Anxiety with mistakes at work

In my bank in Sweden we have a saying that goes:

”Det som sker det sker”. Which basically means, what happens, happens. The underlying meaning is that, whatever has happened - there’s nothing other to do than to move on.

It’s a terrible feeling and it in some way or another happens to most analysts (though varying degrees of mistakes for sure.) I understand your anxiety about making another mistake but you gotta let it go in order to improve. Your anxiety is going to give you tunnel vision the next time you are running through a check of the model. You’ll be so worried about not having any typos (being perfect) that you won’t catch any obvious mistakes that you would have otherwise caught. The amount you care is a good thing but you need to channel it properly.

I made a similar mistake a few months ago and had that same crippling anxiety feeling. In about 2 weeks you will realize how short term people’s memories are.

Additionally, you just unlocked a whole knew technical / quality control skillset in a very quick amount of time.

Eat the loss, turn it into an advantage and remember that at the end of the day no one actually cares.

Totally okay to make mistakes like this and frankly, it's your associate's job to catch these errors as being deep in the weeds on a model often times leads to errors given how myopic your lens becomes. That being said, the cardinal sin is making the same mistake twice - that is what you need to make sure you don't do as that'll peg you as someone who isn't teachable. Don't be afraid to ask for a second set of eyes from another analyst or your associate before sending out deliverables either as it can often help catch simple errors you may have overlooked. And most importantly, don't beat yourself up about mistakes as you'll spiral into a state of paranoia that'll further worsen your work quality. Remain confident and request frequent feedback from your peers prior to distributing widely. 

Let me put it this way. If I’m given a few hours to go through materials of an already closed transaction, there’s a 99% chance that I’ll find a mistake. The volume of work is just too high and things often get overlooked, despite the amount of time spent reviewing by the deal time. The reality is that mistakes happen, some are immaterial, some are not. The latter are easier to spot as they tend to have a greater impact on the output.

I’ll caveat this by saying, that repeatedly making the same mistakes is unacceptable, but materials are NEVER error free. Don’t beat yourself too much over this. Try to have checks throughout. Then take a step back and ask yourself whether outputs make sense and go from there. This will help you clean up 80% of material issues in early drafts.