While I was fostering Stella, my plott hound mix, we worked heavily on walking on a leash. I’m quite sure she had rarely been on a leash, and the job of a foster is to get your animal as fully prepared to go into a home as you possibly can in a short amount of time.
We were walking one day, and she was at the end of the retractable leash, when suddenly, she got spooked. At 50 lbs and all legs, she yanked me along behind her. By the time I got my bearings, she had pulled me under a pine tree, and I ran headlong into a huge spider web.
I screamed like a banshee. My arms flailed trying frantically to get the web off my face, my arms, my legs, and I was completely freaking out on the location of the damn spider. (If you have seen my hair, you know a spider could hide in it for a year, and I wouldn’t know it. Spooky!)
All the while, Stella wanted to go home, so she wrapped the leash around my legs trying to convince me to get her out of this situation. It was a disaster! Finally, I got my act together, and we sauntered home, completely exhausted.
Mistakes happen, and they cling to you like a spider web to your clothes. My mistake was letting her go too far on the leash before I knew her better. If I had known that she got spooked so easily, then I would have managed the situation more effectively. Oops!
Here are 3 steps on how to manage your mistakes, so that you learn from them.
- Freak out for a minute. Literally shake it off. You know you want to, so give yourself permission to just freak out. Get all that adrenaline out of your system.
- Assess the damage. Check your hair for spiders. Wipe the web off your arms. Check around you and see how things are.
- Do the next right thing to clean it up, whatever that may be. For Stella and me, it was getting back to the street, comforting my dog, straightening my clothes and her leash, taking a big deep breath and walking back to the house. In addition, I did some damage control by apologizing to my neighbors.
I never did find that spider, but I did find a chunk of web on my shorts later that day. It served as a reminder to read my foster a bit better before letting them walk out too far on their leash. Lesson learned.
POWER THOUGHT: Mistakes don’t have to be scary or spooky!