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While many of us realize how failure can affect our careers, few understand how setbacks affect us.
Backfires happen at work every day. Sometimes they are small and mildly annoying, and sometimes they are large and deeply disappointing. The word “knockout” can mean a physical blow that causes the person on the receiving end to fall backwards. Or it can mean a metaphorical blow – something that delays or halts one’s personal or professional progress. At work, the blows are more likely to be metaphorical than physical, but they still hurt. By managing our response to the disappointment of a knockout, we can reduce the negative effects and can recover through increased self-confidence.
Here’s a guide to how failures impact our careers, and how you can use them to increase your confidence at work.
The relationship between knockouts and confidence
Maybe you can remember the initial feelings you experienced in the wake of the setback. You may have thought about it for a while, wondering how you let it happen, and blaming yourself. This is an understandable reaction and shows a high degree of commitment to your work. But it’s also a backfire because constantly questioning ourselves can have long-term negative effects on our confidence levels and our success.
Let’s take a moment to explore how trauma can affect our confidence so we can begin to understand how we can change our responses to trauma and use a disappointing experience to actually boost our confidence.
When things don’t go well at work, we may feel disappointed, embarrassed, and frustrated. These feelings are normal and natural, and often pass within hours. But when we berate and punish ourselves in response to disappointment, we can fall into a downward cycle. When we kick ourselves emotionally, we turn undoing something disappointing that happened into a painful decline in our self-worth. “I worked hard to put the deal together, but it didn’t happen” becomes “I really messed it up, and I should have anticipated all their objections.” This can become “I’m not commercial enough” and even “I’m a failure.” What started as a knockout turns into an unhealthy feeling of self-doubt.
Retraction is unavoidable, but allowing response to undermine our confidence is entirely optional. It is possible to avoid self-punishment. In fact, instead of focusing on minimizing self-criticism, we can choose to use the jab as fuel to boost our confidence.
Here are two steps that allow us to turn a self-doubt-inducing decline into an experience that fuels our self-confidence.
Step 1: Put the knockout in perspective
The first step is to stop escalating the undoing of something disappointing that happened to something more important. To do this, we have to put what happened in perspective. Here are some ways to achieve this:
Normalization of knockouts
We all have disappointments. Decisions don’t always go our way, projects get rejected, and promotions get denied. Rejection isn’t fun, but it’s part of being human, so there’s no need to look for the specific personal deficit that caused this thing to happen to you. It’s happened, and now you have a choice about how to respond.
Fact separated from fiction
We often weave stories around failures and magnify their importance in our minds. To address this problem, try writing down everything that’s going on in your head and then separating facts from fiction. What exactly happened? What exactly was said? These are facts. Anything that is a prediction of the future, such as those pessimistic stories you might tell yourself about what will happen as a result of a setback, is likely fantasy. None of us have a crystal ball, nor do we have the ability to read minds. If you find yourself imagining what others think of you now, that’s a fantasy too. You can’t know what’s on another person’s mind unless they tell you.
Look at the gray areas
Most situations are neither entirely good nor entirely bad. A simple way to keep a knockout in perspective is to look for gray areas. For example, maybe your project proposal wasn’t approved, but you can learn more about what’s important to the executive team. Or maybe you didn’t get the new role you went for, but you received some encouraging feedback from the hiring manager.
Think about the future
Try to imagine the future. Look at the knockout from the perspective of a week, a month, or a year in the future. How important is it from there? This kind of mental “time travel” offers a way to see regression for what it is: a difficult episode in a much longer story, not a moment that defines who you are or what you are capable of.
Step 2: Use reverse kicks as a catalyst for forward momentum
The second step to having a healthier relationship with setbacks is to focus on progress and growth. This mindset is about creating movement, trying again, and learning how to bounce back.
It keeps moving forward
In the face of decline, it may be tempting to retreat. However, a decline will only reduce confidence further. Going forward and taking action shows ourselves what we are capable of. Maybe something didn’t work last time, but that doesn’t stop you from trying again. Learn from that first attempt, and parlay those lessons into your next effort.
Give yourself credit
When we face a knockout blow, we tend to focus on what went wrong, not what we did in response. Was it a knockout? Yes. Did you deal? Yes. Give yourself credit for what you did next: how you handled the disappointment of senior stakeholders, how you acted on harsh feedback, and how you found the motivation to try again.
Recovery
Everyone has ups and downs in their confidence. Sometimes, bad moments can spark our confidence to grow. Sometimes, you may surprise yourself with your ability to find your way through difficult situations. Things don’t always go as expected, but you keep moving forward, you find another way. If you use this as a catalyst to reset your sense of self, you can expand your understanding of what you are capable of and fuel your self-confidence with the idea that if I can get through this, I can get through anything. If you do this, taking a step back can boost your self-confidence and you can build a greater level of confidence in yourself.
These two steps can help change our experience when things don’t go well at work. Knockouts are inevitable. No matter how hard we try, no matter how brilliant we are, we will face setbacks. The situation itself does not need our introduction. For example, not getting a promotion does not mean that we suddenly become less able to do our current job, nor does a deal fail to mean that we suddenly lose our business edge. What sets us apart is our response to setbacks. Take a hard look at what actually happened, put the decline in perspective, and then use the experience to propel yourself forward with an increased level of belief in yourself.
Julie Smith is a sought-after driving instructor and book authorTrain yourself to trust: Get rid of the tax of self-doubt, and unleash humble confidence(Practical Inspiration Publications, February 20, 2024) and founder of Talent Sprout, a leadership consulting firm.
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