If you accidentally send the wrong document, send a follow-up email apologizing for the mistake and (if the occasion calls for it) kindly asking the recipient to delete the attached document and not share any information they may have read. If you typically work with important financial or confidential documents, you’ll want to be extra careful here. Send the attachment in a follow-up email and, in the future, attach the document before you even begin writing your email. In this situation, it is acceptable to make ‘fear of attachment’ jokes. Forgetting the attachmentįorgetting to attach a mentioned attachment is common, but still embarrassing. As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to double check who is receiving an email to make sure it’s relevant to those individuals. If you notice this happening, inform your main communicant(s) that you’re removing individuals from the conversation and will relay any necessary information. Replying to “all” is great for keeping people in the loop, but sometimes it can create an unnecessary thread of messages for certain recipients. Simply start a follow-up email by apologizing for the multiple messages (or maybe even lighten the mood with a joke) and convey the rest of your original message. If you type quickly, you’ve probably made the mistake of sending an email before you’re finished. Here are ten embarrassing email mistakes you might make and how you should react to save face: 1. Such business mistakes are awkward but common, especially for entrepreneurs, and can be fixed. (If anything, he had my respect.) I laughed joyously because it was funny and it broke up the monotony of hours of political speeches.Įver since then, every time I’ve publicly humiliated myself in some way that made others laugh, I’ve tried to remember the fact that giving people a reason to laugh can be a wonderful thing, even if they’re laughing at me.We've all hit send prematurely, CC’d the wrong person and even spoken ill of a non-responsive recipient without knowing whether they were receiving emails. And I remember that I didn’t think anything negative about the speaker at all. I still remember it so well because it was so funny. It was a long day of mostly boring speeches, but during one of them, a student misspoke - instead of “success,” he said “suck-sex.” The teenage audience roared with laughter. I still remember participating in Model United Nations as a high school senior and attending an end-of-year summit with all the clubs from schools around the state. What if people laughed at your mistake? Even then, putting yourself in their shoes for a moment might be illuminating. Memorizing and giving a speech in front of hundreds of people is really hard.” What might an audience member think? What would you have thought if you were listening to a speech and the speaker made a mistake? Say your memory is of stumbling over your words while giving a speech. Can you try thinking about the memory from someone else’s point of view? This time, let yourself feel those cringey feelings! Don’t worry, they won’t last. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably used to trying to shut the memory down whenever it comes up and quickly distracting yourself from the feelings it provokes. All it takes is asking yourself three questions.įirst, think of the memory you recalled at the beginning of this article. They cringe right along with the people in the stories, and they like the fact that they feel empathy for them.ĭahl realized that we can turn this into a powerful way to cope with our own lingering feelings of embarrassment. Others, however, like reading or hearing about cringeworthy moments because it helps them feel more connected to people. While exploring various performance events and online groups dedicated to airing people’s awkward moments - sometimes with their participation or permission, sometimes not - Dahl discovered that some people use others’ embarrassing situations to ridicule them and set themselves apart from them. Dahl was curious what this feeling we call “awkwardness” really is, and whether or not there’s anything to be gained from it. Melissa Dahl, a journalist and editor at New York Magazine, researched awkwardness and embarrassment for her book “ Cringeworthy,” which came out last year. This approach is much cheaper and probably less dangerous. No, I haven’t invented a sci-fi memory deletion device. Instead of making you cringe or want to hide under the covers, you’ll just smile or even laugh at it, or at least be at peace with it. Now, imagine if you could disarm this memory. Or the one that makes you want to grab your past self by the shoulders and exclaim, “Why?!” Think of your most embarrassing memory - the one that unwittingly pops into your head when you’re trying to fall asleep or about to head out to a social event.
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