‘We learn from failure, not from success.’ Bram Stoker

There are times in our working lives when we all feel a little bit lost. A project goes wrong, we feel we’re losing the class or a job ends badly. When we are going through this we feel pain, frustration or disappointment. This creates a sense that we have failed in some way. We sense we made poor decisions and ask ourselves, if I’d acted differently might things have played out better?   

Here are some of the signs that not all is well:
– I’m having little impact at work
– I’m not sleeping well
– Making simple decisions is like wading through deep water
– I spend more time worrying what others think than doing the work
– The time I’m spending on work and with my family isn’t in balance

We may not be clear how things have gone awry, but we can definitely tell when things aren’t right. We doubt ourselves, and we doubt we have what it takes to put things right. I’ve experienced this more than once – I’d get into a fix and then realise I had no strategy for getting out of it. It’s good to have a plan for when things begin to go wrong, because at some point this will happen for all of us.

So, when things go wrong, here are ten ways to help get them back on track:

1/Take responsibility
First stop doing what you’ve been doing. Then take responsibility for things going wrong. This isn’t about allocating blame, but it does mean admitting to yourself that you’re unhappy about where things are, and that you’re the one responsible for putting things right. When I’ve experienced disappointment and failure at work, friends have helpfully pointed out people who let me down. While I could have wallowed in this sense of injustice, I quickly realised that this was not going to help. The only person who could change the future was me.

‘Be careful, because making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility and this take more effort and care than living in pain and remaining resentful.’ Jordan Peterson

2/Find a mentor
Choose a trusted colleague who will tell you the truth and can offer a new perspective, and help you gather feedback about what isn’t working. This person will be key, so choose wisely. Think who in your network. How might your mentor help?

– They can help by providing reassurance around making tough decisions you have to make.
– They can help by putting the right checks in place so this situation doesn’t happen again.
– They can help by checking that you are measuring your processes as well as your outcomes. For example, if you are responsible for professional development, then are you measuring the engagement of the team as well as the numbers attending your CPD? And if you’re responsible for special needs, are you thinking about how you develop your team of TAs, as well as how your children are performing.
–They can help by assessing the new plan objectively and check your confirmation bias. They can stop you filtering out the disconfirming evidence, the information that contradicts your usual views. In other words, they can help with your blind spots, which may have got you in the mess you’re in.
–They can help by modelling what to do. Sometimes feedback isn’t enough. Often, we need a trusted colleague to break down the first two or three things that need to happen first and then show or model this for us. We need action, not rumination. They could help us streamline a process, (a behaviour system or spreadsheet) or to simplify (help me delegate or manage my budget) or to model (to step into the chair for a meeting). We are strangely awkward about asking for this kind of help, yet it should be the most obvious thing in the world. How about: ‘You find this process easier than me, so can you help show me how to do it better?’

‘Ask for help not because you’re weak, but because you want to remain strong’. Les Brown

3/Make a plan
Once you’ve accepted the situation, and you have a mentor alongside you, the next stage is seizing back control. Draw up a plan which outlines just two or three key things which need to change, and the steps you need to prevent you from becoming overwhelmed.

Part of the plan might be a list of your go-to people to work with on this, or a checklist for mitigating failure, or a set of routines and habits to apply during the week. Perhaps one of the reasons a problem emerged because you were not committing enough time in meetings to reflect on whether things were working. So, calendar this more specifically. Another idea is to conduct pre-mortems together with your team (where you visualise what could go wrong, before it does). This kind of future thinking and preparation will help you build more faith in yourself. Effective planning helps you write your way out of difficulty.

4/ Don’t freeze – decide
Successful leaders fear inaction more than action. While they know that their actions have no guarantee of success, they realise that making a start, taking any decision is better than becoming frozen into submission. They choose not to be paralysed by uncertainty. Putting off a decision because of unknowns is shortsighted. Procrastination falls between a good decision and a bad decision, and means we live in the void, with the illusion is that this is comfortable. Few decisions are final. Even if you make the wrong decision, you can almost always correct it. Deep down, we need to know that our future does not rest on one faulty decision.

One of the most difficult decisions in life is knowing when to persevere with a project, and when to give up. We know that our most successful ventures in life often come about by sticking through difficulty. But we also know that sometimes the best thing to do is to stop. I’m now much better at knowing when sunk-cost fallacy is kicking in, because too many times I’ve been too slow, too indecisive.

But be careful about making snap decisions about your own future. In difficult moments we are susceptible to all-or-nothing behaviours. We tell ourselves that because we’re not operating at 100% we should just give up. Perfectionism triggers, and we catastrophise, throwing out the whole book, instead of seeing this as one brief chapter of challenges.

5/Re-discover your specialism
When you’ve lost confidence in your abilities, it’s easy to think you’ve lost the knowledge that got you there. Returning to your area of specialism (your safe space in an earlier phase of your career) can help. A number of leaders I’ve coached have said to me, ‘I want to become an expert again.’ Perhaps what they were sensing was the danger where a role begins to feel too generalist, or they spend most of their time dealing with other people’s issues. Getting back to your signature strength reminds you what you’re really good at, and why people come to you for advice. It’s the curious balance of self-esteem and self-efficacy. You’ve lost a bit of one – you can replace it with the other.

Moving into adulthood we have a set of ingredients which make up our self-esteem. We are not in control of these. But the good news is that we are fully in control of our self-efficacy, our ability to master things, and this confidence in our abilities is what we draw on when we face challenges. Self-esteem is a measure of what the past has done to us. Self-efficacy is how our skills and strengths will help shape our future. It reminds us what we are good at, and that what we are doing is important and will succeed. Successful leaders harness this inner resolve and confidence in their own mastery to push through periods of difficulty. Try to re-find your specialism.

6/Balance the few failures with your many successes
We get stuck on our failures because we cannot see a future beyond them. We get lost in the black hole of “will anyone still want me?” Remember to step back and look at what you’ve achieved so far. A good tip if you suffer from imposter syndrome, is to catalogue your qualifications and achievements. You can take this further by writing out in sequence your whole career on paper (your career to date, plus the one you’ve yet to live out). This helps you to see your periods of growth and forward momentum, and any phases of stagnation or doubt. When you line up your achievements to date and then pin this disappointment in its place, ask yourself how this serious this particular difficulty looks? Is it now quite so foreboding? Visualising it in this way, helps us see temporary failure for what it really is, just part of the journey, from which we naturally recover and bounce back.

Do our mistakes signal an inevitable decline in our fortunes, or do they herald a new beginning? If we see failure as an endpoint, then we judge everything that might go wrong as a threat, and are afraid to risk new experiences. This breeds anxiety. The more anxious we become the less we are prepared to risk new things – meeting new people, forging new relationships, applying for new roles – fearing they may go wrong.

7/Learn from your mistakes
When I review my (many) mistakes, the following questions help:
What do I wish I had done differently?
How can I put the building blocks in place to prevent myself from getting into difficulty?
What do I know now, that I didn’t before, that could help me and my team?

“Failure is not an option,” was a phrase attributed to Gene Kranz from the Apollo 13 moon landing mission that went wrong. But not only is failure an option, we need to know that it is both inevitable and desirable. I’ve come to realise that unless I fail at some point, I’m probably not making progress, because I’m playing too safe. Deep down we know that failure is a healthy part of learning and developing. And when I’m getting a little stuck, this helps me to see future problems not as painful uncertainty, but as dynamic challenges to be tackled with vigour.

“I used to resent obstacles along the path thinking if only that hadn’t happened life would be so good. Then I suddenly realised, life is the obstacles.” Janna Lewin.

It can help when we recall previous disappointments, the times early in our career when things were not going well, when we faced crises. Our brain will no doubt have helpfully tried to erase these, but think hard and you’ll re-find them. Now remind yourself of the inner resources upon which you drew to help overcome that particular crisis, and harness these again. Hardship strengthens us.

Much of our society is about accumulating stuff. Therefore, dealing with loss, professionally or personally, is counter-cultural. Loss is inevitable, and the experience painful, but it can be fertile. “When we approach these times with reverence” says John Donoghue, “great things decide to approach us.”

8/Celebrate the cracks
We have a negative view of failure – that we can neither personally nor professionally show our mistakes to the outside world. Successful people have no flaws. We must hide our cracks. But there is an alternative perspective – that the more we reveal the cracks, the less we stigmatise failure. The weaknesses we are ashamed to reveal to the world, may actually be what is most helpful for others.

“Forget your perfect offering,” sang Leonard Cohen, “there’s a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

Kintsugi is a repair technique which takes a special lacquer (urushi) mixed with powdered gold to repair broken pottery. This ancient art reassembles the smashed remnants of the pot, and instead of hiding the cracks, makes them into something much more special – lining them with gold. The mistakes become not only a part of the final piece, they become their most important feature. Transformation has taken place.

When we heal from past failures or hurts, we are re-made into something immensely stronger and, in fact, more valuable than before, as long as we get the right mix of glue and gold to fill the cracks. The most effective epoxy is one which fixes slowly, so the bonds last longer. When bouncing back from failure we mustn’t try to bounce back too quickly. Too little gold in the mix means the bond is too brittle. In our road to recovery, we need to give ourselves the flexibility to prepare for future setbacks, and the space to learn from the experience.

We are understandably anxious about showing ourselves as vulnerable with those we work with. There’s too much at stake: our expertise, reputation, credibility. But shedding this perfectionist outer-shell provides us with the opportunity for real growth and the chance to encourage others.

‘We can spend a lifetime valiantly soldering the cracks in our armour but what we end up with will inevitably be misshapen and unreal. We may also be very lonely inside our cast-iron shell.’ Rosemary Lain-Priestley

9/Face your Fear
Fear is an important emotion. Rational fear, aroused by impending danger, is our friend, and protects us from harm. But often fear is irrational – we are afraid of situations that are simply not life-threatening, for example: speaking up in meetings, intimacy, changing jobs, failure at work, making good decisions. Here, fear is more foe than friend. People overestimate the danger of the threat, and underestimate their ability to deal with it.

Courageous leaders do not avoid challenges which present fear – this preparedness to embrace risk is a part of who they are. Proverbs reminds us, ‘fear and courage are brothers’. Pushing through fear is actually less frightening than the alternative, living permanently with the underlying fear. As I push beyond my comfort zone, the fear does not disappear, but with each risk that I take, I move beyond what’s comfortable. And as I stretch my comfort zone, I lean into every new fear with a confidence that it will be OK, because last time it was OK.

Eleanor Roosevelt, who went through extraordinary challenges, puts it more simply, “You must do the thing you cannot do.”

10/You are not alone – work with people you trust
Check the culture of a prospective employer. It’s obvious that we want to work with people who are not out to get rid of us the moment we make a mistake. The thing is, we won’t discover this we see how they respond to things going wrong, and by then it might be too late. Here’s what you can do before you reach this stage, to check the culture feels right:

–Talk to current employees (what’s it really like to work for this organization?)
-Ask prospective employers (see how they respond to a direct question at interview)
-Look at the website (and especially see how their HR or People team works)
-What’s the feel of the recruitment process – you are sent out interview questions in advance and you get to meet lots of current staff (good), you feel their interviewing style is trying to catch you out  and you are shepherded in and out of the building without seeing a soul (not so good)

It’s good to build a culture where it’s OK to make mistakes, but it is better to create a climate where we see mistakes as inevitable. In my experience, being completely on top of things by myself is good, but bouncing back with the help of others is better. I’m thankful that I sometimes fail, because it teaches me that I am not enough on my own. and that actually, I’m not on my own.

We need a team who we trust around us, to help us in our darker moments. Picking ourselves up is a lot easier when there’s someone’s shoulder to lean on. The world is kinder and more forgiving than you think. It is not actually trying to destroy you (although it may sometimes feel like that). There are people around you who’d love to help, if you’ll only let them in.