Navigating Mistakes Through Practical Wisdom

Recently, I made a pretty huge mistake, one that relates to this podcast. Today, I want to talk about the mistake, how I reacted, and the wisdom I gained from the experience. My hope is that my grief will be your gain and that I’ll be able to provide some insights into navigating your next mistake.

Welcome to Live Well and Flourish, where I help you understand what it means to live a flourishing life. I'm your host, Craig Van Slyke. If you're ready to think beyond material and external success, if you're ready to take control of who you are and the kind of life you live, if you're ready to flourish, this is the podcast for you.

We all make mistakes, yeah, even you (and me!). Recently, I made a big one. Today, I want to tell you about the mistake, its immediate consequences, and most importantly, how my experience can help you be more resilient in the face of errors.

This podcast is more than a hobby for me; it’s a critical piece of serving my purpose. I want to help people live successful, meaningful lives. Live Well and Flourish is one of the main ways I try to live up to this purpose. As I say in the close, I don’t want your money and I’m not trying to sell anything. (There’s nothing wrong with asking for listener support or using a podcast to sell products or services. It’s just not what I’m about.)

Just because I’m not trying to make money with Live Well and Flourish doesn’t mean there aren’t expenses. There are actually quite a few, hosting episodes and the website, subscriptions to various tools, paying my virtual assistant for his excellent work … yes, there are expenses. In an attempt to lower the expenses a bit, I decided to switch podcast hosts (that's the service that sends out episodes). The change saves me $400 to $500 per year, so it’s not trivial.

Changing hosts isn’t terribly complicated, but there are a number of little things that have to be done. Unfortunately, I was rushing (always a mistake) and screwed up one of these little things, which had some big consequences. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but essentially my error meant that subscribers to Live Well and Flourish were no longer subscribed. Instead, I think they might have suddenly been subscribed to another of my shows, AI Goes to College. (This is still a little fuzzy to me.)

Once I realized that something had gone wrong, my initial reactions were not very Stoic or philosophical, or frankly, wise. This can happen in the moment. What I felt was a combination of shock, panic, confusion, and once I realized what had happened, more than a little anger at myself for making the mistake.

The overarching emotion, though was a combination of sadness and a sort of depression (I'm a little hesitant to use that term). I put A LOT of work into Live Well and Flourish, maybe more than I should. I’ve spent three years building an audience and suddenly all of my subscribers were gone. At least that's what I thought. (The reality turned out to be not quite so bad, but I still lost about half of my subscribers as nearly as I can tell.)

I seriously wondered if this was the universe telling me that it’s time to move on. I was really close to packing it in, calling it a day, throwing in the towel … however you want to say it. I was ready to quit. Over time I had come to accept that I was never going to have thousands of listeners and I was OK with the size of my current audience. It was more than enough to justify my efforts. But, starting over? That just didn’t sound like something I wanted to do.

Fortunately, I’ve learned not to make hasty, emotion-driven decisions. So, I took a proverbial deep breath and got to work figuring out how to minimize the damage.

My first step was to set up an appointment with podcast expert and coach, Dave Jackson. Dave is a literal hall-of-fame podcaster who runs the School of Podcasting. I’m a proud member of the School of Podcasting and Dave’s help has been invaluable in creating and refining Live Well and Flourish. By the way, if you have any interest at all in starting a podcast, your first thing you ought to do is to visit schoolofpodcasting.com to check out what Dave offers. Really, do that.

Dave and I met and he quickly identified where I messed up and we corrected the error. The problem was that fixing the error didn’t undo the damage, that's did not undo the damage. Basically, anyone who logged into their podcast app before the error was fixed was lost as a subscriber. At least I think that's what happened. Dave and I talked about strategies to mitigate the damage, including sending a message to my email list, which I quickly did. Unfortunately, not all subscribers were on the list and people get so many emails, it’s easy for someone to miss my message. I also posted notices to social media, but whether or not the algorithms showed those posts to people, well that's beyond my control and beyond my knowledge.

So, I did what I could to minimize the damage then started thinking about what to do next. I decided to reflect on the experience and ponder about how to apply practical wisdom to help me deal with the situation.

Before getting into that, though, I want to ask you to help me spread the word about and rebuild Live Well and Flourish. As I said, as far as I can tell, I may have lost about half of my subscribers. Some of those will come probably back over time, but I’d like your help in getting new listeners, or reconnecting with former listeners. It’s really easy to do. You can either use the share button on your podcast app or you can send them to https://www.livewellandflourish.com/. The home page has subscribe buttons for most of the major podcast apps. I really appreciate your help and I hope you'll take the one or two minutes it will take for you to do this. Thank you!

So, how am I trying to get my mind right in this unfortunate situation? Well, first I reminded myself of some truths that I’ve come to recognize over the years. I’ve talked about most of these over the past three years of this podcast.

First, you cannot control the past: I’ve said this lots of times, you just can’t control the past. There’s no way to unring a bell. Lamenting my mistake was counterproductive. As Stoicism teaches us, some things are in your control and some things are not. The past is firmly in that not under your control category. You can only deal with what is and move on. So, I’ve turned my attention and energy to things I CAN control, such as accepting what’s happened.

Acceptance is something taught by many philosophical and religious traditions, including Stoicism and Buddhism. Constantly replaying negative events does nothing productive. Who knows why bad things happen? Sure, they suck, but that’s just the way life is sometimes. If you can accept your current state, you can put more energy into doing what you can to improve the situation. (Are you sensing a theme here?)

I was also reminded that all things are impermanent, including a podcast. Live Well and Flourish will end one day. That’s just a fact. When? Who knows? At worst, if I decided to shut down the podcast due to my error, it just would have sped up the inevitable. It was going to end someday.

This next little bit of wisdom was tough for me, I’ll admit. Emotional reactions are natural. I try to eliminate negative emotions from my life, and frankly, with little success. Even the Stoics recognize that emotional reactions, negative ones included, are part of the human experience. It’s crazy to think that you can eliminate them. Even worse, it’s crazy to think that you SHOULD eliminate them. Seneca wrote this about losing friends, “Let not the eyes be dry when we have lost a friend., nor let them overflow. We may weep, but we must not wail.” I think this means that emotions are natural, but we need to take steps, do what we can to keep them from running our lives.

One way I dealt with my negative emotional reactions to my mistake is by reminding myself that my suffering is trivial in the larger scheme of things. Right now, as you’re hearing this, someone just lost a husband, a wife, a child, a sibling, a parent, a job, a loved one, a beloved pet. All of these and many, many other sufferings are innumerably more important than me losing subscribers to this little podcast. Good Lord, what am I whining about?

This next one is sometimes hard to realize, but it’s a reality that has tremendous power. There are opportunities in hardship. Creating this episode is one of them. A more important opportunity was the opportunity to remind myself of these truths that I just talked about. Getting through a negative event like this also builds resilience for the next challenging situation, which may be much more important than losing some podcast listeners.

The events resulting from my mistake also offer an opportunity to rethink Live Well and Flourish. Should I change the format? Should I rebrand? Should I promote the podcast differently? Should I explore different topics? It’s good to ask these sorts of questions from time to time, but thinking through them is work; work that’s much too easy to put off for another day. If you have any ideas about changes I should make, please let me know by emailing livewellandflourish@pm.me, or by using the Contact Craig button on the top left of the home page at https://www.livewellandflourish.com/

Finally, I reminded myself that the key to living an excellent life is to take wise action. That’s what I’m trying to do now. All of the reflecting, all of the pondering, it doesn’t lead to excellence if it doesn’t lead to wise action.

I realize I’m covering a lot here. So let me summarize with some advice on what you might do the next time you make a big mistake.

First, accept the reality of the situation. What happens happens and you can't go back and change that. I also recommend taking a little time to reflect on what led to the error, which might help you avoid similar errors in the future. But more importantly, what you can do from where you are. What can you do from here? Also, as you consider your actions be sure to stay in touch with your virtues. You always want to act with virtue, that's the core of living a flourishing live. Act with virtue, so don't blame others, don't take the easy way out necessarily, just think through your different virtues that you're trying to live up to and how they might apply in this particular situation.

It's also a good a idea to try, and this is a hard one to explain, try to detach from the outcomes. Focus on your actions. Sending out a message to my email list, I have no idea if that's gonna work or not, but it's something I can do that might work. It seems reasonable, it's relatively low effort, so even if it only picks up a couple of people it's worth doing. But I really don't know, I have no way to know whether or not that email did any good, so I'm just not worrying about that. I did what I could, I'm gonna move on.

This next one may be the most important little bit of advice that I have to offer today. When you make a mistake, practice self-grace. Sure, you wanna do a little analysis so that you don't make similar errors in the future. My error comes down to rushing. There's no doubt about that, so when something important is going on I need to force myself to slow down. But beating myself up over what really was kind of a dumb error doesn't do any good at all. It just leads into a downward spiral of negative emotions that doesn't benefit you or anyone else. So just like you would practice grace when someone else messes up, do the same thing for yourself.

And then finally, try to see the opportunity that lies within the mistake. I know this is easy to say, as I'm experiencing now it's a little bit hard to do, but there always is some opportunity, some little nugget that lies into any negative event. If you can dig deeply enough to find it then maybe you can leverage something bad for something that's really good in the long run.

I've talked about some of the changes I'm considering, including one I didn't talk about, is it time for me to shut down Live Well and Flourish? I'm frankly not sure about that. I need to do a lot of thinking over the next few weeks, over the next couple of months, see how many subscribers come back or see how many new subscribers I can gain, and then think through the costs and benefits or continuing. Is it time for me to do something different and serve my purpose in some other way? I don't know. I don't' know. But you can be sure if I do decide to shut down Live Well and Flourish, I'll let you know and inform you of what my plans are for the future. As of right now I'm just gonna do the status quo. I'm gonna keep putting out episodes. Keep doing what I can and hope for the best.

It's all an ongoing process. As I said, I have a lot of things to think about. I do hope you'll stay tuned, stay subscribed, and please let me know what you think.

One thing I'd like to hear is do you have your own story of recovering from a mistake through practical wisdom? Again, you can let me know at livewellandflourish@pm.me or through the contact button at https://www.livewellandflourish.com. That's really the only thing I want you to do this week. Just let me know what's going on with you, if you'd like to see any changes, or if you'd like to share your story with me.

I'm gonna close with a quote that's often attributed to Plutarch, although I’m not sure that’s accurate (and I don’t really care; I'm gonna take my wisdom where I find it). “To make no mistake is not in the power of a human; but from their errors and mistakes, the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.”

Until next time, be well my friends.

I produce Live Well and Flourish because of my dedication to helping others live excellent lives. I don't accept sponsorships and I don't want your money. The only thing I want is to help you and others flourish. If you've received some value from this episode, please share it with someone that might also benefit from listening. The best way to do that is to direct them to livewellandflourish.com

Until next time.