No matter how good you are at your job, there will always be times when things don't go to plan or you are let down. Rather than simply blaming yourself or others, being resilient helps you to better analyse these kinds of situations, plan for the future, and then execute your plan.
Often when we experience rejection or frustration at work, we create for ourselves a negative story or memory of the events that can hamper our ability to move past it and get back on track. Here our my tips on how to turn a feeling of failure into success:
Keep things in perspective:
Don't be too general or negative in your assessment of yourself. Delivering one poor presentation doesn't mean you'll never deliver a successful one.
There are normally positives to take from even the worst experiences, so use these as the basis for your next attempt at achieving what you were hoping for.
Be SMART:
Look back at what you were aiming to achieve – were each of your goals "SMART"? In order to be SMART, your goal needs to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
If your goal didn't fulfil all of these criteria, then that could well be the reason that it didn't work out. Redefine your goals and try again.
Focus on process:
Very often, though you haven't got the result you were looking for, you can look at the process that you followed and take heart from all the things you did right.
If you can see where things have gone wrong, even better because you'll understand what you need to do right the next time.
Look to the future:
Learn from what has gone wrong, rather than being consumed by it.
It can be difficult, but try to find the value in failure. What did these difficulties help you realise about your current role or situation? What can you learn from what has happened, and how can you use this new knowledge to help, and other in your organisation?
Perhaps the most important thing to remember is to define success for yourself. Working towards a definition of success that you don't believe in will negatively affect your motivation and satisfaction around the task. Defining your own key success indicators can also help you contextualise difficult times - it might be that when you consider things on your own terms there are a number of ways in which you actually succeeded.
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