People make mistakes and failing is a part of life. But when failure happens at work, it’s sometimes hard to remember this. You’re consumed by the screw up and castigate yourself repeatedly internally. Don’t fall into this trap of mentally flogging yourself even when faced with a serious career failure.
Fail girl image from Shutterstock
Molly Moseley is the senior vice-president at LinkUp, an advertising recruitment agency, and has a wealth of experience giving advice to people who are deal with career troubles. She write in a LinkedIn blog post:
“When faced with career failure, the first step is to not let it become your identity. It’s true that most of us are our worst critic. It can be difficult to focus on anything else besides the negative, especially right when it happens. But failure is not who you really are, unless you let it be. Resist making it personal and try to focus instead on times of success.”
Moseley noted that it’s difficult to be objective fresh off a career embarrassment so avoid dealing with the mistake immediate. Revisiting it after a few days or weeks could give you a new perspective and make it easier to learn from the mistake.
“Put aside any feelings of anger, take stock and persevere. How can you ensure this mistake doesn’t happen again? How can you make a positive change in the future? There’s something to learn from every failure, and oftentimes a failure can be inspirational, if you allow it to be.”
[Via LinkedIn Pulse]
Comments
2 responses to “Don’t Let Your Career Failures Define You”
That’s all good and well. It becomes a lot more difficult when you have finally put it aside and know what to do for the next time, but then some of you fellow colleagues feel the need to jokingly remind you about ‘your mistake’ every time you do the exact same job without a hitch.
Now where is that article about office bullying again?
Ask LH: How Can I Deal With A Workplace Bully? – http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2014/05/ask-lh-how-can-i-deal-with-a-workplace-bully/