Early in my career, I thought mistakes proved I was not ready. I was really hard on myself when I made mistakes, and I was a bit of a perfectionist.
I was a young single mom, trying to build a business, carrying debt, and figuring things out as I went. I made expensive mistakes. I made people mistakes. I made decisions that still make me cringe a little.
Then I learned a phrase from Garry Ridge, the longtime CEO of WD-40: do not call mistakes failures. Call them learning moments.
That phrase changed the way I lead.
A learning moment is not an excuse for carelessness. It is not a way to avoid accountability. In fact, it requires more accountability.
You have to be willing to say: I made that decision. It did not work. What can I learn? What will I do differently next time? How do we move forward?
We have seen this happen at Ocaquatics. A talented manager made a mistake that could have ended her career with us. Instead, she owned it, volunteered to step back, returned to teaching, did the work, and eventually earned her way back into leadership.
That took humility. It also took a culture where growth mattered more than punishment.
If every mistake becomes a scarlet letter, people learn to hide problems. If every mistake becomes a learning moment, people learn to surface them, solve them, grow and move forward.
The best leaders I know are not the ones who have never stumbled. They are the ones who learned how to turn a stumble into the wisdom of experience.
Mistakes are inevitable. What matters is whether your culture makes it safe to learn from them.
