What a Family Trip to Colorado Taught Me About Mistakes
Today my son reminded me that it has been exactly 10 years since we took our first family trip from Minnesota to Colorado. The picture in this post was taken on that exact trip in 2011. That brought back a flood of great memories because since that time, we have visited beautiful Colorado enough times to call it our second home. But it also brings back a not-so-great memory about a big mistake I made.
Much like our other family trips, I had spent a lot of time planning well in advance which was important for our young family of four who had to travel with special food and a well-planned itinerary to accommodate my younger son’s allergies and autism.
My husband was combining this trip with a meeting and an important dinner he had to attend on the first evening of our arrival. While doing the final packing the night before our departure, I realized I hadn’t yet printed our boarding passes and it seemed odd that the airline hadn’t sent me the usual “time to check-in” email. When I logged into the website, I was horrified to learn I had booked the 10:00 PM flight for the next day, not the 10:00 AM flight that we needed to get my husband there on time and to be able to enjoy the activities we had planned for the first day. My heart sank!
As it turns out, I was able to scramble to get tickets on a different airline for the next morning. It created a lot of stress, cost us a bunch of money for the new tickets and cancellation fees, and sucked up a lot of time that I didn’t have (which cut my sleep down to about 3 hours).
However, I learned more about airline travel and trip planning than I had in all other family trips combined. And, yes, I now quadruple-check the AM/PM times on all my flight bookings! Not only that, I learned that when I’m stressed and in a bad mood, those emotions transfer to the people closest to me (in this case, my family), which led me to improve my self-management skills to help make our trips more enjoyable in the future.
So what’s the point of this story?
Oftentimes we learn more from making mistakes than we do when things go smoothly.
This is an important thing to remember about ourselves. We are human, so the question is not whether we will make a mistake. The question is, how will we respond to making a mistake? Don’t miss the opportunity to reflect and learn. In doing so, we grow and we may just be able to help someone else avoid the same mistake in the future. I bet you will be double-checking for the correct AM/PM on the next flight you book. 😉