the look on her face and how it felt. And this was in 1991.... It wasn't until my next boss told me I needed to go back to school and become a CPA, that I finally believed it and decided to pursue it. I apologized to my former mentee for discouraging her back when I did, told her I wished her the best of luck and much success, to remember that she knew more than she thinks she does, and to keep in mind that 'this too shall pass' when things become uncertain. 

She responded to that second message, told me she knew I had put a lot of thought into my email because I brought up my discouraging her, which told me without a doubt that it had stuck with her all these years, just like the discouragement I received had stuck with me, and told me my email had made her day. She also told me that she will always prepare her work the way I had taught her and that I would always be part of her tax preparation process. Her positive response made me feel pretty good about reaching out to her and admitting I had been wrong.  

Having a negative opinion about whether or not she was the right fit for the career she chose was not the issue. My mistake, and unkindness, was voicing that thought in such a way that it discouraged her. My job clearly should have been lifting her up and encouraging her, and making suggestions with respect to possible alternatives when things were not going well.  I made a very poor choice for someone who was supposed to be a mentor. That was my mistake and now I've owned it.

We exchanged a few more messages over the next day or so, me telling her I was available if she ever needed to vent to someone who understood, and her telling me how excited she was for me regarding my upcoming bicycle tour in Europe (I will be posting about that in a separate blog). It was a nice back and forth and I'm glad our brief conversation was left on a high note. 

My opinion with respect to her being able to succeed in the career she chose served no purpose, unless I was able to frame it with a learning opportunity of something specific she needed to address about her performance. I basically told her I didn't think she could cut it and to give up, but a lot less bluntly than that. Words like that, from a mentor, are soooo powerful. They were powerful to me when my boss said them to me, and they were powerful to her, when I said them.  Luckily, neither of us listened, but would our lives have been stressful if those words had never been spoken? 

There are lessons to be learned on both sides of this issue. If someone is discouraging you, pay attention to what is being said. Is it vague and generalized? If so, take it with "a grain of salt" as my mother used to say. A general opinion without specific facts to back it up is just an opinion and you know what they say about opinions.... That person doesn't know everything about you, has their own reasons for saying what they say. Just keep doing what you feel you need to do and want to do. However, if there are specific points in the discouraging words, there might be something constructive to be learned, so make sure you pay attention to it and take the lesson to heart, if need be.  If you are offering up advice or wisdom to someone else, be conscious of your words and make damn sure you don't burst someone's bubble for your own self-interest or without specific facts to back up your words. It's very easy to get cocky when you are in a position of authority, as I have found out. But guess what? You and I don't know everything... So, to quote many a romance novel "don't yuck on someone else's yum."

I learned a lesson from all this. I'm not always right.... dammit!

(photo courtesy of Brett Jordan)