Rob Artigo: Ray, today’s topic is, usually you think of this as a religious subject, repentance, but Ray, you don’t see it that way. You say repentance is not just a religious principle, it’s a practical process for dealing with a mistake, especially a costly one, and actually making things right. So, let’s walk through the four steps you laid out about how to deal with this and what repentance actually looks like. So first, you have to acknowledge you made the mistake, and you call that the hardest step. You said that’s the reason why it comes first. It’s the hardest step. Tell me about it.

Ray Zinn: People don’t like to admit they did something wrong. I’m no different. Obviously, if I make a mistake, I just like to either sweep it under the rug or just forget that I made a mistake. Human beings hate to admit they make mistakes, but we all know we’ve made mistakes. Everyone make mistakes. We see it all the time, even in our daily lives. The errors that we make, we do stupid things, and sometimes they’re done because of selfish reasons and things we should avoid morally, as you would, but we do it because it’s something we want at the time, but then regret we did it.

Admitting we make mistakes goes against our nature. So that’s why it’s the hardest. But we know that if we really, truly, sincerely, honestly, deeply, sorrowfully admit we made a mistake, we got to fix it. And that’s something, “,Oh man, I hate to have to go back and fix it.” You know what they say? Measure twice, cut once as opposed to cut twice and measure once. We hate to go back and repair something that’s broken or regret that we have to fix it. So that’s why it’s number one, is the admitting we make a mistake is a tough thing. Not just admitting it casually. I mean, deeply, deeply admitting it.

Rob Artigo: Second step is confessing it. So you’re now in the action phase, not just knowing it privately, but saying it out loud. That can, like you said, can be embarrassing. It can be expensive too. In a company, it can look like weakness. Why is the actual confessing it necessary?

Ray Zinn: Well, you’re openly admitting it. It’s one thing just to keep it to yourself. It’s another thing to have to go tell somebody, your boss, your wife, your partner, your children, your neighbor. It’s going and telling them, “I screwed up. I really feel bad about that.” It’s tough to do.

I tell a story about when I was driving home one night, it was late at work, and I inadvertently ran a stop sign because I was thinking about something else, and I just ran a stop sign. Of course, my immediate reaction was, “Anybody see me? Was there a cop around me?” Nobody saw me because it was late, and I was not in a real congested area, and it was just a regular street. In fact, there was no traffic on it. And I got to thinking, “Well, good thing there was nobody there. When I ran, I didn’t hit somebody.” And I started kind of rationalizing what I had done.

And then as I got further down the road, I thought something, just because nobody saw me doesn’t mean that I didn’t have an error, that I didn’t make a mistake. So I thought that’s really strange that here I am more concerned about, did somebody see me make a mistake? If they didn’t, no harm, no foul. I’ll just keep moseying down the road. And I felt really bad that I was rationalizing my mistake. When I got home, remember, we’re talking about confessing, I decided to call the police department and tell them that I had run a stop sign and that I was willing to pay the amount, the fine. So that was the confessing part. That was openly confessing. So when I called the police and I told them what happened, they thought I was a nut, and they hung up on me.

Really, all I was trying to do was trying to rectify a wrong that I had committed. Just because somebody didn’t see me commit the crime or the error, didn’t mean it didn’t happen. So I wanted to confess it. I wanted to openly admit I made a mistake, and I was willing then to pay the fine, because that’s the next step that we’re going to talk about in the repentance process. You got to make amends. You got to correct the error. So that was when I said to the police officer who answered the phone, I gave him my driver’s license number and my information so they could send me a ticket, so that I could go in and pay. I was really sincerely going to pay that ticket.

Now, most people think I’m a nut that way, but that’s just the way I want to develop good habits. I don’t want to shirk my responsibility or my duty to correct the mistake. And that’s making amends. If you don’t correct your mistake or make amends for it, then you’ve not made the third step of repenting, which is to reduce or eliminate the error, which is by confessing and then making amends. If you did something to your wife or your friend, your partners that hurt their feelings and something, to make amends, you take them out to dinner. You try to make it right. The correcting part is reducing that effect of that error so that it’s, as they say, no harm, no foul. I tell that story a lot about me running that stop sign and then trying to get a ticket paid and they wouldn’t let me do it. Anyway, that’s the stupid part of politics, I guess.

Rob Artigo: That would be you having a clear conscience. Silent regret wasn’t enough. You had to have a clear conscience. And as you explained, step three is the part where you make amends or attempt to make amends at the very least. It’s the sports analogy of no harm, no foul, is not going to fly. You got to do something about it. The last step is-

Ray Zinn: I want to continue on that making amends. So when I ran my company for 37 years, the problem about making amends is that if they make a mistake, they tend to want to charge the company by solving the problem on the company’s time rather than on their own time. Very seldom, when a mistake was made at the company, did people come in on the weekend or late at night or early in the morning to solve it. They always repaired the problem on company time. So that’s not making amends. If you’re correcting your mistake at the expense of the company, that’s not making amends. It’s like if you rear end somebody and then you say, “Well, okay, I’ll fix your car, but I’ll do it on company time,” or, “I’ll get the insurance company to pay for it or whatever.” That’s not correcting the mistake or making amends.

If you cause an error in your job, don’t just charge the company by repairing it on the company time. Do it on your own time. Come in early or go home late or on the weekend or something like that and solve the problem. That’s making amends. Don’t make somebody else pay for your mistake. And that’s the key here in making amends. You correct it on your time or at your expense. Don’t correct it at somebody else’s expense.

Rob Artigo: The last step is don’t repeat it. So you have to learn from it. That’s the part that turns the one time cleanup into change of character. How do you know someone has actually done this particular step in business or in life and not just given a grandiose speech and said, “Oh yeah, I’m admitting it”? They have to take concrete steps and learn from it too.

Ray Zinn: That’s a key one, because if you keep repeating the same mistake, that means you haven’t really acknowledged that you made a mistake. The whole concept of making mistakes is learning from them. You can’t learn from it if you keep repeating it. So as I say at one of my statements, I think I’ve made it in one of my books, I said, “He who repeats the past fails in the future.” So if you keep making the same mistake over and over, you’ve not corrected it. All you’ve done is just repeated it.

This is a key part about making amends. If you correct it at your expense, you’re less likely to repeat it because you say, “Well, I don’t want to pay that expense again.” So again, the whole concept of admitting you made a mistake and then acknowledge it by confessing it and then fixing it at your expense will help you not to repeat that mistake again.

Rob Artigo: Yeah, that’s the hard work, the tough things that you have to do: acknowledge it, say it, fix it, stop repeating it.

Listeners can find more information and more about Ray’s thinking, and you can offer questions to Ray, at toughthingsfirst.com. We have a full podcast archive. And the books are there, the Tough Things First, The Essential Leader, and the Zen of Zinn series. Also follow Ray on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Ray, thanks as always.

Ray Zinn: Thanks, Rob.