It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room. As high achievers, none of us wants to talk about failure. But how we handle failure is just as important to our careers as how we handle success. It reveals our character – our ability to adapt to the inevitable ebb and flow of life. Failure, handled well, holds invaluable lessons in resilience, empathy, and creativity, and can actually improve our trustworthiness and competence in the eyes of our customers and teammates.
Here are three healthy ways to reframe a current failure into a future success:
1) Realize Failing Does Not Make You a Failure
As high-achievers, failure is seemingly the worst label we can be tainted with. But failure is an unavoidable part of life. As a ‘doer’, and more so a ‘high achiever’, we will be met with failures (yes more than one) in any vocational path we venture down.
My middle school basketball coach taught us, “If you’re not drawing at least three fouls a game, you’re not playing aggressive enough.” You don’t want to foul-out, but you need to play aggressively if you’re going to win a basketball game.
Where we live, on the bleeding edge of technology, if we’re not failing some, we’re not trying enough new things.
Treat everything like an experiment.
So try new stuff. Treat everything like an experiment. It’s ok if it fails. It’s no reflection on you.
2) Own It Quickly
Even so, it still hurts to fail, especially coming to the realization that what you worked so hard at just isn’t going to work.
Be honest with yourself and others. Admit failures quickly when you make them. You want others, especially customers, to hear it from you first. Since this is hard to do for many (than say – blaming, deflecting or some other inappropriate response to failure), it will typically increase the level of respect others have for you. Most importantly, your integrity and inner peace will remain intact.
Allow yourself to grieve the loss of that idea. Grieving gives you healthy closure, and opens the door for the next thing. You don’t want the next idea to be saddled with baggage from the previous one.
So own it quickly, lick your wounds, and admit it hurts. Then pick yourself up, dust yourself off, re-calibrate, and move forward.
3) Learn Something
Do a “lessons learned” session. The US Army has a great template for this in their after-action reports. They ask these questions:
What went right?
What do we want to keep doing?
What went wrong?
What do we want to modify doing?
What do we want to stop doing?
What do we want to add?
The seeds of your future success are your failures today.
So try stuff. You can’t move on to what works until you’ve discovered what doesn’t. And you only discover what doesn’t work by trying stuff.
What About You?
What have you failed at, where you realized you had to cut your losses? How did you do that? Your story will help others; please tell us in the comments.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave is a software engineer specializing in software design, architecture, and protocol reverse engineering. Outside of work, he is a Christian non-fiction author at www.IdentityInWholeness.com.