How a Flopped Expectation Helped Me

A horse has four legs, yet it falls often – Nigerian Proverb

I have a tendency to beat myself up when I fall short or miss the mark. What I have come to realize is that you can be the most skilled, organized and gifted person who is prone to making bad choices, mistakes and wrong turns. It’s all part of the human journey.

I remember pitching an idea to my management at work about doing a special event to raise awareness on mental health for minorities (sidebar – my job involves mental health education and training). It was something that had never been done before, it was in an ultra-professional work environment, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I knew it was something that needed to be done, since Minority Mental Health was nationally recognized during the month of July. Management gave me their blessing and I immediately got to work. I made endless phone calls, vetted tons of potential speakers for the panel I was putting together, and I navigated my way through the logistics on my own – which was a headache all in itself. I had to get very creative with promoting the event, using my copywriting skills like never before with catchy words and convincing reasons to attend this groundbreaking event. It turned out to be a complete flop. The attendance was mediocre, most employees only showed up for the free food at the end and right before the program started, drama broke out with one of the invited guests who was looking for red carpet treatment. The diva behavior was to the point where the actual event was interrupted, requiring one of our executives to tend to the person throwing the temper tantrum. I had never been so stressed and drained by an event that only turned out to be mediocre. The event was supposed to turn heads, get conversations going, cause our phone lines to get swamped with compliments and follow-up questions, but none of that happened.

Fast-forward a few months later, I was doing my routine review of quarterly numbers that tracked utilization of our workplace resources. To my delightful surprise, the numbers had skyrocketed. Even though the in-person attendance was low, there was apparently a ripple effect of sorts; on their own time and in a place of comfort, people took advantage of the information being offered to them for either themselves or someone they knew. I congratulated the metrics folks, saying to keep doing whatever it was I was doing because it was working! Requests also started coming in for additional presentations and discussions for the different branches and directorates. It was amazing to see things take off the way the did…certainly not the way I was expecting them to take off.

The whole turn of events was a great learning experience in hindsight. I know what to do moving forward, particularly how to handle dramatic guests who love making a scene (I may just expound on that in another post). But I learned that even though I didn’t make the best decisions at times, things turned out to be successful in the most unexpected way, which even more rewarding than I could have imagined.  

I would love to know what experience you’ve had that started off as a travesty and ended in the weirdest form of triumph. Tell me all about it below!