There are some comments and strategies that I have used over my career to handle my stress (which, earlier in my career, I did not do well) and to mitigate co-workers' and managers' demands that my work has to be perfect.
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." Said Einstein, and he was pretty clever.
I transitioned from a clinical healthcare job (where mistakes can lead to death) to a tech startup job (where absolutely no one died due to anyone's mistake). During my early days in the tech space, co-workers around me were completely stressed out by their mistakes and I do would stress over my mistakes. I reminded myself and others, "It's okay. No one will die; take a breath, fix your mistake, figure out why this mistake was made, and try to mitigate the root cause (if any can be found)."
Later in my career, when I had more knowledge and seniority capital, my comment to people with snarky comments on my mistakes goes like this, "When you have a mistake-free week, then you can comment on my work."
Coming from healthcare, where mistakes can lead to death, there is lots of training, documentation, professional standards, and individual QA checks (and now a lot more technological intervention) that staff either can or are required to use to ensure that they don't rely on their memories to prevent mistakes. There are few support mechanisms to prevent mistakes in business, but you can create your own.
How can you deal with the additional stress caused by a fear of producing less-than-perfect work? (which I would call "work" b/c no one is perfect)
-find and mitigate your weak spots.
If you send emails with grammar mistakes (that's me), save your emails in your draft, wait 10 minutes, read what you are sending, OR use an online grammar checker (including Google Docs/ or Word).
If you make a mistake moving files on servers, slow down, find a manual queue, talk yourself through what you are doing (mumble or talk to yourself in your head), or write down the step in a notepad or on your phone and run through the checklist.
-Develop your own QA processes
Nobody wants to be responsible for shutting down a server or bringing down an application, and there are things that we do that, although the mistakes are not life-threatening, they are still severe. For those activities, create your own QA processes. Write out the steps you need to follow and keep them close - even if you've done a particular task 1000s of times, that doesn't mean that on the 1001 time, you won't forget a step, so do a mental rundown of the steps before you hit the Go button.
What works for me are manual cues, so I move my fingers above my keyboard, pointing at things on the screen to physically pattern out how things will when I execute an action. I do that stop-breath-finger-pointing-check pattern every time I perform a more-serious action, even things I can do in my sleep.
-give yourself grace. There is absolutely no human who has ever walked on this planet who didn't make multiple minor mistakes a day.
We can mitigate those mistakes through training, documentation, practice, outside QA, root cause analysis (as a team or individually), and finding the tools needed to lessen the frequency of a particular error.
Don't beat yourself up for being an average mistake-making human; if you find an activity or a time of the day when you make more mistakes (or you are making the same mistake over again), do your own root-cause analysis and find the issues you need help with and create a mechanism to help.
Anyone else on the team who isn't making mistakes has probably created those internal tools to reduce their error rate. They just aren't talking about the multiple ways that they found to help reduce their own mistakes b/c they don't want to appear less-than-prefect or are no longer aware of their internal support mechanism because it's "just how they work" (or what is called tacit knowledge - the stuff we know because we know it after working in our careers forever)
On that tacit knowledge idea, you could ask co-workers if they have any tips/tricks to help them with specific tasks. "Thanks for pointing out my error in ABC. Do you have any tips to help me prevent that type of error in the future?" Some people will reply with a snarky comment, "How about you just don't make mistakes," to which I would happily respond, "Thanks for being not helpful." Most people will give you tips and hints that work for them, and only some ideas will work for you, but I bet you'd find many great ideas.
Good luck
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