To err is human and to forgive divine. Those famous words from the Alexander Pope poem “An Essay on Criticism” are ringing in my head. Do you think there is any truth to forgiveness in business? Recently I had an error in one of my sales messages that resulted in two very different and distinct responses. After a long couple of weeks tending to my daughter after her accident, being away with the family on vacation and rushing around to promote a scheduled Webinar training, I made a mistake and included a typo in one of my sales messages.

This one message when out to hundreds of thousands of people via my ezine, blog, Twitter and Linked In. Out of the thousands of people who may have viewed this message, two individuals had an emotional response and handled it very differently.

The message “Worse Presentation Mistakes Made by Millions” vs. “Worst Presentation Mistakes Made by Millions”

Response #1: John Doe decided to post a horrible public comment to my message that included a personal attack and his opinion about how unprofessional I was because it was apparent I couldn’t spell and so on and so on. When I received his message, I was shocked by the horrible nature of it. I literally had the message posted for about 4 hours before I caught and corrected the error, but John Doe felt it necessary to use harshness and personal attacks to respond to my message.

Response #2: Mark Doe decided to send me a personal email alerting me of the error. An act of kindness with one private message.

So how can one message cause two very different responses? Why do you think John Doe needed to “put me in my place” when he doesn’t even know me?

My belief is that some people need to put others down to feel good about themselves. Even in business, you will find those people who cannot forgive a minor mistake in hopes that they can use your misfortune to advance their own agenda.

Even though my first reaction was to respond back with bitterness, I decided to treat both men the same, I sent them both a personal email thanking them for bringing the error to my attention with a slight attempt to make light of the situation.

So the morale of the story is….. when somebody tries to knock you down for a mistake, kill them with kindness and move forward!