Repair Over Perfection: What I Learned When I Said the Wrong Thing

By Admin • 05 Nov 2025

I was trying to help her understand her brain. Instead, I accidentally dismissed something she held sacred.

We were in a discovery meeting — the crucial first conversation where I learn about a new client’s needs so I can develop a plan to support them as their patient advocate. She kept mentioning how she’d always been told she was “gifted.” Multiple times in our conversation, she’d reference it: “I’ve always been gifted.” “They told me I was gifted.” “Being gifted has been part of how I understand myself.”

As a health communication scholar with 20 years of experience, I recognized a pattern I’d seen before. In the 80s and 90s, many neurodivergent individuals, myself included, were labeled “gifted” before we had better language for understanding how our brains worked. I’ve seen this a few times in my patient advocacy work — people carrying outdated labels that didn’t fully capture their neurodiversity.

So I felt I needed to say something. I tried to educate her. I explained how that language had evolved, how we understand neurodiversity differently now, and how “gifted” was often what people said when they didn’t know how else to describe neurodivergent thinking.

I thought I was helping. I thought I was offering her more accurate, empowering language.

What I was actually doing was centering my expertise over her lived experience. I was telling her that something central to her identity wasn’t quite right. I, however, unintentionally discredited her.

Her husband sent me an email later that day. She hadn’t asked him to, but she’d been hurt enough by our conversation that he felt compelled to reach out. The message was polite but clear: I’d made her feel invalidated.

In that moment, I had a choice. I could defend my good intentions. I could explain what I meant. I could point out that I was technically correct about the evolution of terminology.

Or I could do what I teach others to do: own the impact, regardless of my intent.

The Fear That Keeps Us Silent

I think about that moment from time to time, especially when I’m training leaders, mediators, or healthcare professionals in difficult conversations. Because here’s what I hear constantly: “I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing. What if I mess up? What if I offend someone? What if one wrong word destroys the relationship?”

This fear is so pervasive that it paralyzes people. They avoid difficult conversations entirely. Or they script everything so carefully that they lose all authenticity. Or they say nothing when something really needs to be said, letting problems fester because the risk of imperfection feels too great.

I truly understand this fear. I’ve spent decades studying communication, conflict, and how people navigate difficult dialogue. I’ve worked as a patient advocate helping families through medical crises. I’m a conflict mediator trained to facilitate high-stakes conversations. And I promise you, even I still say the wrong thing sometimes.

But here’s what I’ve learned through practice, through research, and through painful personal experience: The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is authentic repair.

Why Repair Matters More Than Perfection

There’s research that changed how I think about mistakes in relationships and communication. For example, John Gottman’s work on relationship dynamics shows that successful couples don’t avoid conflict—they repair effectively after it occurs. In fact, relationships that successfully repair after rupture often end up stronger than relationships that never rupture at all.

Why? Because perfection is impossible. You will say the wrong thing at some point. You will misread situations. You will center on your own perspective when you should have listened. You will trigger someone unintentionally. You will cause harm even though you never intended to.

The question isn’t whether you’ll make mistakes. The question is: What will you do when it happens?

The Three Qualities That Make Repair Possible

When I received that email from my client’s husband, I could feel my defensive instincts activate. My brain wanted to explain, to justify, to make sure they understood my good intentions. But I’ve learned — through my work and training- that effective repair requires three qualities.

These are the same three qualities I teach as the foundation for all difficult conversations: courage, curiosity, and compassion. But they show up differently in repair than they do in other contexts.

Courage: The Vulnerability to Own It

Courage in repair means being willing to say “I got that wrong” without immediately defending yourself, explaining your intentions, or minimizing the other person’s experience.

This is harder than it sounds. Our brains are wired to protect us from feeling like bad people. When someone tells us we’ve caused harm, our immediate instinct is often to explain why we’re not actually the kind of person who would do that. “But I didn’t mean…” “What I was trying to…” “You have to understand…”

All of those responses, however well-intentioned, focus on our discomfort over the other person’s hurt.

Courage means sitting with the discomfort of having caused harm, even unintentionally. It means prioritizing the relationship over our ego. It means being willing to be wrong, and it means being the person who messed up all without threatening our entire sense of self.

When I responded to my client’s husband, courage looked like this: “Thank you for speaking up and letting me know. While that was never my intention, I understand that my comment made her feel discredited. I am genuinely sorry.”

I didn’t try to justify my actions or overexplain. I simply owned my error and apologized.

That’s courage.

Curiosity: The Openness to Understand Impact

Curiosity in repair means being genuinely interested in understanding how your words or actions landed, even if — especially if — that’s different from how you intended them.

This is where the fundamental distinction between intent and impact becomes crucial. Most of us rarely intend to hurt people. We’re trying to help, educate, support, and resolve conflict. People’s intentions are usually good. But we must all realize, impact matters 100% more than intent.

I didn’t intend to dismiss my client’s identity. But I did. My good intentions don’t erase her experience of feeling invalidated. And curiosity means I need to understand her experience, not just defend mine.

During our next appointment, before we got into our meeting’s goal, I took a few minutes to apologize face-to-face and ask a few questions. Not defensive questions (“How could you think I meant that?”) but genuinely curious ones (“Help me understand what being called ‘gifted’ has meant to you. What did it feel like when I suggested that language might not be accurate?”).

Listening to her responses to these questions helped me learn that for her, “gifted” wasn’t just a label educators had used. It was how she’d made sense of feeling different her whole life. It was a word that had made her feel special rather than broken. It was wrapped up in her relationship with her parents, her self-concept, her understanding of her own mind.

When I’d tried to “correct” that language, I wasn’t offering her better terminology. I was, from her perspective, taking something away.

Taking the time to be curious allowed me to understand that. And understanding allowed me to repair more effectively.

Compassion: For Them and For Yourself

Compassion in repair has two directions: toward the person you’ve harmed and toward yourself.

Compassion for them means honoring their hurt without minimizing it, explaining it away, or rushing them to “get over it.” It means recognizing that they get to decide what hurt them, not you. It means making space for their experience to be valid even if it wasn’t what you intended.

When my client shared how my words had landed, compassion meant not defending myself or explaining all the neurodiversity research I was drawing from. It meant simply acknowledging: “That must have felt really dismissive. I can understand why that hurt.”

But compassion also needs to extend to yourself. As much as we might hate to admit it, we are all human. You will make mistakes. You’re learning and growing, and that process involves getting things wrong sometimes.

Self-compassion doesn’t mean letting yourself off the hook for the impact you’ve had. It means recognizing that you can be someone who caused harm AND someone who’s working to do better. Both can be true simultaneously.

I had to hold both truths: I hurt my client, AND I’m someone who genuinely cares about supporting people. The mistake didn’t make me a terrible advocate. It made me someone who had something to learn.

That compassionate both/and thinking is what allows us to stay in the conversation, to repair authentically, to commit to doing better — without collapsing into shame or defensiveness.

The Structure of Effective Repair

Through my work as a mediator, patient advocate, and communication trainer, I’ve developed a structure for repair that I teach to leaders, healthcare teams, and anyone navigating difficult conversations. It’s simple, but it’s not easy:

1. Own the Impact Without Defensiveness

Start by acknowledging what happened and its impact. No “but,” no “however,” no immediate explanation of what you meant. You need to own your part, “I made you feel discredited.” “What I said hurt you.” “My words had an impact I didn’t intend, and I’m genuinely sorry for that.”

Notice what’s NOT in these statements:

• “I’m sorry you felt that way” (puts the problem in their perception)
• “I didn’t mean to hurt you” (centers your intent over their impact)
• “I’m sorry, but what I meant was…” (the “but” erases the apology)

Just own it. Cleanly. Completely.

2. Don’t Over-Explain Your Intentions

This is where most repair attempts fail. We apologize, and then we immediately explain why we said what we said, what we really meant, and how they misunderstood.

All of that, however true it might be, centers OUR experience over theirs. It makes the repair about making us feel better rather than actually repairing the relationship.

In my conversation with my client, I eventually explained what I’d been trying to do — help her better understand her neurodiversity. But I made that a small part of the conversation, not the center of it. And I only offered it after I’d fully acknowledged the impact.

We need to remember that repair isn’t about making sure they understand you were a good person with good intentions. The repair is about honoring that they were hurt, and you want to do better.

3. Make a Clear Promise About Future Behavior

Repair requires commitment to change. Not vague promises (“I’ll try to be more careful”) but specific commitments about what you’ll do differently.

For me, that looked like: “Going forward, when you share something about how you understand yourself, I’m going to listen and ask questions rather than assuming I know better. Your lived experience is valuable and will be listened to.”

Specific. Behavioral. Something she could observe and hold me accountable for.

4. Actually Follow Through

This is where trust is built or broken. You can apologize beautifully and make compelling promises, but if nothing changes, the repair was just performance.

Following through means:

• Catching yourself before making the same mistake again
• Asking for feedback about whether your changed behavior is actually landing better
• Being open to continued conversation about this issue if needed
• Demonstrating through consistent action that you meant what you said

My client and I continued working together—and our relationship actually grew stronger after that rupture and repair. Why? Because I showed her, through my actions, that I could hear feedback, own my mistakes, and adjust my behavior. That created a pattern: when something I said landed wrong, she felt safe naming it, and I responded by repairing rather than defending.

We developed what I now think of as a repair agreement: “We can pause and talk more when wording is taken in different ways.” That agreement became part of the foundation of our working relationship.

That’s what effective repair creates: not a return to the status quo, but something better — a relationship with established patterns for navigating difficulty.

Intent Versus Impact: The Distinction That Changes Everything

Let me be direct about something I see constantly in my mediation practice, my patient advocacy work, and my training with leaders: We spend far too much time defending our intentions and far too little time owning our impact.

“I didn’t mean it that way.” “That’s not what I intended.” “You’re misunderstanding what I was trying to say.”

All of these statements might be true. Your intentions might have been good. Pure, even. But here’s the hard truth: The impact of your words matters infinitely more than the intent behind them.

Think about it in physical terms. If I accidentally step on your foot, my lack of intention to hurt you doesn’t make your foot hurt less. You’re in pain regardless of whether I meant to cause it. And if my response to your pain is “But I didn’t mean to step on your foot!” instead of “I’m so sorry — are you okay?” — I’m making the situation worse.

The same dynamic applies to communication. Your words had an impact. Whether you intended that impact or not doesn’t change the fact that it happened. And the person who experienced the impact gets to name what they experienced.

This doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean you did something unforgivable. It means you’re human, and human communication is complex and imperfect.

What separates effective communicators from ineffective ones isn’t the ability to never cause unintended harm. It’s the willingness to own the harm when it happens and commit to doing better.

The Pause That Saves Everything

Here’s something I wish I’d understood earlier in my career: Most communication damage happens not in the first moment, but in what we do immediately after we realize something’s gone wrong.

When my client told me I’d made her feel discredited, I had a choice in that split second. I could:

• Get defensive and explain what I really meant
• Minimize her hurt (“Oh, you’re being too sensitive”)
• Dismiss her perspective (“But I’m technically right about the terminology”)
• Shut down the conversation (“Let’s just move on”)

Or I could pause. Breathe. Feel my defensive instincts activate and choose not to follow them.

That pause — that moment between stimulus and response — is where repair becomes possible.

I think about this constantly when I’m teaching leaders how to navigate difficult conversations. So many conflicts escalate because we react from our amygdala rather than our prefrontal cortex. When someone gives us feedback, we feel threatened and immediately defend ourselves without thinking.

But if we can create even a tiny pause — a breath, a moment to notice our own reactivity — we make space for a different response.

In mediation, I constantly watch for this. When someone’s been hurt or challenged, their nervous system goes into protection mode. If I try to move forward in that moment, nothing productive will come of it. But if I can help them pause, breathe, and regulate enough to access their thinking brain again, repair becomes possible.

The same principle applies when WE’RE the ones who’ve caused harm. Pause. Notice your defensive instincts. Breathe. Then choose your response consciously rather than reacting automatically.

That pause is the difference between escalating damage and beginning repair.

What Repair Looks Like Across Contexts

The structure I’ve described — own it, don’t over-explain, make a clear promise, follow through — applies whether you’re a mediator, a manager giving performance feedback, a healthcare provider, a family member, or anyone navigating difficult conversations.

In my mediation practice, I use these principles when I misread someone’s needs or accidentally trigger a trauma response. I might say: “I pushed too hard there. That wasn’t helpful. Going forward, I’ll check in with you before we move to difficult topics.”

In training managers on performance conversations, I teach this framework for when feedback lands poorly: “I can see that didn’t come across the way I intended. Help me understand how you’re hearing it, so I can communicate more effectively.”

In my patient advocacy work, when families are navigating medical decisions, I emphasize: Words have consequences. Every communication either builds trust or erodes it. When we get it wrong, we repair it immediately rather than hoping people forget.

The contexts differ, but the principle remains: Repair is how trust is built and maintained. Not through perfection, but through authentic acknowledgment when we fall short.

The Gift of Rupture

Here’s something else that feels paradoxical that I’ve learned over the years: Relationships that successfully repair after rupture often end up stronger than relationships that never rupture at all.

Why? Because repair demonstrates something perfection never can: You’re safe with me even when things go wrong. I can handle your feedback. I won’t abandon you or punish you for telling me I’ve hurt you. I’m committed to this relationship enough to sit with discomfort and do better.

That’s enormously powerful.

My client and I developed a stronger working relationship after that repair than we might have had if I’d never made the mistake. Because now she knew: If I mess up, I’ll own it. If she gives me feedback, I’ll listen. We can navigate difficulty together.

That’s what repair creates. Not a return to innocence or pretending nothing happened, but a demonstrated pattern: We can handle hard things together.

I see this in mediation frequently. The parties who find sustainable resolution aren’t the ones who never have conflict — they’re the ones who learn to repair when conflict happens. They develop agreements about how to address future disagreements. They build trust through navigating difficulty, not through avoiding it.

The same is true in any relationship where difficult conversations matter. The goal isn’t to never cause harm. The goal is to repair effectively when you inevitably do.

Repair as Leadership

If you’re in any kind of leadership role — formal or informal — your ability to repair well might be the most important skill you develop.

Leaders who can’t admit mistakes create cultures where no one can admit mistakes. Everyone spends energy covering up rather than learning from errors. Problems compound. Trust erodes. Innovation dies because people are too afraid of being wrong.

Leaders who repair authentically create cultures where repair is normal. Mistakes become learning opportunities. Feedback becomes useful rather than threatening. People can focus energy on solving problems rather than protecting their egos.

I think about this when I’m training department chairs, healthcare administrators, and mediation center directors. The question I ask: What happens in your organization when someone realizes they’ve made a mistake or caused unintended harm?

If the answer is defensiveness, blame-shifting, or cover-ups, that’s a culture problem. And it starts with leadership’s willingness to model repair.

When leaders own their mistakes without over-explaining, listen to feedback without getting defensive, make clear commitments to change, and actually follow through — they give everyone else permission to do the same.

That’s how organizational cultures shift from perfection (impossible and anxiety-producing) to repair (possible and growth-oriented).

Learning the Skill

Here’s what I want you to hear: Repair is a skill you can learn. It’s not a personality trait you either have or don’t have. It’s not something that comes naturally to some people and is impossible to others.

It’s a skill. Which means it can be practiced, developed, and improved over time.

I’ve taught this framework to healthcare providers, managers, family caregivers, university faculty — people from every background and communication style you can imagine. And I consistently see the same thing: When people learn the structure and practice it, they get better at repair.

The first few times feel awkward. You might over-explain despite trying not to. You might get defensive even though you’re trying to stay open. That’s normal. That’s part of learning. With practice, however, repair becomes more natural. You catch yourself earlier in the defensive spiral. You notice when you’re centering your intent over their impact. You develop muscle memory for owning mistakes cleanly.

And gradually, you build relationships and environments where difficulty can be navigated, where feedback is welcomed rather than feared, where mistakes become opportunities for deepening connection rather than ending it.

That’s what I help people develop through my work at Compassionate Navigation. Not perfection — no one achieves that. But the capacity to repair authentically, to navigate difficult conversations with courage and curiosity and compassion, to build trust through demonstrated commitment to doing better when we fall short.

What conversations are you avoiding because you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing? Where in your life or work could repair skills make a difference? I’d love to hear your experiences with repair — what’s worked, what’s been hard, what you’re still figuring out.

About the Author

Malynnda Stewart is a leading expert on regulated difficult conversations — integrating trauma-informed mediation, neuroscience-based feedback delivery, and health communication to help professionals navigate high-stakes dialogue across contexts. With 20 years of teaching communication, board certification as a patient advocate, and a conflict mediator, she helps people develop the skills to repair authentically when conversations go wrong. Her work is grounded in the principles of courage, curiosity, and compassion.

Through Compassionate Navigation LLC, Malynnda works with organizations, individuals, and families who want to transform how they handle difficult conversations — not by avoiding mistakes, but by building capacity for authentic repair. Her Regulated Conversation Framework and BRIDGE Feedback Method provide practical, research-backed tools for working with human biology during high-stakes dialogue.

Connect with Malynnda on LinkedIn or learn more at compassionatenavigation.com.

Further Reading

My Related Work:

• Your Employees Aren’t Difficult. Their Nervous Systems Are Protecting Them
• The Day I Realized Neutrality Wasn’t Enough: A Mediator’s Journey to Trauma-Informed Practice
• 5 Signs of Nervous System Dysregulation Every Mediator Needs to Recognize

On Repair and Relationships:

• The Dance of Connection by Harriet Lerner
• Daring Greatly by Brené Brown
• The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman

#Communication #Repair #Leadership #Mediation #DifficultConversations #ConflictResolution #EmotionalIntelligence #ProfessionalDevelopment