Setbacks, rejection and failure

A bit of a shorter post this week on how to deal with setbacks, rejection and failure.  Firstly, this is an inevitable part of everyone’s career (and life).  If you never suffer from a setback, you probably aren’t pushing yourself in any meaningful way and you would have no reason to read a blog on corporate life and personal effectiveness.   Setbacks, rejection and failure can be either from situations that are controllable (i.e. if you had your chance again you could avoid them by choosing a different course of action), or they are uncontrollable (i.e. weather, traffic or simply a choice between two competing objectives).  We have limited hours in each day, and we need to prioritize what we focus on, how much effort we put in and what range of outcomes would bring us happiness, contentment and joy.  In this post I will argue that the easiest way to bounce-back from setbacks and rejection is when we are deliberate about making these choices.  Even if we choose not to be deliberate about those priorities and choices, we are also still making a choice that comes with a range of outcomes. 

This post is a continuation of some of the themes from my earlier posts (specifically: learning from failures and the need to debrief projects, managing stress, work-related stress, success and never too soon to show leadership).  Common themes emerge in these posts such as splitting out events between those that are controllable and uncontrollable, understanding your personal brand and values, debriefing when things don’t go the way you want them too and the lessons that can be learned, taking full responsibility and ownership for a task and using tools to effectively manage stressful situations to operate close to your peak effectiveness.  All of these are relevant when we consider how we respond to rejection and failure.

I argued in my post on success for a very narrow definition of what success and being successful meant to me.  My exact formulation was “I need to believe that I am good at something, and other people need to agree with me.”  I then went on to add “I believe [ success] to be less linked to specific achievements and events and more to our ability to develop the skillset to make those achievements routine or at least more likely to happen”.  In a similar vein, I have a very similar narrow definition of failure.  I consider it to be the gap between who you want to be and how you are seen by yourself and others.

If you were an artist and your art accurately reflected your vision and employed the materials and techniques you wanted to use, it shouldn’t really matter if there wasn’t a market or demand for your work.  You wouldn’t be commercially successful, but if that was never your priority then you can’t consider yourself a failure.  It’s the same with every other career choice.  My personal brand was to be the person who drives change and proactively helps others get things done at work.  If I am living this brand and I get a set-back or have a failure, I have the start point for how to respond.  Firstly, did I live up to my brand or did I get distracted and miss an opportunity.  If I was distracted, then I know my failure, can learn from it and ensure that I don’t put myself in that position again.  If the distraction was something in my personal life that was more important, then I can reconcile my failure as a conscious choice to fail in that specific situation and move on with my life.  If I was living up to my brand, gave my best and the results still went against me, there are a few decision-paths we can follow.  Was it truly my best effort?  Would a different result have been achieved if I put in another 1% of effort?  If I could have made more effort then, this may be classed as a failure.  If I have given my best effort and the results are too difficult to accept, I need to reconsider my brand and my priorities.  In this case I haven’t really failed, but I may reprioritize what I focus on such that if the same result happened a second time, I would consider it a failure.  Finally, if I am happy with my brand and my efforts and the results aren’t the ones I wanted, I will make piece with that situation and do my best to shrug it off.  I will not consider this a failure; I prioritized what I wanted to prioritize, and the outcome was the outcome.

I am incredibly lucky (as are most office workers) that my performance is reviewed internally and usually with a high degree of consideration from managers who know me well.  If you work in the gig economy or provide some sort of personalized service direct to the consumer, the performance reviews can be very different.  If you buy a service from someone and it doesn’t meet your expectations, you may consider leaving a public rating online and a detailed description of the issue.  The immediacy of this feedback can feel like a very public failure to the provider of the service.  However, for consistency, the same approach to failure should apply.  Did the service live up to its description at sale, was it priced appropriately and was it consistent with the brand of the service provider?  If it was, then it should not be considered a failure.  It is perfectly possible for a service to be the best expression of itself, whilst still not meeting a client’s needs.   If this happens frequently enough to have a commercial impact, it would be sensible to re-assess the services provided.  A one-off miss-match between provision and expectation probably needs to be ignored, as tailoring a service to everyone’s individual and specific desires is difficult if not impossible.  The old quotation from Harry Selfridge on customer satisfaction is usually abridged.  The full quotation is that “the customer is always right, in matters of taste”.  Which means if a customer wants to buy an ugly hat, then let them.  But it is still your choice whether you stock that ugly hat in the first place. 

As mentioned above, this post is pulling together some threads that I have been developing through previous posts.  What I wanted to do was give some definition of what failure is and how to address it.  What I purposely haven’t covered is how to emotionally recover from a setback, mainly because it is different for everyone, and I would not consider myself to be an expert.  If you want my technique, its usually deep introspection, strong self-criticism, all washed down with a glass of bourbon.

Next week’s blog is on a technique for time management.