One problem that many of us face is that we have not been adequately prepared to deal with things that go wrong. Our education system focuses primarily on rewarding students for getting correct answers—not for fixing mistakes. In addition, we’ve increasingly chosen to reward people for participation in events rather than success, which means that we do not get much practice with adversity.
Yet, things are quite likely to go wrong at work. Sometimes bad outcomes reflect your own mistakes. But other times you’ve done everything you could correctly, and you still don’t achieve the outcome you desired.
If you find yourself struggling after setbacks, here are a few things you can do to improve your ability to come back stronger.
Play the long game
The biggest difficulty people have overcoming problems is that they give too much weight to what is happening right now. You feel great in the moment when you have a success, and you feel lousy when something goes wrong. It’s important to pay attention to what is happening in the moment, but career success is a long-term effort. You have to learn to pay less attention to what is happening in the moment and more attention to trends.
When you make a mistake, spend less time thinking about the error itself and more time thinking about the implications of your action. You’re prone to focus on how to minimize the damage of an error to you in the moment, and might want to avoid letting anyone know you made a mistake. That may give you a brief reprieve, but if the error has any long-term consequences, those can multiply if you don’t address problems immediately.
Instead, minimize the long-term consequences of a mistake as soon as you recognize that it has happened. Take responsibility and repair relationships or any damage caused by the error. That attitude will demonstrate to everyone that you are focused on long-term success. The paradox of this approach is that you may think it damages your reputation to admit a mistake, but it may actually increase people’s confidence in you, because they know you will be proactive about fixing problems.
Track progress
Because you tend to focus on the recent past, a mistake or bad outcome can be demoralizing. You are better off focusing on your trajectory than on what has happened most recently. Unfortunately, we all live in a limited window of “now,” and so you may have difficulty really remembering how much you have improved and what you have accomplished over a longer time frame.
As a result, it’s valuable to keep records of your career path. Hold onto your job descriptions or annual reports so that you can look specifically at what you were doing in previous years. When you are feeling down about a run of bad luck or a critical mistake, look back at where you were a few years ago. Reflect on your accomplishments and achievements. Recognize that you are generally on a good path, even if you’re currently in a slump.
Sleep on it
Most of us don’t have work lives that mirror what athletes go through. A quarterback, goaltender, or pitcher who makes a mistake must get right back into the game and continue. They have to shake off problems immediately.
The rest of us can take advantage of the benefits of time (and particularly sleep) on emotions. When you get some bad news at work, spend a few minutes to determine whether there is anything urgent that needs to be done. Often, there is not. In that case, put the bad news aside for at least a day. Then, let the benefits of sleep do their work. When you sleep, the emotional reaction to a situation is separated from the content of a memory. As a result, when you return to thinking about a situation after getting some sleep, your emotional reaction to it will be dampened. That can make it easier to form a plan to move forward in the days after receiving bad news than it was immediately after hearing it.
Adjust your expectations
If you repeatedly fail to achieve a desired outcome, then your resilience strategy also needs to include a change in your actions. After all, the world appears to be telling you that if you persist in doing the same things, you will continue to fail.
There are many ways to adjust what you’re doing. Perhaps you need some coaching or education to deal with complex situations. If you’re pursuing projects or promotions that you fail to get, you might need to shoot for something less ambitious.
Work with a colleague, coach, or other expert to help you determine what is going wrong. Work with that individual to determine a better course of action moving forward. After all, exhibiting grit does not mean banging your head against the same wall repeatedly. It means having the courage to continue trying new approaches to achieve important goals.
