Who likes participating in some sort of retrospective meeting in which they are pressed to explain why they broke something?
I have had my share of mishaps throughout my I.T. career. Things that I still think about occasionally which I wish I could go back and prevent, but I cannot of course so I have had to handle them by other means. Here are some quick points gathered from experience.
Move on. Sounds easy but I have found that as time separates me from a bad instance, it helps. Not completely resolves it, but it helps. Even the following day could be a 180 in which I will go from klutz to I.T. Superman. If your career can be depicted as a line graph always completely moving upward, never downward, I would love to hear from you.
Note what happened to prevent it from happening again. Even better if you can identify an underlying cause that will not prevent not only a specific instance but potential, related instances. One of my drum teachers used to tell me, paraphrased, “How do you know that you learn from your mistakes? You don’t do them again.” I need to learn from my mistakes, not just hope to learn from someone else’s. In the case of software deployment, if an issue can be prevented from something simple as testing more before rolling out to users, then get all over that immediately. Do you want to end up in a second retrospective explaining to management a new issue which has the same cause as the first time around?
What kind of mistake was it? Was it a technical issue? A personal issue? If it is a personal issue, such as poor communication skills, then it is not an I.T. issue, and it will not matter in this case if you attend I.T. conferences or participate in technical courses. Regarding poor communication, that is an underlying cause in which if you tackle that then you are not only handling a work issue but an everyday life issue. That should encourage you to be handling multiple birds with one stone.
Your teammates are not perfect, either. I am not saying this to be at odds with teammates. If you do have an inferior attitude, it could show and look like you are selling yourself short when in actuality you can have a lot to offer.