A Useful Kind of Embarrassment
By Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
The moment after a confident mistake can reveal what we actually value.
I would like to become quicker at saying that I was mistaken. The obstacle is rarely the wording. It is the brief wish to preserve the authority of the person who spoke before the correction arrived.
A small mistake then recruits unnecessary helpers: an exception, an ambiguous phrase, a claim that the main point survives. Sometimes it does survive. Sometimes these are merely ways of delaying an uncomplicated admission.
Embarrassment has a useful message. It tells us that our self-image became attached to an answer. The task is to notice that attachment without allowing it to direct the next sentence.
There is relief in a correction that stops expanding. The error remains the size it originally was, instead of becoming a demonstration of how much effort someone will spend protecting it.
I think credibility is strengthened by those small, unadorned admissions. They make future confidence easier to trust.