Would you erase the worst day of your life – or relive your best?

This was a question posed to Ellen Widdup this week by her 10-year-old son. Here, she considers her answer, the butterfly effect that has shaped some of the biggest moments in her life and why, in business and communications, what happens next can matter far more than what went wrong in the first place.

If you were given a choice, which would you take?

You can go back and erase the worst day of your life, as though it never happened. Or you can relive the best day, exactly as it was.

It’s one of those questions that sounds like a bit of fun until you actually start thinking about it.

Because I’d love to relive some of my best days.

I’d go back to my first date with my partner, Adam. We ate sushi and, in a move that probably isn’t recommended in any sensible dating handbook, got matching tattoos.

Thankfully, it worked out.

I’d happily revisit holidays, adventures and those brilliant days with the people I love when everyone is happy and, for a few hours at least, life feels exactly as it should.

But erase my worst day? That’s much more complicated.

One of the worst periods of my life was the breakdown of my marriage.

At the time, I certainly wasn’t sitting there contemplating the exciting possibilities this might create for my future.

It was painful, frightening and completely destabilising.

If you’d offered me a button that could make it all disappear, I’m fairly sure I’d have pressed it.

But if I erased that period of my life, what else would disappear with it?

Because it was out of that upheaval that Satsuma was born.

I had three children and needed to build a working life around them rather than continually trying to squeeze them around a job.

So I created a business that worked differently.

That decision led to clients, colleagues, friendships, opportunities, mistakes, successes and probably thousands of other tiny moments that simply wouldn’t exist if that first domino hadn’t fallen.

Another of my worst experiences was watching one of my children become so overwhelmed by anxiety and OCD that they ended up in hospital.

There is absolutely nothing about that experience I would choose to repeat.

But erase it? No. Because even that changed things.

It forced me to learn. To understand anxiety differently. To develop coping strategies. To recognise warning signs earlier. To become better equipped for difficult moments in the future.

It didn’t make what happened good.

That’s an important distinction.

Sometimes we have an irritating tendency to rewrite painful experiences once we’ve survived them – everything happens for a reason, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, every cloud has a silver lining.

I’m not convinced.

Some things are simply awful. But awful things can still change what happens next. And that’s the butterfly effect.

The idea is that one small change in a complex system can ultimately lead to a completely different outcome.

Change one thing and you don’t just change that moment. You change what comes after it – and potentially everything that comes after that.

Which is fascinating when you think about communications and reputation.

Because businesses often treat individual moments as exactly that – individual moments.

One bad review. One badly worded email. One complaint handled brilliantly. One employee speaking up. One journalist deciding to make a phone call. One LinkedIn post that unexpectedly takes off. One customer telling a friend about the extraordinary way they were treated when something went wrong.

Individually, they can seem insignificant.

But reputations aren’t created by one enormous PR campaign.

They’re created by thousands of moments colliding. And you rarely know which one is going to matter.

A complaint that feels like a nuisance on Tuesday morning could become the reason you change a process that improves the experience of thousands of customers.

A crisis could expose a weakness in your organisation that you subsequently fix.

A mistake handled with honesty could create more trust than never making the mistake in the first place.
Equally, a small problem ignored because “it isn’t a big deal” can travel in the opposite direction.

That’s why good communications isn’t really about controlling the story.

You can’t.

Life, business and people are far too unpredictable for that.

It’s about understanding that what you do next matters.

When something goes wrong, there is always a temptation to focus on undoing it.

Can we get the article taken down? Can we make the complaint disappear? Can we stop people talking about it?

Can we somehow get back to where we were yesterday?

But yesterday has gone.

The more useful question is – what happens because of this?

What do we say? What do we change? What do we learn? How do we behave? And what chain of events do those decisions set in motion?

It’s one of the reasons I’m fascinated by crisis communications.

We tend to think of reputation as something built through the big stuff – press coverage, campaigns, awards, launches and carefully crafted statements.

In reality, it’s much more chaotic than that.

It’s how you behave when the going gets tough.

But it’s also a journalist remembering that you were helpful six months ago. An employee telling someone they love working for you. A customer remembering that when something went badly wrong, you called them rather than hiding behind an email.

It’s hundreds of tiny butterflies flapping their wings.

Looking back, I can draw fairly neat lines between some of the worst things that have happened to me and some of the best things in my life today.

But that’s only because I have the benefit of hindsight.

At the time, there were no neat lines.

And perhaps that’s the lesson for businesses too.

You won’t always know which moments will define you. You won’t know which setback will force a change that ultimately makes you better. And you won’t know which tiny interaction someone will remember years later.

So would I erase the worst day of my life?

No.

Not because I’m grateful it happened. But because I have absolutely no idea what else I’d erase with it.

So, given the choice, I’d relive my best day instead.

I’d take the sushi and the matching tattoos.

Because the strange thing is, that best day only happened because some of the worst ones did too.

And I rather like where the butterflies eventually landed.