Way back when I got my first supervisory position, I wasn’t very good.

In fact, I sucked. My team staged a mutiny.

It was embarrassing, heart-rending, humbling, and an enormous blow to my pride, all at once. The facilitator of the meeting stayed with me after they had all left and said something to me then that I have never forgotten.

He said, basically, that it doesn’t matter if you miss. Every good leader misses, at some point. What makes a good leader, he said, was how you recover.

At times since then I’ve forgotten what he said, and I beat myself up over screwing something up, or making the wrong choice. I forget that it doesn’t matter if you miss, it’s how you recover afterwards.

This past year seems to be one miss after another, and I keep forgetting that I need to recover well. That it’s okay to miss, and be wrong, and make the wrong choice, as long as I recover well.

So I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately because I feel like I missed, again. Again! I made a series of choices that seemed so right at the time and instead, I missed. I’m trying now to recover well but it’s slow going. It gives me hope to remember what that guy said, and that it’s okay to miss. No matter how many times, it’s okay. It’s only a failure when you don’t pick yourself up to try again.

Which is good news, because I’m not even half done with my life yet!