How To Bounce Back Stronger After You Blow It At Work
Three
strategies to manage disappointment when it shows up. Because, for better or
for worse, it will.
Whether you blew your big
presentation, failed to land the account that you had “in the bag,” or got
passed over for a promotion, you know what disappointment feels like. It
sucks--it sucks our energy, our confidence, and our dreams. Disappointment
itself has many cousins in the family of negative emotions (anger, fear,
sadness) but it also has a unique formula, as highlighted by author Chip Conley
is his New York Times best-selling book, Emotional Equations:
disappointment equals expectations, minus reality.
In other words, disappointment shows
up in the gap between what we planned or hoped for and what we actually got.
Sometimes that gap is a small fissure, easy to manage and simple to bridge.
Other times, that gap is a giant chasm, and it can feel nearly impossible to
pull ourselves out. What’s distinctively difficult about disappointment is that
we grieve for the loss we feel today while we have to reconcile that our plans
for a particular future that we had envisioned are lost as well.
We all deal with disappointments of
all shapes and sizes in both our professional and personal lives on a regular
basis: like the “sure thing” client (expectation) who went with another firm
(reality); like the book proposal that we labored over (expectation) that got
rejected by seven publishers (reality), and like the love of our life
(expectation) who decided to love someone else (reality…AND reality TV, sadly).
But we don’t just have our own disappointments to deal with: We have those of
our colleagues, clients, bosses, family, and friends to consider. And the way
in which we handle (or don’t handle) our disappointments can expand or limit
the ways in which we support others in dealing with theirs.
Here are three strategies to manage
disappointment when it shows up, because, for better or for worse, it will:
Recognize that there’s no correct
way or time to manage disappointment.
You may want to find the bright side (“So what? Losing this client means we
have time to pursue other, more exciting clients!”) while your boss or
colleague chooses to sit with the darkness or fear for a while (“Losing this
client looks bad for us. We’ve got to figure out how to spin this before it
becomes a PR disaster”). Don’t feel compelled to pull someone out of their
misery prematurely or to ask someone to tone down their Pollyanna approach that
rubs you the wrong way. As positive as I tend to be, I have a strong, negative
reaction to people who need for me to see the bright side before I’m ready to.
Just take some space and give some space, and don’t force someone to see your
perspective immediately.
Assume that you have something to
learn from this setback. When I
lost my big client, I realized that I had minimized the importance of creating
a long-term business pipeline in order to maximize short-term profits. Yes, I
was busy making hay while the sun shined, but I hadn’t planted the seeds for
the following harvest. Now, I am constantly doing business development while I
do income-generating work because that disappointment taught me a terrible and
terrific lesson that I don’t want to have to repeat. Your disappointment might
highlight some shortcoming in your business strategy, an inflated setup in
expectations, a mistake in your assumptions, an error in judgment, or even a
character flaw in yourself. Don’t waste the pain. Force it to yield you
valuable personal and professional rewards.
Don’t shrink your goals to avoid
future disappointment. The anger,
sadness, and embarrassment that can result from a setback can be a huge
deterrent to putting yourself back out there, professionally and personally, to
do what you were meant to do and be who you were meant to be. Do you set an
undersized goal for your annual sales so that you are all but guaranteed to
achieve it? When your superstar staff member quit to take a bigger job
elsewhere, did you replace her with someone less fabulous as a (hopeful)
retention tool? Are you hanging on to a book proposal that you won’t share with
agents for fear of rejection? When we set a low bar for ourselves as a way to feel
safe and even victorious when we achieve those small objectives, we deprive
ourselves, our companies, and the world of our excellence and brilliance. Now
that’s the real disappointment.
Author Marianne Williamson wrote,
“Your playing small does not serve the world.” The big pain of disappointment
can lead to even bigger outcomes and opportunities if we’re willing to be
patient with the process, do the hard work to learn critical lessons, and, yes,
put ourselves out there again. And again.
--Deborah Grayson Riegel is a
communication and behavior expert
http://www.fastcompany.com/3006749/how-bounce-back-stronger-after-you-blow-it-work
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