One bad choice doesn’t define you. The next ten say a lot more.

One decision is a data point and ten in a row is a direction, which is why the week after a bad call matters more than the call did. People read trajectory rather than incidents, and so do you when you look back. Nothing about a single mistake is fixed, and almost everything about a pattern is.

Having just got something wrong, make the next few choices deliberately small and good: turn up, hand it in, say the apology, go to bed. Do not try to clear it with one grand gesture. The repair is built out of ordinary days and it starts tomorrow.