We make mistakes too

When your company has a bold impactful mission to redefine something as precious and as important as mental health you have a responsibility to lead by example.

As a business and as individuals, we take that responsibility very seriously and try our best to be role models in the way he hold ourselves and carry out our mission.

That doesn’t mean shamelessly promoting how amazing we are, it means being genuine, honest and human.

Like any group of humans, we make mistakes.

Recently, we’ve made a few mistakes that we’ve had to apologise for and we’ve been grateful for the people we work with to have called us out to help us improve.

Most businesses cover up their mistakes, backtrack or justify them. We’re not going to, we’re human, we make mistakes too and we’re sorry, but we’re filled with pride that we have a community around us that feel close enough to us to give us that honest feedback.

Last week I wrote a newsletter on the news of Chester Bennington taking his own life. I wrote it with the very best of intentions and all I wanted to do was express my sadness and disbelief that someone so open about their struggles with mental health still felt so helpless.

However, the mistake I made was in the way I wrote about suicide. I used the phrase “committed suicide” which is the wrong terminology to use when reporting a suicide. It harks back to a time when suicide was illegal.

Fortunately, Gemma Milne who follows Sanctus felt comfortable enough to e-mail me to tell me about the mistake I made. I was so happy she e-mailed, because I’m sure other people will have seen that and thought the same or I could have made the same mistake again.

More recently, George jokingly posted on LinkedIn about someone who’d cold messaged him addressing him as Bettany. Again, there was no harm intended from George, just some playful banter, but as Katrina pointed out to us in a message on LinkedIn, we should know better.

Katrina was right to call us out and George has since apologised to Simon and had a good old chat with him. Again, thanks to feedback from our community — we’re better for it and we’ll consider the impact of our words more seriously next time.

Vic too, has of course made a few mistakes in her first 6 weeks in a brand new role. There’s been dates that have needed to be re-arranged with businesses and coaches, booking forms to be updated and just yesterday she got so excited she spoke over George a bit in a meeting.

Again, thanks to our amazing community of businesses and partners like Natalie at user replay and Sam at carwow, we were given the feedback, we took it on board, we amended and we learned.

We make mistakes too and to be honest we’re going to keep making them.

We just wanted to say thank you to our amazing community who keep us in line and who aren’t afraid to give us feedback.

We’re on this mission together and with your help, we’ll get there.

Thank you,