Averting Guilt and Learning from Mistakes

Ah, the joys of being overly sensitive and feeling real guilt for not doing something perfectly. Case in point today:

I had done a lot of work to gather ideas for this project and had presented them relatively comprehensively. This had involved talking to a lot of people about how they thought a particular situation should be dealt with. I presented my content and people moved it forward.

Fast forward to the NEXT level of presentation of my content : the person who had assigned me to gather this information presented it as content I had gathered from some people who I, in fact, had not talked to. And they were there.

Now, I didn't realize until RIGHT THEN that I was supposed to have talked to them. I thought that the list of people to talk to was a selection and a place to start/work from, not an all-inclusive list. I have now learned that that is not the case. When I'm given an assignment, especially if it is for someone else, I need to really make a plan of EXACTLY what I should do per their instructions. While my methodology may make sense to me, they probably know what they're asking for and want what they're asking for for a reason.

So I didn't do it perfectly and I totally didn't realize it until way after I thought I was done. Very frustrating, and I suppose this is avoidable guilt. I will have to apologize and really reconsider how I organize my tasks so that, when I'm done, they meet all expectations and assumptions and I can win instead of feeling really good and then feeling like I only performed marginally well.

I mean, now I can see how the information I gathered would have been richer had I been fully paying attention to my original assignment, but I got caught up in the product and that it needed to be done and not in the process and how to do it richly and well. Lesson learned.