The best seat to catch my drama

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

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.