How often do you have an oops experience and then berate yourself for doing it wrong, not being good enough, should have known better, yada, yada, yada? A few weeks ago I decided to make Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies – had my dry ingredients in the bowl, grabbed the cinnamon and shook it into the flour. It looked a little bit red, hmmm. I checked the bottle and realized that I had grabbed cayenne pepper instead of cinnamon, oops!
Many of you are likely wondering how in the world I simply shook the pepper in instead of measuring it, in which case I would have seen that it wasn’t cinnamon. The answer is that I have Aliveness Life Energy (click here for info about Life Energies). I use the “eyeball” method of measuring many ingredients!
I quickly scooped out as much cayenne as I could and then added as much flour and baking soda as I guessed I had taken out. I also realized that there was still some cayenne in the flour, so a new recipe was born! The extra kick was actually delicious and next time I might even add some chocolate chips.
The point of this story is that even though I had a fairly significant oops, I quickly shifted to what I could do to fix it. I didn’t spend time beating myself up for not paying attention, grabbing the wrong spice, not measuring so I would have seen the error, and so on. This is a very innocuous example of an occasion where I could have made myself wrong. And yet we do it often in many areas of life.
What if you could let yourself make a mistake and roll with it rather than judging how wrong you are? What could happen if you gave yourself more space to plan, take action, fail, be curious, try again and be ok with the things that didn’t turn out as you expected? Give it a try and leave a comment below to share your oops moments.
How’s that for being brave?!!! I know the picture above is blurry, but it’s too perfect not to include. It is from high school graduation and was the only day in my life that I had big hair. What was I thinking? Now, that’s an oops of epic proportions!
I love this story, Cindy! For me, this brought up a similar oops yesterday, along the lines of food mishaps. I often find that I get very clumsy when I’m feeling nervous or slightly out of my powerful element. Yesterday, while doing some research on small business marketing, I had a passing thought, “holy crap I have no idea what I’m doing this is really hard how am I ever going to get good at marketing and keep my business growing!” –all in a flash of a moment this thought came, and in the very same moment I spilled coffee all over myself. It was like I just poured coffee AT my mouth instead of INTO my mouth. It ran all down my face, my shirt, my pants, everywhere. And then immediately, I noticed, “aha! I was feeling a little insecure there. Let’s put the coffee down until this moment of insecurity passes. I can do this marketing thing. And I can drink coffee. I bet I can even do them at the same time!” I recovered, cleaned myself up, took a deep breath and tried to come back to the marketing research with an open and receptive state of mind. No more coffee spills–at least for the day!
Great example of an oops and a quick recovery! You know that it could have ruined your whole day or possibly longer. I love your description of pouring coffee AT your mouth – such a good visual.