How to handle mistakes and perfectionism

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! I hope you’re all doing well and hopefully getting some time off over the year-end holidays! This is the final “substantive” newsletter of the year; next week I’ll send out my annual “books I read this year” post (here’s last year’s if you’re looking for some holiday reading), and then the newsletter will take two weeks off while I do some skiing, beaching, and pajama-ing.

The T4T online training year has wrapped up, and I’m excited that 633 people participated in our master classes and challenge groups in 2023! If you’re looking to get a jump on things for 2024 (or if you need a year-end tax deduction!), our January offerings are open for registration:

• On January 16, I’m teaching a special one-hour “flash session” on Using objective data to set your freelance rates. This “quick start” webinar will help you use actual numbers to decide how much to charge (imagine that!), at a special price of $50.
• On January 17, my four-week, self-paced class, Getting started as a freelance translator or interpreter…in the age of AI kicks off. I teach this four-week class once or twice a year, and it’s continually updated to reflect the actual working conditions that beginning and aspiring freelancers encounter. Registration is $190, with a $30 discount for American Translators Association members (use coupon code ATA).

Now, on to this week’s topic: How to handle mistakes and perfectionism

When I teach classes for freelancers, I often tell people that if you’re making it as a freelancer, I already know that you’re a go-getter and an overachiever, because it’s basically impossible to succeed as a freelancer without those characteristics. In most salaried jobs, if you think of people on a scale of 1-10, the 1s and 2s might get laid off or demoted, the 9s and 10s might get a raise or a promotion, and everyone else sort of cruises along being neither great nor horrible at their job. That’s completely untrue of freelancers, where if you’re not a 9 or a 10, clients can easily just go find someone else.

This has its downsides, namely that when we make mistakes (which we all do), or if we suffer from perfectionism (which a lot of us do), we can have a hard time dealing with it. This happened to me last week: for a variety of reasons (none of them catastrophic), I had a bad day at work. I love my job, so it hits me hard when things don’t go well. But here’s what I did well: I realized that I was spiraling into panic mode, and I paused for some perspective instead of continuing to freak out. And then:

• I didn’t have any particular plans that evening, so I decided to walk home from my office to clear my head. This walk takes more than an hour, so it’s a good amount of time for reflection.
• I remembered that Sophie Llewellyn Smith, who hosts The Complete Interpreter podcast (sooo good; she covers mostly conference interpreting topics, but some of her episodes apply to translators as well) had done an episode on How to let go of mistakes when you have a bad day, and I had my earbuds with me, so I decided to listen to the episode while I walked home. Following are some takeaways for all of us!

1. I really appreciated Sophie’s take on the toxic aspects of perfectionism. Namely, that we tell ourselves that perfectionism is a positive thing, sort of a “continual quest for excellence,” when in reality, perfectionism often means that we never see our own work as good enough, and we see any mistakes as a complete failure: we’re either perfect or incompetent, and nothing in between.
2. Sophie also reinforced something I often tell people: You’re going to make mistakes; no one who does language work is perfect all the time. And when (not if, when) you mess up, you need to apologize, do what you can to make it right, and move on. However, Sophie had some really great tips for “moving on” that I had never thought of. They’re in the show notes if you want to take a look. Hint: I was on the right track by walking home instead of taking the bus!
3. Sophie also encourages (great advice for both translators and interpreters) differentiating between mistakes that weigh on you because your work wasn’t up to par, and mistakes that weigh on you because of mindset. There’s a difference between, “I knew I should have proofread that translation more carefully / I knew I wasn’t fully prepared for that interpreting assignment,” and feeling like the mistake was something relatively minor (Sophie’s episode is inspired by an interpreter who hesitated during an on-air interpreting assignment; not a catastrophic error) but it’s still eating away at you hours/days/weeks later.

Two tips that we often share in my family, and that I think are helpful in work situations as well, are:

• Progress doesn’t happen in the comfort zone. You never want to sell a client something on which you can’t deliver; “fake it ’till you make it” is actually terrible advice for a freelancer, IMO. But, when you challenge yourself, things aren’t always going to go perfectly, and yet you can grow from the experience.
• The only way never to be disappointed is never to try. If you stay in your safe zone, you’re never disappointed in your own work, because you stick with things you’re already good at. I always appreciate it when my yoga teachers will say, “If you’ve never tried this hard pose, you literally don’t know whether you can do it or not.” Trying involves the risk of not succeeding, and you need to give yourself credit for trying.