When you make a mistake, you begin to envision the wrath of judgment.

You picture how people will look down on you. You feel today is the day your manager FIRES you.

Maybe it’s all true. Maybe not.

Some will call you a fool, gossiping behind your back.

You fear judgment. You fear losing credibility. You fear not what the lesson the mistake will bestow on you, but rather, how others will perceive you.

Mistakes happen for many reasons.

You rush. You’re stressed. You didn’t sleep well.

Emotions and wasteful processes are often the biggest culprits.

When you panic, you make more mistakes. You ignore procedures. Rules are forgotten. You shift away from the plan. You become unresponsive and stop thinking clearly. Your emotions build, stacking on top of each other.

You react—not to what you need to respond to but to the insidious hormones raging through your veins.

Uncontrolled emotions make you do dumb things.

Quickly accept, fix, and prevent mistakes.

Execute Lean Thinking into your life. Learn the eight wastes of lean and continuously improve every day.

Work in a judgment-free zone. People shouldn’t judge you for the mistakes you make. Work in an environment where you’re allowed to learn from your mistakes.

Conduct a premortem where you imagine your project failed. You then work backward to think through why the failure occurred.

Always report your mistakes. When you feel comfortable being able to report your mistakes and not sweep them under the it-wasn’t-me rug, you’re allowed to learn from the mistake and prevent it in the future.

When you’re finished, conduct a postmortem where you analyze the successful and unsuccessful project elements. My business adviser calls this Liked Best and Next Times.

• What did you like best about this?

• What can we do better next time?

Catalog your mistakes. Ozan Varol says, “to facilitate learning from failure, NASA catalogs mistakes in human spaceflight in a document called ‘Flight Rules.’”

We’re all human, and mistakes will happen, but Ozan reminds us to avoid stupid mistakes,

“You can allow people to take high-quality risks, but you can also set high standards. You don’t have to tolerate sloppy failures—repeatedly making the same mistakes or failing because of a lack of care. You can reward intelligent failures, sanction poor performance, and accept that some errors are going to be inevitable when you’re building things that may not work. People should be held accountable not for failing intelligently, but for failing to learn from it.”