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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I’m not sure Canadian’s understand bacon, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share an embarrassing story from Podcast Movement 2014.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
I just returned from a fantastic weekend at Podcast Movement 2014. The experience exceeded my expectations and I can not wait to return next year. I’ll be sharing a different story about Podcast Movement 2014 every day this week.
You may recall that we had a Golden Spiral Media community meetup last friday night while we were in Dallas for Podcast Movement. Dallas traffic is normally bad, but the traffic on Friday was among the worst that I’ve ever experienced there. It took us over an hour longer than expected to drive down from Oklahoma City.
While we were sitting in Dallas traffic I got a text from another podcasting friend of mine, Jason Cabassi from The Walking Dead Cast. Jason asked if a friend of his named Michael could join us.
Jason and I last saw each other at New Media Expo in January of this year. At that conference Jason also introduced me to Michael. I spent a lot of time at New Media Expo hanging out with Jason and Michael. We had dinner together one night and went over to the Venetian for gelato one day. Of course, Michael was more than welcome to come to the meet up.
When we finally arrived at the hotel, we checked in and headed for our room to drop off our luggage. We didn’t have a lot of time to relax before it was time for the meet up. The time soon arrived for us to head down to the lobby to meet up with those who were attending Podcast Movement before heading over to the restaurant. We got on the elevator and I was excited to immediately recognize a face of a familiar podcaster standing right at the front. I enthusiastically greeted him by yelling out his first name, “Caesar!” The friend smiled, said hello, and asked me how things were going.
We continued chatting until we reached the lobby. Then we ran into a bunch of other familiar faces and the conversation went in a whole bunch of new directions.
A couple of minutes later, Jason arrived. I was surprised to see that Jason was alone. I asked him where Michael was. He pointed behind me and said, “right there.” I turned around to greet Michael and couldn’t believe it. The person I had just clearly and confidently announced to be Caesar, was actually Michael. Michael just looked at me and smiled.
I was mortified. I wasn’t sure what to do. I wondered if he realized that I called him Caesar. I wondered if he might have thought that I was calling else Caesar. I wondered if I should just ignore the mistake and act like it never happened. I wondered if doing that would make things awkward for the rest of the weekend.
I decided the best course of action was to approach Michael, acknowledge my mistake, apologize, and hope that he wasn’t offended.
I approached Michael, looked him in the eye, and offered a sincere apology. I wasn’t sure why I had made the mix up. I truly thought I was talking to Caesar on the elevator. I was really that confused. Michael was gracious. He told me it was okay and we joked about it a bit after that.
Here’s what I learned.
The last time I checked, we are all guilty of making mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are small and no one notices. Sometimes those mistakes are unmistakable. What we do in the face of those mistakes is more important than making the mistake itself.
We can hide them, hide from them, ignore them, wait for them to go away, deny them, make excuses for them, blame them on someone else, or own them.
Think about that list. Let’s look at it again, this time let’s pay attention to the verb in each option. Hide, ignore, wait, deny, make excuses, blame, own. Only one of those verbs has a positive connotation. That should teach us all something, shouldn’t it?
I’m glad I owned up to the mistake. By owning up to it, we go to talk about it and work it out right away. We didn’t let things get weird. We did have to avoid each other. We didn’t have to do anything. Why? Because there was nothing left to do.
I made a mistake. I owned up to the mistake. I apologized for the mistake. Michael accepted my apology. At that point, what else is left to do but move on and move forward.
Was it embarrassing to approach Michael and acknowledge my mistake? Sure it was, but it was absolutely the best thing to do, and a whole lot better option than possibly offending Michael and losing him as a friend.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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